A SIMPLE TELEPHONE CALL triggered the tempest. Seymour Hersh phoned Director Colby on December 18, 1974, to say he had it from several sources that the CIA had carried out a massive intelligence operation against American opponents of the Vietnam War, including break-ins, mail intercepts, wiretapping, and surveillance. Colby saw Hersh and tried to explain that his data reflected distorted fragments of different projects, all within the agency’s charter. He insisted that such activities had ceased under 1973 directives that made plain the CIA would stay within the strict letter of the law. Colby felt Hersh had blown his information out of proportion. Hersh did not see it that way. His article was splashed across three columns of the front page of the Sunday New York Times on December 22. The headline read: “HUGE CIA OPERATION REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES, OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS.”
The immediate consequence, as Colby himself concedes, became “a press and political firestorm.” He remembers the events as “ruining not only the Christmas season for me but nearly all of the next year as well.” Colby arrived on the Seventh Floor at Langley just in time to face this explosion. The ground had been well prepared by the Nixon-Ford administrations. Watergate, plus their disingenuous handling of explanations for U.S. activity in Laos and Chile, fueled what became a season of inquiry. The political controversy ushered in a decade of turmoil for the Central Intelligence Agency.
In all the years since passage of the National Security Act of 1947, presidents had successfully warded off further legal codification of intelligence duties, responsibilities, and restrictions. On a certain level it is not surprising that Richard Helms had felt confident in deliberately misleading Congress on Chile. But the pressure built a little each time the White House avoided reforms, until by 1974 the pot boiled. Indeed it was red hot. The CIA’s Cold War mystique had eroded, and with it Langley’s protection from scrutiny. Bill Colby’s troubles had a lot to do with the White House.
Attitudes began changing in the late 1960s, but the pace accelerated in the Nixon years and by now public confidence had reached a low ebb. Historian Kathryn Olmstead has reported 1975 polling data from the Gallup organization which show barely 14 percent of Americans held a highly favorable view of the CIA. Among well-educated college students, that level was halved. Two years earlier support—already anemic—had stood at 23 percent. The hand grenades from Chile and Southeast Asia were taking their toll.
Despite occasional flaps, the Central Intelligence Agency had been very lucky for a very long time. None of more than two hundred legislative measures intended to oversee or restrict it introduced before 1974 ever passed. Now, however, bad feeling predominated in Congress. In an amendment to the foreign aid bill that year, Democratic Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa and Democratic Congressman Leo B. Ryan of California successfully sponsored legislation to require reporting of significant covert operations to relevant committees of Congress. In practice this worked out to eight committees with more than 160 members plus senior staffs. Commenting on the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, President Ford focused on the danger of leaks rather than the advantages of oversight. Then Bill Colby got that phone call from Sy Hersh.
President Ford was flying to Vail, Colorado, for some skiing when Colby warned him of the imminent Hersh story on CIA domestic activities. The spy chief, speaking to Air Force One over an open line, a radio patch through the White House switchboard, had to be most circumspect. Ford immediately demanded a report. Later that day he responded to growing press inquiries by declaring he had asked Henry Kissinger, as NSC adviser, to obtain Colby’s report.
Bill Colby’s bad year got off to a rousing start that Christmas Eve. That evening he crossed the Potomac to visit Kissinger at the State Department. In the two days since the Hersh article, the CIA director had assembled a memorandum describing how the New York Times story had exaggerated. But there was fire behind the smoke, as Colby had to admit. In fact Hersh had uncovered some of the major CIA abuses recounted in the “Family Jewels” compilation Jim Schlesinger had ordered. This document gathered together allegations of illegal or questionable activities observed by employees throughout the agency. It happened that Kissinger had never been briefed on the “Family Jewels,” completed as Colby replaced Schlesinger at Langley.
At last Colby went ahead with his briefing, then handed Kissinger a copy of the report. It noted allegations of CIA assassination efforts against foreign political leaders such as Castro, Ngo Dinh Diem, and Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Kissinger flipped quickly through the pages but slowed when he came to the part about assassinations. He stopped and looked up.
“Well, Bill, when Hersh’s story first came out I thought you should have flatly denied it as totally wrong,” said Kissinger, “but now I see why you couldn’t.”
The next day Kissinger wrote to Ford explaining that besides the items in Colby’s report, there were other CIA actions that raised questions of judgment on moral issues. He took Colby’s thirty-page account to Vail to show the president. Kissinger favored an inquiry, one confined to a narrow scope.
There were no White House denials, and Ford said nothing to support the CIA. There were no official statements from the agency or Colby. The only refutation came on Christmas Day from Richard Helms, a source who increasingly lacked credibility.
Director Colby wished to save the agency but without lying or doing anything illegal. That meant sitting tight for the inevitable investigations. The first would be Ford’s, with parameters worked out among advisers Richard Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld along with Kissinger. Taking the route of a White House investigation enabled President Ford to show leadership, set the limits himself, and potentially head off other inquiries. White House staff drafted an order for the panel, gave Ford lists of prospective commissioners, and sounded out those people on their willingness to serve. Most of this took place while Ford still vacationed.
When the president returned to the White House he saw the key people. On January 4, 1975, in the Oval Office, he led off with Henry Kissinger, who told Ford that the outpouring of press accounts since Christmas represented merely the tip of an iceberg.
“If they come out, blood will flow,” Kissinger said.
The national security adviser added that Richard Helms had confirmed the worst. In a veiled reference to Project Mongoose and the plotting against Castro, Kissinger went on, “For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.”
Immediately afterward Ford saw Helms. The discomfort level, if anything, exceeded that of the president’s talk the previous day with Director Colby. Aware of his exposure to criminal indictment in the Chile perjury, Helms also knew of the proposed commission. Ford assured Helms he automatically assumed the CIA man had done the right thing. Helms responded that he would defend himself. Perhaps threateningly, the former top spook warned, “A lot of dead cats are going to come out.” But he used the phrase again later, in the context of the more general controversy now raging.
“Frankly, we are in a mess,” Ford admitted.
“I think the mood of the country is ghastly,” Helms agreed. “I feel deeply for you, Mr. President.”
Helms supported the presidential commission and made the constructive suggestion that FBI activities also be included in its purview. Ford replied he would think about that, but in fact his commission stood ready to go and he gave it no instructions to look beyond the CIA. Ford wanted the commission to stay within its charter. Given the political climate he did not think he could guarantee this.
Publicly Gerald Ford declared he would not tolerate illegal activities by intelligence agencies. He said Colby had given assurances that no such activities still existed, and announced a commission under Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Of course Rockefeller, who had headed the PFIAB subcommittee on covert operations, could be depended on to ride herd on the members, and their mandate ended with the domestic abuses the press had reported. Rockefeller would do a very good job.
Meanwhile Colby testified before the CIA subcommittee of Senate Appropriations on January 15. Pressed for his response to the charges of skullduggery swirling about, Colby’s opening statement reprised his report to President Ford. The committee, given the political climate, took the unprecedented step of releasing his testimony. Kissinger and others condemn Colby, essentially claiming the CIA chief put out this material without White House approval, but the spy chief was simply recounting what Ford had known since Vail. Colby also undoubtedly went to Capitol Hill expecting that the statement would be tightly guarded. The secret subcommittees had never before taken such action. This in itself shows the political sensitivity of the time.
In view of public opinion, Congress would not leave the field to the Rockefeller Commission. Very swiftly it established its own investigative committees. The Senate approved its panel on January 27 by a vote of 82 to 4, naming a Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Frank Church would chair the fourteen-member group. The House set up a ten-member panel in February, but this became embroiled in disputes and would be replaced months later by a slightly larger Select Committee on Intelligence led by New York Democrat Otis G. Pike. So began what has become known as the “Year of Intelligence.”
In his memoir, A Time to Heal, Gerald Ford writes as if the Year of Intelligence should be blamed on journalists and congressional committees who wanted to look at “everything in the files.” Ford is correct that the Watergate atmosphere contributed to the intensity of the inquiries, but the CIA abuses were scarcely incidental. There would have been no controversy without questionable activity.
From the instant of first exposure to the “Family Jewels,” President Ford’s major concern remained leaks. This is the one point he returns to repeatedly in his memoir, and it certainly preoccupied him in office. The terms of reference for Rockefeller were carefully drawn in an effort to avoid the most sensitive areas, like assassinations. But Ford and Kissinger had no such control over the congressional investigations, though the White House did develop lines to friendly members or staff that afforded some ability to influence committee activity, or at least find out what they were up to. It was a mistake to suppose that the investigations were merely an annoyance, and improper at that. In fact the very existence of the CIA hung in the balance.
Obviously it would be impossible for the commission and committees to investigate without collecting data, or for them to report without revealing details. The White House saw the inquiries as a major threat. The intelligence community at large—beyond the CIA—reacted in like manner. Withholding documents and witnesses, or restricting testimony by officials, certain to arouse ire, only encouraged leaks. Yet that became the main tactic utilized by the White House and the agencies. Arguing the need to preserve the secrecy of agency “sources and methods,” then stretching that category to cover every conceivable bit of information, the spooks fought a rearguard action through the corridors of Capitol Hill, Langley, and the other centers of U.S. intelligence. Kissinger aligned himself with the most extreme keepers of the secret vaults.
Director Colby, who saw more clearly the danger that the CIA might be swept away if it failed to give at least the appearance of cooperation, was vilified for his efforts and ultimately forced to resign. That, plus his role in the Helms perjury case, tarnished Colby’s reputation for many secret warriors. Others, frustrated that anyone would question the DCI’s ability to lead the CIA, felt he “handled the grilling with aplomb.” The inquiries involved only certain persons at the agency, effectively compartmenting the grief from others at Langley. The inspector general actually commissioned a poll and interviewed a significant fraction of agency employees, demonstrating that morale remained high, except among the top echelon.
The charges against the CIA became the stuff of lunchtime conversation in the agency cafeteria, “but few expressed any real concern for the future.” Richard Holm, who now headed China operations for the recently renamed East Asia Division, recalls that “we did our jobs while struggling with the substance of some of the revelations.” Staff working directly with the inquisitors were even more upbeat. Scott Breckinridge of the IG office felt the agency in pretty good shape. Hank Knocke, liaison to both Rockefeller and Church, who told Breckinridge the job had cost him among colleagues, reminisced later, “I was proud to be among those who worked . . . in defining the terms for improved oversight and accountability.”
Those who thought the CIA’s wounds self-inflicted objected to the inquiries. Duane Clarridge, for example, then chief of operations in the Near East and South Asian Division, said of Colby, “He betrayed his own because he didn’t try.” The coalescence of pro-Helms and pro-Colby factions at headquarters created a cleavage that rent the CIA of the 1970s.
This is not the place for a full treatment of the investigations of the Year of Intelligence. But it is important to understand the interplay as it affected covert operations. Contrary to assertions that Director Colby said what he pleased and ignored the White House, Ford’s staff actually kept close control. The president’s political advisers looked after general attitudes while lawyer Phillip Buchen followed daily developments. Controls became even tighter that fall when Ford set up a committee under John Marsh that met daily to coordinate strategy against the investigations. Kissinger’s NSC staff reviewed the release of every CIA internal history the Church Committee asked for. Robert McFarlane, then a subordinate on the NSC staff, ruled against Church seeing many of the documents and expressed reservations about more, including some quite innocuous ones. Ford and his NSC reviewed Colby’s proposed testimony on covert operations, and the DCI went to the White House immediately after that hearing to report on what had been said. In June the White House adopted explicit guidelines on dealing with covert operations data, and modified them later.
In May, Ford’s advisers, faced with the Church Committee schedule of formal hearings on covert operations, decided the CIA director should brief only, not testify, and only the leaders of the committee. Deep in the hole politically, Ford proved unable to make that stick. Instead Colby was told what he could discuss: Cuba, but only the Bay of Pigs; the Congo, but only the late war period; Chile, but not after 1971; Korea, but only until 1952. Russian, Greek, and Indonesian involvements apparently seemed nonthreatening to the White House, and unfettered discussion of those was permissible. Other covert operations were out of bounds altogether.
Director Colby, far from being off the reservation, cooperated. He wanted to “sanitize” documents given to the Rockefeller Commission, only to be overruled by the White House. He assigned Scott Breckinridge of the IG office, an original author of the 1967 report on assassination plots, to dissuade the Rockefeller staff from looking too hard at this. Breckinridge ran afoul of David Belin, but judging from the absence of the subject in the commission’s report, the effort succeeded.
For the congressional committees, Colby’s original arrangements created four levels of increasing secrecy regarding materials. Only basic historical data would be given freely. More sensitive data would be sanitized before shown; the investigators could get only the expurgated versions. At the third level the inquisitors had to visit CIA headquarters, where “fondling files” were housed in the IG office—investigators could make notes only, copying was prohibited, and notes were reviewed by CIA before being let out of the building. The most secret data Colby restricted to indirect reference—it could be used only for briefings or briefs. This included everything about presidents’ orders and much about covert action. When inquisitors proved adept at identifying documents sourced in CIA histories, asking to see them, Colby added word-for-word review to his restrictions.
Proposing fresh guidelines to the NSC late in June, Colby anticipated that the investigators might be satiated with in-depth briefings—but of just those programs the CIA selected to typify categories. The agency would offer only a few documents to amplify oral presentations. Again those could be read only at Langley. Everything pertaining to the president, 40 Committee, and the like would be removed from the files, and the White House could review each case before CIA made it available. Colby hoped to satisfy the inquisitors with the National Student Association case, Laos, and Indonesia. President Ford agreed at the time.
A key index of Bill Colby’s basic approach is that he tried—and failed—to keep the “Family Jewels” out of play. The measure his detractors prefer is based on a comment Vice President Rockefeller made after a session with Rocky’s commission. Rockefeller asked whether Colby ought to be telling so much, as if the CIA did not have an obligation to fully inform a presidential commission, and as if the commission had no legal responsibility to conduct a full inquiry. Indeed it had already overridden CIA’s attempt to expurgate documents given to it. No one who makes this criticism notes Rockefeller’s role on covert action at PFIAB or the political vulnerability hanging over the vice president as a consequence.
By way of contrast, Gerald Ford himself was responsible for the leak that put the most sensitive covert action issue on the table. At a luncheon with newspaper editors on January 16, 1975, Ford mentioned assassination plots in describing why he had given Rockefeller a narrow assignment. Television reporter Daniel Schorr quickly picked up the gossip about this and confronted Colby with a direct question at the end of February. Colby could not deny the fact, though he did deny any plots in the United States and refused to discuss cases. That news appeared to a public uproar, with Ford forced to expand the remit of Rockefeller’s commission to cover assassination allegations, and the Senate also obliged to widen the scope of Church’s inquiry.
Reflecting Ford’s interests, the entirety of the text on assassinations that eventually appeared in the Rockefeller Commission report concerned whether CIA officers or contract employees had had any role in the murder of John F. Kennedy. This happened in spite of the personal efforts of staff director David Belin, who conducted this portion of the inquiry, deposed a variety of witnesses, and pulled together documents from the agency and elsewhere. Belin’s preliminary report, nearly a hundred typescript pages, ended up on the cutting-room floor, its discussion of CIA plots against Castro, Trujillo, Lumumba, and Ngo Dinh Diem kept from the public. President Ford had the source materials turned over to him.
Like Bill Colby with the “Family Jewels,” in the political climate of 1975 Jerry Ford could not hold this line. Instead, several days after he released the Rockefeller Commission’s report, the president told a news conference that he would turn the assassination files over to the Church Committee. Confining Belin’s inquiry turned into a mistake: Ford had no control over the Church Committee’s treatment of the same subject. The CIA went to court to force the committee to remove certain names from its report—which in most instances Church did voluntarily. On October 31 President Ford wrote members asking that the entire report be kept secret. Several weeks later, after acrimonious debate on the Senate floor, the committee released the report on its own authority.
Refusals to supply data often occurred in the open, to be reported in the press. One of the worst instances happened with Henry Kissinger and the Pike Committee, which went to the full House of Representatives to secure subpoenas. The subpoenas were voted. The CIA’s own lawyers concluded that the documents at issue could not be protected, but Kissinger gave up the papers only when he was about to be cited for contempt of Congress. Before the end the House voted seven subpoenas, but Ford’s administration surrendered materials on only a few. Three it rejected, including one addressed by name to Kissinger to supply copies of all State Department recommendations to the NSC on covert operations since January 30, 1961. The second also concerned covert action while the third related to intelligence on arms control.
Ford’s opinion is that the Pike Committee went out of its way “to stick it to Kissinger.” After consulting with the attorney general, the president intervened on November 19, 1975, writing Otis Pike that the subpoenaed documents had been legitimately withheld. The committee responded by voting to cite Kissinger for contempt, a measure that went to the full House in December. President Ford compromised, releasing some materials.
Counterattack came in early January 1976 when White House aides told the congressional committees that if they hoped to obtain information in the future as oversight panels, staffs would have to be reduced and stiff penalties adopted for leaks, penalties to include expulsion from Congress. For its part the CIA recommended numerous deletions from the Pike Report for reasons of national security. A number were accepted, but Pike’s committee rejected about 150 of the proposed deletions. Ford prevailed upon the full House not to release the report. Some 246 representatives voted to suppress it, 124 for its release.
When television reporter Daniel Schorr asked for his reaction, Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., said, “This is an election year, and they’re getting a lot of flak about leaks, and they’re going to vote their American Legion posts.”
But the Pike Report did leak, and major portions appeared in a New York weekly, The Village Voice. A couple of hundred copies of the report had gone to an assortment of congressional and executive offices. No culprit ever emerged, though it was established the initial leak had been to Daniel Schorr.
Again, Gerald Ford might have done better with the original House committee. The first chairman, Representative Lucien Nedzi, came from the president’s home state and had been the leader of the secret subcommittee. Nedzi’s position on the House investigation disintegrated, in fact, when it became known that Colby had briefed the Michigan congressman on that portion of the “Family Jewels” concerning assassination, but Nedzi had told none of his colleagues. Nedzi would not even be a member of the panel that finally conducted the inquiry.
Frank Church, a liberal Democrat with presidential aspirations, hoped to ride the intelligence investigations to national prominence, positioning himself as a dark horse for 1976, with a solid bid for the presidency possible in 1980. Be that as it may, his investigation proceeded quietly and systematically. Plenty of material was withheld from the Senate committee, but Senator Church knew where to look. The Idaho Democrat had been a member of the Foreign Relations Committee when the CIA spurned that body in 1966. He participated in the Laos hearings of 1967 and 1969. Church had also been chairman of the subcommittee on Multinational Corporations to which Richard Helms had lied about CIA involvement in Chile. Ambitious or not, the senator determined to follow up several of these subjects.
For its interim report on alleged assassination plots, the Church Committee conducted numerous interviews, held sixty days of hearings, and accumulated more than eight thousand pages of sworn testimony. Some witnesses were reinterviewed on the basis of later information. For its review of covert operations, the committee received fourteen CIA briefings and conducted more than a hundred staff interviews, among them thirteen former ambassadors and a dozen CIA chiefs of station. The investigation continued past its original September 1975 deadline. Sixty professional staff assisted. A final report, approved and released in April 1976, ran to many volumes plus detailed staff studies. There were also seven volumes of hearings, an interim report on the assassination plots, and a case study of covert action in Chile. Six additional case studies on covert operations remained classified at the request of the CIA.
The significant conclusion from all this: Congress had failed to provide necessary statutes. Intelligence needed a constitutional framework. Presidents had made excessive and sometimes self-defeating use of covert operations while inadequate legislative attention had been given to budgets. The committee recommended that overall CIA budget figures be made public so that annual budget debates could be realistic. The fundamental issue remained one of balancing secrecy with American democracy. Church’s committee, and Pike’s as well, recommended the creation of permanent oversight units on intelligence. Both houses established such committees in 1976. The Central Intelligence Agency entered a new era of formal legislative oversight.
From the millions of words in the hearings, findings, and recommendations of the Church Committee, one phrase in particular stuck in the minds of many who heard it: one day Frank Church wondered out loud whether the CIA had not become a “rogue elephant.” Government officials spent years living down that damning epithet.
Church’s opinion after the investigation by his committee was that U.S. capabilities for covert action should be sharply circumscribed. Most of his colleagues would not go that far.
Referring to the secret warriors in comments appended to his committee’s report, Church expressed this view: “Certainly we do not need a regiment of cloak-and-dagger men, earning their campaign ribbons and, indeed, their promotions by planning new exploits throughout the world. Theirs is a self-generating enterprise.” With capability in place, pressures on presidents to use it, the senator believed, became immense. Of this activism the senator wrote, “I must lay the blame, in large measure, to the fantasy that it lay within our power to control other countries through the covert manipulation of their affairs. It formed part of a greater illusion that entrapped and enthralled our presidents—the illusion of American omnipotence.”
Church’s opinion would undoubtedly be strengthened by yet another CIA venture, a covert action in Africa, carried out even as the investigations worked toward their finales. This was called Project IA/Feature. Like the Congo, Feature intended to influence events in an African colony headed for independence. This time the target was the Portuguese colony of Angola, immediately south of Zaire.
The Angola affair really began in Portugal with the April 1974 leftist military coup that overthrew a long-standing dictatorship. Portugal had been warring against indigenous independence movements in Angola and other African colonies. The new Portuguese government had no stomach for this fight, and Lisbon announced its withdrawal from Africa. Angola represented a classic case of colonial underdevelopment. It would become independent on November 11, 1975. Until then, under the “Alvor agreement” Portugal negotiated with the three rebel movements that January, a coalition government would prepare elections. The fact that few Portuguese settlers intended to stay on complicated the situation, as did the existence of Angolan oil production in a section of the country, Cabinda, isolated from the rest.
Each of the three rebel movements had its own armed forces, and they were left to fight it out among themselves. Tribally based, the movements’ political competition had ethnic overtones as well. The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA by its Portuguese initials), the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) all espoused vaguely socialist ideologies, were left of center, and all had taken cash and guns from Communist nations. MPLA had the strongest political organization, appealing to the Mbundu tribe, founded in 1956 as an offshoot of the Angolan Communist Party. FNLA came from the Bakongo, of about 700,000, more than half of whom fled to Zaire during the Portuguese resistance war. Holden Roberto, an educated Christian of peasant stock, had founded FNLA in 1954. The CIA had known him since 1953 and put him on its payroll in 1966, in part to counter the Chinese Communists, who were already helping FNLA. Jonas Savimbi, Roberto’s chief lieutenant, broke away at that time to form UNITA among the Ovimbundo, Angola’s largest tribe. The groups waged parallel wars against Portuguese colonialists but were not allied in any way.
Except for Vietnam and the Cold War, Angola might have reached independence without anyone taking notice. Kissinger credits Zambian leader Kenneth Kaunda in an April 1975 visit with convincing him and Ford that the MPLA could not be permitted to win Angola with Russian arms—the Cold War argument. Another interpretation of U.S. intervention is that Washington, concerned by the perception of its weakness after Vietnam, chose Angola to show its strength. The truth lies somewhere between and is a good deal messier.
A huge amount of juggling has concealed the record on Angola. Kissinger himself records that Kaunda’s claims—that African leaders agreed with his stand—proved completely misleading. Kaunda in fact had supported the MPLA but a faction that lost out, giving him motive. But the secretary of state learned this later, and “none of this changed the basic challenge, which was Soviet intervention on a scale not seen in Africa for fifteen years.” Kissinger writes of an airlift of Soviet weapons to a nearby country for transshipment and a flow by sea “said to involve two dozen ships.” This version both fudges the chronology and is a gigantic exaggeration, essentially a fiction. Kissinger may have focused on the Soviets later, but the evidence suggests that at least initially the affair had more to do with who controlled the oil production of Angola’s Cabinda enclave.
During the Angolan revolution the CIA had played both sides, selling the Portuguese B-26 bombers and permitting them to recruit Cuban exile pilots for the planes while paying Holden Roberto as an intelligence source. When the Portuguese coup took place, Langley created a special task force for Portugal, not Angola. The connection to Roberto had been maintained at a low level, but in 1974 the CIA increased its support to $1,000 a month. At the time the FNLA’s main backing came from China, arming Roberto’s troops and training them in Zaire, with a unit of more than a hundred military advisers in camps that dictator Joseph Mobutu allowed Roberto to establish. This became the first time where the United States and Communist China worked together on a covert operation in a third country.
Within days of the Alvor agreement, the 40 Committee approved the provision to Roberto’s FNLA of $300,000 but rejected a suggestion for another $100,000 to Savimbi. President Ford quickly approved. The project amounted to a political action, enabling FNLA to get a leg up in the move toward elections. The CIA funded a printing press for a newspaper, equipment for a radio station, and fifty thousand election-style campaign buttons. Deputy national security adviser William Hyland argues that the cash scarcely raised a wave in Angola, but the fact of CIA support betokened a relationship that Roberto could flaunt, and that was the key factor. Buoyed by the support, Roberto in February 1975 ordered his troops to attack MPLA cadres in the capital, Luanda, and in northern Angola. In one instance in early March, fifty unarmed MPLA activists were gunned down. These attacks ended any possibility of coalition government. A second round of FNLA attacks in Luanda tempted fate.
Thus both the initial CIA subsidy and the outbreak of fighting predated any appeals from Kaunda to Ford and Kissinger, and combat began with the U.S.-backed FNLA movement, not with the MPLA. In addition, Zairian Joseph Mobutu, who funded a separatist movement in Cabinda, began stirring up trouble there as well. As early as October 1974, Mobutu’s planes started flying FNLA soldiers to Luanda.
At this juncture the Soviets took a hand, resuming aid to the MPLA, which they had terminated several years earlier. Moscow had favored the same MPLA faction as Kenneth Kaunda, which lost out to leader Augustinho Neto. The breakaway Communist nation Yugoslavia (with which Washington had fairly good relations) became the sole socialist country to help MPLA during this period. Moving into the post-Portuguese-war struggle, Neto appealed for help, but the Russians initially did nothing. Then they talked of equipping a special unit for the MPLA, but the idea embodied two thousand troops, not Neto’s whole army, of which this would have been a small fraction. In addition the Soviets wanted to train those soldiers in Russia, not in Angola. These schemes are tiny compared to claims of Soviet arms aid made by defenders of the U.S. intervention. As for the timing, definitive records are still lacking, but indications are that Moscow began thinking about this aid at about the same time Washington put together the CIA political action. Weapons began arriving between March and May. The assistance included a couple of aircraft loads to Luanda, but most of it came on a pair of ships. Two, not two dozen.
The MPLA had long had friendly relations with Castro, and not long after the Soviets sent help, Havana followed suit with a small contingent of Cuban advisers. A few Cuban observers and negotiators reached Angola early on, but the work of historian Piero Gleijeses shows conclusively that Cuban military trainers arrived only around August 1975.
Washington had already swung into action. About the end of April Henry Kissinger asked for an options paper. Bill Hyland sees Kissinger’s involvement as “late and hesitant,” yet these moves predate the Cuban advisers. One 40 Committee discussion after the January project involved arms aid, but nothing had yet come of it. Nathaniel Davis, returned from Chile and now assistant secretary of state for African affairs, answered Kissinger with a pair of memoranda: on May 1 advising against covert aid for Jonas Savimbi, which he felt could not remain secret; and six days later cautioning against pre-independence shenanigans in Angola. Upon returning from a familiarization visit, Davis repeated his warning. Kissinger nevertheless insisted on the interagency review, conducted by a group under Davis. They submitted their options paper and an associated study (NSSM-224) on June 13.
The majority opposed intervention; instead the Davis panel held out for diplomatic efforts to encourage settlement among the factions. This reflected a basic understanding that Angola was an African, not a Cold War, problem. Intervention carried high risk of exposure with negative effects in Angola, across Africa, and in relations with Portugal; it offered only limited benefits and potentially contributed to increased Soviet involvement. Davis warned that the United States would have to reckon with “probable disclosure” and argued that “at most we would be in a position to commit limited resources, and buy marginal influence.”
The June 13 report of the Davis group framed a stark choice for President Ford. By then another outbreak of fighting had occurred in Luanda, sparked this time by Neto’s increasingly powerful MPLA. Events had begun to move against U.S. ally Roberto. According to the Pike Committee, which studied Angola in some detail, the Davis group’s prime recommendation disappeared from its report “at the direction of National Security Council aides.” The course was presented to the NSC as merely one policy option, others being to do nothing or make a substantial intervention.
In preparation for a National Security Council meeting, Secretary Kissinger sent two senior Africanists to the front-line states to survey the situation. They returned to tell the secretary that Mobutu favored intervention in support of the FNLA and would help with his own forces. The Kissinger memoirs artfully describe his encounter with the diplomats without mentioning at all the NSC meeting—a fateful one—that took place the same afternoon. Secretary Kissinger’s briefing memorandum for Ford conceded that U.S. interests were “important but not vital,” and noted Mobutu’s push for intervention. Contrary to Kissinger’s recitation of Zambian leader Kenneth Kaunda’s position, in this paper he notes that Zambia (and Tanzania) “can be expected to continue to work for a peaceful settlement.” The Kissinger briefing made out the diplomatic option as only an opening move—everyone agreed on that, but afterward the choice would still be between a neutral attitude or stepped-up involvement. Kissinger’s discussion of the latter lays bare his preference:
Active support of the FNLA and/or UNITA could enable us to check the momentum of leftist forces and to facilitate assertion of control by pro-Western moderates but would involve considerable risks. Assistance would have to be covert or channeled through third parties. We would be involving ourselves in a match with the Soviets, yet we do not enjoy the same freedom to raise the level of support as do the Soviets.
In addition to our substantive interest in the outcome, playing an active role would demonstrate that events in Southeast Asia have not lessened our determination to protect our interests. In sum, we face an opportunity—albeit with substantial risks—to preempt the probable loss to communism of a key developing country at a time of great uncertainty over our will and determination to remain the preeminent leader and defender of freedom in the West.
The NSC meeting itself opened with Director Colby describing the situation in Angola. Colby warned of the MPLA-FNLA standoff in Luanda. New fighting could break out at any time, he said, while Cabinda “remains a tinderbox” where MPLA had a slight edge but Mobutu-supported separatists also figured in the equation. The text on Soviet military aid is deleted from the currently available declassified version of the document, but its placement and length suggest that the CIA had no evidence of the huge arms shipments claimed by Kissinger. Moreover, there is no mention at all of alleged Cuban troops in Angola. President Ford’s questions show that he knew very little of this West African nation. Kissinger jumped in, raised the specter of the Congo from the early 1960s (where, as seen earlier, the Soviets had been misrepresented as meddling), then remarked that “Soviet arms shipments have reversed the situation.” The secretary of state expressed himself as “not in wild agreement” with any of the proposed options, but he discounted neutrality as giving away the game to Neto’s MPLA, and a diplomatic approach as a sign of weakness.
Kissinger’s comment on covert action is deleted but probably favorable since immediately afterward President Ford asks if there are specific proposals for “grants in the arms area.” Ford also says that diplomacy would be “naive.” The group does recognize Kaunda’s encouragement of U.S. intervention. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger then cautions that “if we do something, we must have some confidence that we can win, or we should stay neutral.” Schlesinger saw Holden Roberto as “not a strong horse.” The consensus bypassed this point to agree to “keep Roberto and Savimbi viable and keep the options open,” as William Clements, Schlesinger’s deputy, expressed it. Bill Colby promised action proposals within five days.
Kissinger and Colby agreed that in African wars those who controlled a nation’s capital usually won. The CIA chief added that the educated classes in Angola were concentrated around Luanda and tended to support MPLA. For Kissinger this was one more reason to ramp up a CIA program. In early July, just as Langley completed options for Project Feature, another round of fighting erupted in Luanda. The MPLA drove its adversaries out for good. That presence in the capital—the condition for success that Kissinger himself had framed for the president—had now been lost made no difference at all to his drive to jump-start the covert operation.
Action now moved to the 40 Committee. Assistant Secretary Davis prepared a fresh dissent paper for Undersecretary Joseph J. Sisco. The oil in Cabinda, in which Gulf had a $300 million interest, remained the only significant American stake, Davis argued. He agreed with Kissinger’s view that if the United States did anything at all it had to do it quickly and massively, decisively. Davis simply doubted this could be done, pointing to the CIA’s own paper which made clear that the United States could not win in the best of circumstances, and argued that in these particular ones the Soviets were freer to escalate than the United States. The diplomat warned against leaks, raised questions regarding the legality of the contemplated method of weapons delivery (they would be given to Mobutu, who would hand the rebels U.S. weapons he already had), and questioned a premise in the CIA paper that arming Holden Roberto and Jonas Savimbi would discourage them from engaging in a civil war. Nate Davis’s colleague William G. Hyland, who now headed the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, dismissed the paper as the usual State Department carping.
Meeting on July 14, Kissinger’s 40 Committee directed the CIA to finalize details within forty-eight hours. Langley should use the CIA director’s contingency account so as to avoid the need for the Ford administration to ask Congress for money. That would have meant explaining a paramilitary intervention to the same legislators then busily investigating the CIA. The top leadership at Langley opposed Project Feature—the CIA, like the State Department, worried about exposure while estimating a $100 million price tag, an amount not available in the DCI’s contingency fund. While Langley refined details the press reported FNLA forces completely driven from Luanda, and the CIA received new data on Soviet arms shipments—more and heavier weapons flowing into MPLA hands. Assistant Secretary Davis made one more try at turning Kissinger away from his determination to proceed.
On July 17 the 40 Committee blessed the project. Henry Kissinger took the proposal to President Ford, along with Davis’s dissent paper. Kissinger quotes himself as favoring action and urging the president to study the dissent. Ford merely wondered why Davis was so vehement. Kissinger warned he had “massive problems within” State over the program and expected Davis to resign and the program to leak. Ford approved an initial $7 million the next morning. A million of that went directly to Mobutu, not to any of the Angolan rebel groups. Nathaniel Davis indeed resigned when he learned of the go-ahead. In a replay of the Haig-Kissinger ploy with Ed Korry in Chile, Kissinger kept Davis on the reservation and out of media hands by convincing him to become ambassador to Switzerland.
The CIA, which had advised against Track II in Chile and the Kurdish operation, again received distressing marching orders. That it proposed a plan at all was used by Kissinger in 1976 Senate testimony to argue that “the CIA recommended the operation and supported it.” This is in marked contrast to Kissinger’s recollections, where he takes every available opportunity to castigate the agency as loathe to participate in covert action. Put another way, Kissinger’s constant railing about CIA reluctance to engage, plus the fact that Langley did conduct all these operations, demonstrates quite directly that the Central Intelligence Agency, far from being a rogue elephant, functioned under purposeful presidential control.
One reason Director Colby was so lukewarm is that he knew the difficulties involved. Project Feature, just a few months after the final denouement in Vietnam, found the agency still licking its wounds. The Special Operations Group, Langley’s paramilitary experts, had been reduced under DCI James Schlesinger, and they had no recent African experience. As of late 1974 the agency had fewer than ten black case officers. Some saw the Africa Division of the DO, still the smallest, as having its hands full watching dozens of nations. A 1971 policy review chaired by the State Department, according to a subordinate officer, concluded that the CIA had been useless in Africa and recommended closing the division. Its baron, James Potts, strongly supported Feature. Potts came to the Africa Division from a four-year tour as station chief in Athens, where Langley’s headaches were from Greek colonels who had taken over the government amid public suspicions of CIA collusion. It had been his second Greek assignment, and Potts had tired of political action. Angola offered fresh terrain and a new mission.
Project Feature proceeded under very high priority, so urgent in fact that a first planeload of weapons went off to the FNLA, via Zaire, before Langley even formed a task force and before the Portuguese withdrew from the airfield that received them. By August 9 two more loads had been sent on air force C-141 transports while CIA assembled a shipload of supplies.
Director Colby chaired an interagency group to oversee Feature. Kissinger objects to that procedure, crediting the spy chief with an insufficiently aggressive attitude and CIA with lacking a “sense of tactical feasibility” and being “attracted to dramatic ploys rather than to a coherent long-term strategy.” The national security adviser observes that he and Ford ought to have put someone in the White House in charge—CIA management would have been okay for espionage or a political action but “it made no sense with respect to military operations on the scale now unfolding.”
These are specious objections. Langley had just ended secret wars in Kurdistan and in Laos and Vietnam, both of which involved long-term strategy over a decade and a half; and it had worked against Cuba for half a decade and in Tibet longer than that. Except for Project Mongoose, the standard had always been for CIA management, and if Angola had been intended as a new Mongoose, Kissinger and Ford were in real trouble, for that kind of effort was simply not possible amid the controversies of the Year of Intelligence. If that seemed problematical, the problem should have been apparent to the White House at the time. If the White House had been in charge, this would not have freed Ford from clearing a more muscular approach with Congress. Kissinger quotes himself telling the 40 Committee there were “ ‘no rewards for losing with moderation,’ ” by way of explaining that he held a “most liberal interpretation” of the formal directive, which was simply “to establish a balance of power in Angola, as a prelude to negotiations.” In other words, Kissinger’s—notorious—posturing should be taken as the guidance rather than the actual directive. Moreover the monies actually approved for Project Feature were consonant with the formal objectives, not the expansive goals Kissinger asserts retrospectively.
One level below Colby’s management group, Langley’s Angola task force was somewhat unusual. Appointed chief, John Stockwell was a twelve-year veteran and old Africa hand who had also served in Southeast Asia. The agency’s equivalent of a colonel, relatively junior for the job, Stockwell held a slot normally reserved for generals. Judging from Stockwell’s account, Jim Potts then ran it—the division chief rather than DDO William Nelson. Potts, his deputy George Costello, and Stockwell prepared detailed plans right up to the last minute. On July 27 President Ford upped the ante, approving another $8 million for the program.
The CIA principals gathered in Nelson’s office to review the plans for the Colby working group. When Costello suggested that the moment had come to determine how far the CIA should go, DDO Nelson spoke up: “Gentlemen, we’ve been given a job to do. Let’s not sit around wringing our hands.” Colby carried the latest plan to the 40 Committee on August 8.
John Stockwell, sent on a fact-finding mission to Zaire and Angola, visited both Holden Roberto and Jonas Savimbi. The latter seemed by far the more credible opponent for the MPLA. French intelligence chief Alexandre de Marenches agreed. So did the British, apparently, and a British corporate aircraft flew the CIA officer to Savimbi’s headquarters. De Marenches, not so fortunate, had to send one of his SDECE officers on a trek of more than a thousand miles just to put key questions to the UNITA leader. Savimbi had the strongest movement. An inspiring leader, his political organization was competent and had grass roots. Much of Roberto’s support resided in Zaire. On August 20, while Stockwell observed the FNLA and UNITA, President Ford authorized an additional $10.7 million for Feature. By the time the task force chief reappeared at Langley, the project had momentum. In all, Langley put about a hundred secret warriors into this battle for black Africa.
Mobutu would be critical. With MPLA in control of Angola’s main seaports and railroad, CIA supplies could enter only through Zaire (or South Africa). In addition, Holden Roberto had his FNLA base camps in Zaire and resided there too. In fact Roberto showed no inclination to leave his comfortable villa for the front, something of which the United States was well aware (Roberto had not been in Angola in years)—Jim Schlesinger even mentioned this at the key meeting with President Ford. Mobutu had Roberto in tow and to some extent used FNLA as a cat’s paw to advance his own interests in Angola.
Stewart Methven, chief of station in Kinshasa, handled relations with the FNLA and Mobutu. Methven, a covert project man par excellence, a member of the first class to graduate from Camp Peary, was a Langley legend. His exploits in Southeast Asia ranged from training Diem’s spooks in the 1950s, to work on the montagnard scout program and the counterterror teams, to pacification and political action. But Methven had earned the greatest acclaim in recruiting Vang Pao for the secret war in Laos. He had been controller for Vietnamese officer and politico Tran Ngoc Chau, who became such a political thorn to Nguyen Van Thieu that the Saigon leader had him jailed. The CIA failed to protect Chau, and the Young Turk blew Methven’s cover. That upset the spy’s son, who learned of his father’s occupation in the New York Times. By then deputy station chief in Indonesia, Methven watched as General Suharto began secretly helping Nixon in Cambodia, with supply shipments to the pro-U.S. side. John Stockwell fought alongside the Hmong in Laos, and also had Vietnam service in common with Methven, but their relations quickly soured over Project Feature. Stockwell saw Methven as far too willing to pander to Joseph Mobutu, presiding over payoffs and barely concealed bribes—like ice plants and boats for Zairian officials—while standing aside as Mobutu used FNLA aid to reequip his own military. Stockwell also saw Jim Potts as weak for failing to rein in the station chief in Kinshasa.
Meanwhile Methven solved the problem of an air force by the simple expedient of rewarding defectors who brought airplanes with them. Eight assorted light planes were contracted, commandeered, or diverted. In one instance Methven went along with Mobutu’s demands for $2 million from CIA to buy a Zairian C-130 worth less than a third of that, though Langley rejected the scam. The Americans also acquired a pair of Swift boats for the FNLA to run off Cabinda. The boats, 140 trucks, several hundred radios, and 70 mortars sailed on August 30 from Charlestown for Africa aboard the freighter American Champion. Project deliveries to Zaire also included a dozen M-113 armored personnel carriers and almost 20,000 automatic rifles. Soon there would be a munitions stockpile in Kinshasa of 1,500 tons. But corruption reigned: Zairian shipments to the rebels included no armored vehicles, fewer than half the number of modern rifles the CIA gave Mobutu, and more than 12,000 old M-1 carbines. The FNLA ultimately received supplies at a rate of ten tons per day, much of it old and worn out. As on other occasions, the agency made its cash go farther by undervaluing the weapons, for example pricing an M-1 carbine at $7.55 or a .45-caliber automatic pistol at $5.00.
Langley fooled itself, supposing the Zairian weapons somehow hid its hand. Mobutu’s involvement simply invited attack on the rebel rear base in Zaire while reducing the effectiveness of rebel forces. Meanwhile China continued to train the FNLA almost until independence day. When Roberto’s troops failed to show much striking power in northern Angola, Mobutu sent in two of his paracommando battalions plus some Panhard armored cars in return for more CIA arms. Half the twelve hundred troops Mobutu sent into Angola deserted. His army turned back after suffering only about fifty casualties.
The secret warriors also tried to substitute propaganda for boots on the ground. Fully a third of the Feature task force were psywar specialists, their effort code-named Project IA/Cadmus. In Kinshasa they planted stories in the two major newspapers, Elimo and Salongo. The same thing happened in Lusaka, the Zambian capital. Whatever favorable development could be seized upon was converted into leaflets printed on a mimeograph in Kinshasa. Planes dropped them inside Angola. In at least one case MPLA radio in Luanda took CIA leaflets and broadcast them verbatim. At Langley a committee compiled press guidance for the State Department, several paragraphs each day with the themes that should be pushed. Often the stories were completely made up—in one instance a lurid tale of Cuban soldiers raping and pillaging, complete with the accounts of victims. The Cubans were supposed to have been taken and executed by a firing squad of women. Another story told of UNITA capturing Soviet advisers when they took a village. Looking for evidence of Communist presence, and ignorant of African superstitions about spirits (Stockwell believes that women, especially, would never have participated in killings), the press gave such stories great play. When journalists—more than fifty of them—tried to follow up the stories, they found nothing. Savimbi admitted to reporters that UNITA had no Cuban or Russian prisoners and had never been near the village named in the accounts. The propaganda coup evaporated.
The station chief in Lusaka, Robert Hultslander, dealt with UNITA. Despite liking Savimbi, Hultslander eventually came to agree with the U.S. consul in Luanda that the MPLA were, in fact, better qualified to govern the country. Theoretically no Americans were to work inside Angola. But Hultslander got a Special Forces training team in mufti to instruct UNITA recruits. This would be critical since, at the outset of Project Feature, Savimbi’s forces numbered only a few hundred. CIA communications experts were also located with both UNITA and FNLA, handling not only Feature cable traffic but training rebel radio operators. More ominously, South Africa, both through its armed forces (SADF) and its intelligence service, the Bureau of State Security (BOSS), intervened as well. Early on South African troops occupied a hydroelectric dam in southern Angola. Then BOSS quietly sent money and arms to UNITA. This meant that the CIA and the secret warriors of the white minority regime worked hand in hand in a covert operation in the heart of black Africa, which automatically put Washington on the wrong side of African nationalism, to devastating political effect. All the propaganda the agency generated so assiduously could not alter that reality.
Langley coordinated war strategy with BOSS, permitted high-level talks with BOSS officials in Washington, and sent UNITA some arms through South Africa. The CIA paid for gasoline to move SADF armored cars to help Savimbi. Plans were in process to procure a C-130 transport and some helicopters to be given to SADF for its UNITA supply flights. In October the South Africans asked for help acquiring 155-millimeter artillery shells they claimed were needed in Angola.
Stockwell’s account maintains that Africa Division chief Potts entertained even wider cooperation with the South Africans. These were stifled by staunch State Department opposition. The diplomats upheld the Kennedy administration’s arms embargo on South Africa and quashed suggestions for major collaboration. State proved right in the fall, when journalists confirmed the presence of South African troops with UNITA. Instant black African revulsion toward the Western-supported factions followed. This dealt Project Feature’s political action component an irreparable blow.
Ironically, one of the diplomats who closely questioned CIA plans for Angola was Frank Wisner, Jr., son of the legendary secret warrior. Another cautious diplomat was Edward Mulcahy, State’s representative on the Colby working group, who quietly threatened to resign if Potts went ahead with the South Africans.
South Africa escalated its involvement in the fall of 1975, sending a force that included armored cars plus associated logistics. Task Force Zulu, its commander code-named Rommel (an Afrikaner, Col. Koos van Heerden), was more powerful than Savimbi’s entire army at the time. Zulu became Savimbi’s spearhead. Typically the South African Operation Savannah was passed off as a UNITA offensive and the SDAF troops, if anyone asked, as mercenaries. Savannah became the most successful military action mounted against the MPLA. Rommel advanced rapidly while another SDAF task force joined Savimbi at his headquarters. Within two weeks Zulu captured the major port in southern Angola and threatened the port at Lobito and the Benguela railroad, one of Angola’s few major transport systems.
The South Africans were good fighters. With them UNITA gained much of Benguela province. Neto turned to his Soviet allies. Moscow increased its shipments, allowing MPLA troops to introduce potent artillery rockets during the summer and 76-millimeter guns about this time. The Cuban military mission became active in late August, planning to operate four training detachments, and Cuban advisers of one of these first participated in combat toward the end of October—a few dozen men compared to the Zulu force of well over a thousand. Lobito fell on November 7, four days before independence. Kinshasa newspapers praised the fighting abilities of FNLA and UNITA.
The Zulu force represented one prong of a pincer attack toward Luanda. Roberto’s FNLA was the other. Stiffened by more than a hundred Portuguese mercenaries—their recruitment financed by the CIA—the FNLA advanced on Luanda from the north. Finally inside Angola, Roberto got a bit of South African help too: advisers and some guns in early November. South African sources report a small CIA contingent with Roberto as well. The American consul and all remaining U.S. diplomats left the capital at this time.
Through exhaustive research Piero Gleijeses established that Fidel Castro decided to commit combat troops to Angola on November 4, the same day Havana sent a hundred heavy weapons experts that the Angolans had wanted for months. (Kissinger both greatly exaggerates the pace and timing of the Cuban commitment and wildly underreports the South African involvement.) The first men of an elite battalion left for Luanda several days later aboard two aircraft. Gleijeses believes Castro moved when he appreciated that South Africa had really intervened. The Cuban unit went into the lines defending Luanda from the FNLA. The MPLA and the Cubans blunted Roberto’s attack. The South African advance also stalled with ambushes set by the few Cubans facing them, who destroyed bridges and then defended the only other paved road to Luanda.
Henry Kissinger cites a CIA report to the 40 Committee on November 5 as showing that the FNLA and UNITA were on the cusp of victory. But what he quotes shows a static picture: a list of a list of ports and provincial capitals controlled. The report itself notes the factor already beginning to swing the pendulum: the “heavy” commitment of Soviet equipment, armor, and trainers, plus Cuban combat troops. Secretary Kissinger adverts that “we” interpreted Moscow’s moves as harassment, not policy, and “therefore judged that Moscow would recoil once the United States asserted an important national interest.” Kissinger miscalculated, not the CIA.
On independence day, November 11, there were about seven hundred Cubans in Angola. In an emergency airlift and sealift called Operation Carlotta, Cuban volunteers came in large numbers: the remainder of the elite battalion almost immediately (this unit halted SADF’s Zulu force), a thousand artillerymen in early December, several thousand more by the new year, up to fifteen thousand in all by the spring of 1976.
Between the end of October and November 18, according to the CIA, more than twenty Russian aircraft delivered arms to the MPLA. After Ford and Kissinger appealed to Moscow, the Soviet airlift halted on December 10, not to be resumed for weeks, without affecting the military balance. There could be no plainer demonstration of rebel weakness.
Estimated Soviet aid stood at $100 million in December 1975, and four times that amount by March. Weapons delivered included fifty T-54 tanks, 122-millimeter artillery, and MIG jet fighters. Moscow had always had this capacity but no reason to engage so deeply until its client seemed menaced. The Soviet-bloc response anticipated in Washington’s original deliberations had come to pass.
In northern Angola the FNLA failed to capture the isolated enclave of Cabinda, seat of Angolan oil production. Cubans and MPLA forces began to push back the FNLA. Holden Roberto tried to raise more mercenaries to stiffen his army. Roberto offered a million dollars for a “parachute regiment.” Soldier of fortune John Banks received advances to recruit in England. In the United States the recruiter was David Floyd Bufkin, a former pilot and California crop duster, variously reported to have received cash from either Roberto or the CIA. Mercenary recruiting used the grapevine plus ads in newspapers. Bufkin also appeared on television and advertised in the action magazine Soldier of Fortune. Roberto’s “parachute regiment” ultimately received 140 British and seven American recruits, some with no military experience at all. Twenty-three arrived too late and were sent home. Another group was rejected as unsuitable.
The Central Intelligence Agency engaged in a parallel effort to recruit in Portugal, yielding several hundred men for FNLA. Through French intelligence, which also contributed ammunition, four helicopters, and its own agents, the CIA contacted longtime soldier of fortune Robert Denard, who recruited twenty mercenaries for UNITA. Another forty went to UNITA from BOSS. Instructions prohibiting Americans from working inside Angola were spurned by a fresh army mobile training team at FNLA headquarters.
Washington viewed the worsening situation with alarm. On November 27 President Ford authorized another $7 million for Project Feature. That exhausted the CIA director’s contingency fund. Any more had to come from Congress. Langley prepared options for the 40 Committee alternatively priced at $28 million, $60 million, or $100 million. Director Colby, now a lame duck awaiting replacement, recommended the first program. Ed Mulcahy of State personally carried the options paper to Kissinger before the latter departed on a ten-day trip to China with Ford.
Later Mulcahy, unable to tell the working group just what Kissinger had decided, said, “He read it. Then he grunted and walked out of his office.”
“Grunted?” asked Potts incredulously.
“Yeah, like, unnph!”
They were reduced to trying to figure out what an affirmative “unnph” might sound like.
Kissinger is silent about this exchange. He writes that he backed the $60 million option. Ford approved the CIA’s recommendation. This revolved around “reprogramming”—taking money from one government account and moving it to another—which applied to amounts of less than $50 million and could be done with the approval of appropriations committee chairmen alone. But the $28 million gambit was blocked.
In the Year of Intelligence, Congress had ceased to be a rubber stamp. It also knew a lot more about Project Feature than earlier secret wars—a result of the Hughes-Ryan reporting requirements. The CIA first informed both House and Senate members and staffs beginning a week after Ford’s presidential finding, though not the full eight committees required. In particular, on August 4 Director Colby briefed Democratic Senator Dick Clark of Iowa shortly before Clark left on a fact-finding mission to Africa. The senator, chairman of the African Affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations panel, feared the intentions behind the project. What Clark saw led him to suspect U.S. collusion with South Africa. He returned determined to do something. South African intervention and the collapse of the rebel offensives only sharpened Clark’s resolve. At just this time the executive came to Congress for the Angola money.
Meanwhile public exposure, delayed by the secrecy of Colby’s CIA briefings, inevitably occurred. Congressmen had sworn silence on what they learned in thirty-five briefings from the DCI in 1975–1976. The first leaks appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Times in late September to no apparent effect. They were muted by the continuing CIA-manufactured propaganda, a case of blowback in which agency foreign activities affected American politics. Even afterward, in his congressional appearances, Colby continued claiming that no CIA weapons were going directly to the guerrillas and that no Americans were involved inside Angola. The operative words were “directly” and “inside.” Henry Kissinger lent his own hand, testifying to the Church Committee on November 21 that CIA involvement in Angola was purely to bring about negotiations.
The subterfuge finally collapsed. On December 5 Ed Mulcahy came late to a hearing at Senator Clark’s subcommittee. The CIA witness, William E. Nelson, went first. Nelson, a Colby protégé, probably feared his own days numbered, as Ford had suddenly fired Colby a month earlier. Having spent most of his career in the Far East Division, including a long tour on Taiwan at the nadir of China operations, Nelson knew the downside of covert action. By December an insider could certainly view Angola as trending in that direction. For whatever reason, Bill Nelson suddenly admitted the truth about Project Feature.
Then Mulcahy arrived and laid out the agreed version that minimized U.S. actions. Senator Clark confronted Mulcahy with Nelson’s testimony, revealing the lie. Capitol Hill buzzed. Legislation to terminate the project was the result.
In 1994, in a debate waged on the letters page of the Washington Post, former CIA baron James Potts attributed the legislation to a complete outsider, the academic Gerald J. Bender. The true story revolves around California Democrat Alan Cranston, the Senate majority whip at the time. Cranston wrote an amendment in conjunction with his aide, William E. Jackson, Jr. They relied on Bender for expertise on Angolan history and politics, but he had no other role. Meanwhile Democrat John Tunney, junior senator from California, faced tough competition for reelection in 1976, beginning with the nomination. Cranston permitted Tunney to present the provision in his own name, and they attached it to the Pentagon appropriations bill.
President Ford lobbied hard to defeat the Tunney Amendment. He made telephone calls, had newly promoted national security adviser Brent Scowcroft assemble a chronology designed to show how little had been done, and threw his congressional liaison staff into the fray. Ford directed Kissinger to postpone a trip to Moscow in part to oppose the legislation, which prohibited expenditure of any money for Angola not specifically appropriated, thus ruling out the reprogramming ploy that Ford counted on. After debate in the Senate, Tunney’s amendment passed by a considerable margin (54 to 22). In a statement Ford complained of the grave consequences of abandoning responsibility.
Ford’s statement laid groundwork for a counterattack when the bill came before the House. But on December 21 a provocative article appeared on the front page of the New York Times. This time Seymour Hersh had details of Feature plus the story of Ambassador Davis’s resignation. Driven by more leaks, discussion of Angola mushroomed. Ford simultaneously engaged in a very public fight with the committees investigating intelligence over whether their reports and findings could go to the public, including a specific study of Angola from the Pike Committee. The Church Committee had recently released its report on CIA assassination plots, opening many eyes and increasing Ford’s political difficulties on Angola.
As the House bill moved forward, the president pulled out all the stops. Press secretary Ron Nessen’s notes of January 1976 briefings indicate careful parsing of Angola questions, and marching orders to reiterate Ford’s position. On various occasions Nessen’s instructions were to claim that Washington knew nothing of South African troops, that there had been no U.S. recruiting of mercenaries (tightened to become a denial of recruiting Americans), that Congress had been fully informed on all covert matters, that he had nothing to say, or that he had nothing to say beyond Ford’s and Kissinger’s comments. When White House counts indicated probable defeat, the president himself phoned House leaders to delay the vote. Talking points prepared by Scowcroft’s staff show the Kissinger visit to Moscow now served to excuse postponement, and that a delay of even a few days was considered helpful for the CIA to move arms and for the United States to explore alternate sources. Ford got his delay but the Tunney Amendment passed the House. President Ford reluctantly signed it into law on February 9, 1976. So intent is Kissinger on shifting blame that he argues “with victory for the Cuban and Soviet forces in Angola, the geopolitical context for SALT [nuclear arms control] was gone.”*
Calamity befell the FNLA mercenaries. Generally an undisciplined lot, they arrived to a dilapidated bus, ratty clothes, and tatty weapons, as Dave Tomkins recalls. There were no maps. The mercenaries were led by a self-styled “colonel,” an enlisted veteran of the British Parachute Regiment, who called himself Costas Gheorghiu. Unbalanced in the opinion of some, a good trooper according to others, he had only fifty or sixty men. Tomkins understood that they, plus some black troops with them, were the entire FNLA army in northern Angola. They never had a battle. He never saw a Cuban. Gheorghiu cut a swath of murder and rampage across Zaire and Angola, culminating in the execution for alleged desertion and misconduct of more than a dozen men by their own comrades.
Others died as well. Among them was a real paramilitary expert, well regarded at Langley—George Bacon III, a Green Beret who had served in Vietnam in 1968–1969 and done a tour for CIA with the Hmong, using the agency cryptonym Kayak, in 1972–1973. Bacon received an intelligence medal for Laos but quit in disgust at what he perceived to be American betrayal of South Vietnam. He was a “cowboy” in the CIA tradition and enthusiastic about Angola.
The mercenaries’ demise came when the MPLA decided to advance and Gheorghiu tried to ambush them. Many were captured including Gheorghiu, wounded, and three Americans. In Luanda the Angolan government put them on trial. The self-styled colonel, American Daniel Gearhart, and two others were condemned to death. Nine men received long prison sentences, with sixteen-year terms for Americans Gustavo Grillo, a Marine Corps veteran of the Battle of Hue; and Gary Acker, also a Vietnam veteran. The State Department barely acknowledged these men and made few efforts to secure their release. Grillo and Acker were finally freed in an Angola–South African prisoner exchange in 1982. Surviving mercenaries complained about CIA severance pay. Mobutu simply pocketed final payments given him for Roberto and Savimbi.
The South Africans continued destabilizing Angola. Thoroughly disillusioned, CIA officer John Stockwell resigned and went public. With this fiasco so recently revealed, it is not so surprising that Senator Church made strong charges on covert action in his committee’s final report. Church also called Henry Kissinger a “compulsive interventionist.”
The Tunney Amendment, attached to a specific budget bill, would soon expire. Senator Dick Clark took a hand and proposed permanent legislation. It would be reported out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously—highly unusual—and passed by large majorities in both houses of Congress in mid-1976. The Clark Amendment made the restriction an enduring one. In April 1977, after the changeover to the administration of President Jimmy Carter, another White House meeting centered on what to do about Angola. Afterward the CIA director went to Senator Clark with a proposal to funnel the rebels weapons through France. Clark would have none of it, and the episode embarrassed President Carter, who publicly claimed he had only learned of this covert action scheme from the newspapers. That proved the end of Angola operations for an entire presidency.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence went on to do a yearlong investigation of Project Feature. In the spring of 1978 it concluded that the Ford administration had misled Congress on the scope of the operation, not revealing some activities and mischaracterizing others. Documented with cable traffic and official papers, the study confirmed that the CIA had indeed spent more than a million dollars to recruit mercenaries, that despite standing orders U.S. personnel had served inside Angola, and that the CIA had been much closer to the South Africans than admitted. The committee also singled out Henry Kissinger’s November 21, 1975, testimony to the Church Committee as especially misleading. The Central Intelligence Agency denied the charges and tried to show congressional overseers where it had briefed various matters. Colby maintained that the CIA had not conducted Angola the way it had Laos. Kissinger dismissed the inquiry as a smear job.
Project Feature, a product of White House determination, had been a dismal failure. Those who attribute causation of the Angolan war to Moscow and Havana typically downplay the effect of the initial CIA program, which inflated Holden Roberto enough to think he could break up the national unity coalition before independence. Apologists also fudge the timing: the attacks that broke up the coalition preceded Soviet arms. Thus they overplay the Cold War aspect. U.S. intervention brought the Cold War to Angola, not the other way around. While Langley made operational errors in its effort—like supposing the initial program would have no fallout—the major mistakes were of policy. Conceiving Mobutu as an effective ally and siding with the South Africans were decisions that undermined the entire project. The CIA correctly anticipated the Soviet response to U.S. intervention and opposed the paramilitary program it was nevertheless ordered to conduct.
Those who argue the CIA could have won in Angola if only Congress had not cut off the money flow cannot get around the weaknesses of cooperating with Zaire and the deadliness of the alliance with the Afrikaner regime. In addition, U.S. ignorance of Angolan conditions and its fixation on Roberto (given his lack of popular support) created more obstacles to covert success. The United States lacked an infrastructure for a decisive intervention, and geography precluded backing Roberto and Savimbi except through other states. Scale of the program is not the real question: the proper comparison is between the $100 million or so spent by Moscow in 1975 with the CIA’s $32 million in Angola, $100 million in Zaire plus the funds committed by South Africa (substantial), Zaire, France, Britain, and the People’s Republic of China. Those numbers are not currently discoverable, but the total likely outweighs the Soviet-Cuban expenditures.
The story of Angola is that Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger heard lots of advice to steer clear yet chose to head straight for disaster. As for America and democracy, the Ford administration acted against it. There is no doubt that Roberto’s FNLA, Savimbi’s UNITA, and Neto’s MPLA were in an uncomfortable coalition, but at least they were in coalition and had the opportunity to fight out differences at the ballot box. Giving Roberto the advantage of CIA political action helped spark a civil war, and wading into that conflict not only proved shortsighted but placed the United States on the wrong side of African nationalism. In addition the Ford-Kissinger decisions further complicated their problems right in Washington, D.C., creating important new restrictions for the secret warriors.
The events of the Year of Intelligence touched off a struggle to regulate U.S. intelligence, an effort that has ebbed and flowed ever since. “Oversight” is the game, which the executive branch, claiming there is too much of it, has on the whole played more successfully than Congress. Legislators on Capitol Hill, having created reporting requirements through Hughes-Ryan, strengthened their monitoring by replacing the secret CIA subcommittees with permanent committees in both houses of Congress.
Oversight did not bring the end of covert action, however. On February 15, 1976, newly minted CIA director George H. W. Bush refused to say whether the Angola project had ended. In a later interview Bush commented, “What happened in Angola was that a properly conceived program, one signed off by the policymakers and reported in accordance with law to the congressional intelligence committees, was leaked and once it was leaked it was aborted.” He then went on, “I think there is a role for covert action somewhere between inactivity and sending in troops.”
During the Ford administration there were also covert actions in Portugal and in the Malagasy Republic, where an American ambassador who had been a career CIA officer was expelled following a puzzling series of musical-chairs military coups. Former agency officers take credit for putting in place a constitutional government. But the 1975 constitution promulgated for the democratic republic permitted only a single political party and remained in place until the fall of the government in 1991. To this day the Malagasy project continues classified.
Oversight simply meant that covert actions were reported and justified by a “presidential finding,” formally known as a Memorandum of Notification. Hughes-Ryan specified that all significant or anticipated actions by the CIA not for intelligence-gathering purposes be so covered. The executive tried to limit oversight, particularly where covert operations were concerned. In December 1975 special counsel Mitchell Rogovin of the agency gave the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence a detailed explication of CIA’s position, in which Langley construed a statutory basis for its activities. The argument was that covert activities lay within the “inherent powers” of the president; they had been conducted by presidents long before a CIA existed, thus the agency was not attempting to assert new powers. Rogovin also referred to the “such other functions” provision in the 1947 act, arguing Congress had never objected to these practices and had always approved agency budgets.
These claims are undercut by the legal opinions of the CIA general counsel rendered on several occasions since 1947. Congress obtained a copy of a paper prepared in 1974 for the general counsel’s office, which took much the same position as had counsel Lawrence Houston: the National Security Act “functions” language applied to intelligence gathering; extending it to covert operations strained the law. The paper added that covert operations were an implementation of policy, a shared power under the Constitution.
Paradoxically, by laying out reporting requirements for covert operations, the Hughes-Ryan Amendment could be seen as authorizing them in the name of Congress.
Whatever animosities Bill Colby had attracted, he had at least been a CIA professional. When George H. W. Bush took the helm at the end of January 1976 there were grave doubts. A Republican politician from Texas, Bush overcame those doubts, appearing at staff meetings in shirtsleeves and professing an “aw shucks” attitude. His mixture of quick appreciation and practical problem-solving won many converts. Richard Holm, for one, had been a Colby supporter but came away a fan of Bush. Genuine concern for the rank and file plus the international awareness Bush had honed as ambassador to the United Nations and to Beijing were the roots of his success. Although not a great manager of the CIA’s analytical role, or major advocate of covert operations, Bush’s sensitivity to public relations and connections returned stability to Langley, with an impression of White House support and a regeneration of agency morale.
In a move that curried favor among one agency faction, throughout his time as DCI Bush resisted Justice Department demands to turn over materials pertaining to Chile and ITT, the evidence necessary for its determination on whether to prosecute Richard Helms.
Within weeks of Bush entering the director’s suite, President Ford issued an executive order on the intelligence community. Billed at the time as a major reorganization, in fact the move amounted to minor tweaking, its main purpose to head off congressional action on a CIA charter. The executive order responded partly to the excesses revealed during the Year of Intelligence, partly to a set of a dozen suggestions Bush had made as he prepared to take over. In early 1976 Ford’s Executive Order 11905 became the first public regulation ever to describe the function of U.S. intelligence and restrictions on it. The order prohibited assassinations, enshrining directives Colby had issued. It replaced the 40 Committee with an Operations Advisory Group, placing decisions in the hands of cabinet members, not deputies. The attorney general continued as a member while the White House budget director became an observer. Telephone concurrences, at least, were prohibited. Covert operations were defined as those intended to further U.S. policies abroad. Ford also put fresh people on PFIAB. The CIA would concentrate administrative functions under a new deputy and elevate its community role with a second.
At Langley, Director Bush turned the improbable trick of raising morale while purging the leadership. Inside half a year Bush changed eleven of the top fourteen CIA officials. Some he transferred, a few he promoted, others retired, and Bush brought in a couple from the outside.
When he spoke of “excesses,” Bush typically referred to outside investigations of CIA, not his agency’s activities, deploring the effects of the Washington spectacle on CIA relations with foreign services. To reinvigorate those associations Bush tried to convey an impression of receptivity and keep hands off foreign operations. On his watch the intelligence services of the Southern Cone nations moved strongly on Operation Condor—and assassinated Orlando Letelier in Washington. Nor did the docket stop there. In fact during the Bush period actions against dissidents in the United States were carried out by the intelligence services of Iran, the Philippines, South Korea, and Israel. The CIA itself recruited Panamanian Manuel Noriega.
There remained the matter of the Directorate for Operations. The DO still seemed bloated from the Vietnam War. The question of realigning it remained a major agenda item. A consensus on the need to do this had existed at the CIA since Schlesinger’s time. In 1974 a management study for Colby had advised the agency to shed its covert operations mission. Another, completed in 1976, recommended cutting the DO by 1,350 officers over a five-year period. That spring deputy director William Nelson sent Bush a memo about moving ahead on reductions. As Nelson later described this incident to journalists:
There were a lot of people in the [DO] who were marginal performers. The low middle. We needed quality, not quantity. I told him that the lower 25 percent should be identified and should be encouraged to seek other employment. . . . I said we owed these people a lot but not a lifetime job.
Bush would think about it, he told Nelson, but he put the paper in the round file. Although Director Bush never disavowed reductions, he made no move to initiate them. A few months later he selected E. Henry Knocke over Nelson to be deputy director of central intelligence. Nelson retired. That opened up the DDO position, for which Bush chose William Wells.
A broadly experienced officer from the old OSS cadre, Wells had been close to both Bill Colby and Tom Karamessines, and had spent his agency career on Far East operations after selling kerosene lamps in China before the big war. Representative of the very group who stood to be phased out, Wells happily went along with Bush doing nothing to reduce personnel. As associate DDO, meanwhile, Bush elevated secret warrior Theodore Shackley.
In a memoir published at this time, Ray Cline advocated taking the covert operations function away from the CIA and giving it to the Pentagon. George Bush opposed that course in interviews, insisting the mission belonged to the agency.
By far the most serious situation to confront Bush during his time at Langley was the Lebanese civil war. Fighting broke out there in the spring of 1975 and was stilled temporarily by Syrian mediation and then intervention; but a year later the Maronite Christian and Muslim sects were back at arms. Next to Indochina, this had become Langley’s biggest headache. In 1975 division chief David Blee promoted his deputy, Clair George, to chief of station in Beirut, then considered a prestige assignment. George, a skilled street man, relaxed as a ballroom dancer where many spooks played tennis. He needed all his dexterity in Beirut, a maelstrom. On June 16, 1976, the new American ambassador, Francis E. Meloy, Jr., died under a hail of bullets on his way to his very first meeting with the president-elect of Lebanon. With him perished his driver and the embassy’s economic counselor. George scrambled to figure out whether the murders had been some insane mistake or an act aimed at the United States. It turned out that Meloy had been abducted before being killed. The next day President Ford held an NSC meeting to consider evacuating Americans from Lebanon. Director Bush briefed the CIA’s latest information, which looked pretty bleak. Ford decided to pull out.
The evacuation would be carried out by the U.S. Navy. The CIA scored a coup here because it had established a relationship with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and PLO security forces now furnished protection for the maneuver. Bush had already ordered evacuation of CIA families from Beirut; now Clair George had to pull out the agency officers themselves. The operations center at Langley set up a special area just to monitor the pullout. In the middle of the night Bush came to watch along with anxious DO officers. The move was completely successful. For a time the Beirut station worked out of Athens. That fall the Arab League placed a deterrent force in Lebanon, which became the origin of a Syrian occupation that endured for three decades. The CIA returned to Beirut.
Jerry Ford faced the Lebanese crisis in the middle of his political campaign for the election of 1976. He lost that election to Governor James Earl “Jimmy” Carter of Georgia. During the hard-fought campaign Carter several times indicated suspicion of the CIA. A climate of apprehension prevailed at Langley when he came to office. As for George Bush, the director made a bid to stay on as DCI, but Carter wanted his own man in charge. There would be a new broom at the head of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Much of 1976 passed as Congress set up machinery for intelligence oversight. Legislation containing intelligence charters was considered during the Carter administration in 1978 and 1980, but it never passed. Meanwhile congressional support for regulatory action on intelligence peaked during Carter’s middle years. When charters were taken up at hearings, the vast majority of CIA professionals testified against excessive restrictions on covert action. Witnesses at various hearings included such figures as George H. W. Bush, John McCone, Richard Helms, Bill Colby, Hank Knoche, Dick Bissell, Tom Karamessines, David Atlee Phillips, and Gen. Richard G. Stilwell. They undoubtedly believed they had achieved a signal victory in avoiding CIA charter legislation.
Outpacing a laggardly Congress, the White House seized the initiative on intelligence reform. President Jimmy Carter continued Ford’s practice of intelligence regulation through executive order with one he signed in 1978. The assassination ban continued. The decision-making body became the Special Coordinating Committee of the NSC, with essentially the same membership. The covert action definition narrowed somewhat to include only those “conducted abroad” in support of national foreign policy objectives. Typical activities approved by the SCC during the period included the provision of training and special communications equipment to the leaders of Egypt and the Sudan for their personal security, and an anti-Cuba propaganda campaign in the Horn of Africa.
Hank Knocke stayed on for six months into the Carter administration. He later recalled that when presidential findings were signed, copies went to the congressional oversight committees. “I never presented a finding to any of these committees,” says Knocke, “but what there wasn’t a whole range of questions and answers covering an hour or two. And usually a lot of fulminating—like, who in the world wants to do thus and so?”
The White House created a fresh mechanism to monitor operations, called the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB). Much later, in the heat of the Iran-Contra affair, it would be revealed that the IOB, essentially moribund, had never conducted an investigation. Two of its three members though, former ambassador Robert Murphy and Leo Cherne, came right out of PFIAB, Cherne having been its most recent chairman. James Farmer ran the IOB for Carter. The Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board itself was abolished by the president.
At first the Carter administration had no great appetite for covert action, postponing the day of reckoning between congressional oversight and executive power. President Carter nevertheless defended executive primacy. He supported legislation to repeal Hughes-Ryan and reduce CIA reporting to the two specialized intelligence committees of Congress. Carter also made use of a gambit innovated by Kissinger and Ford—blanket findings to justify in advance all covert operations concerning terrorism, narcotics, and counterintelligence. From the oversight standpoint, once this device became accepted it shrank the scope for program review in these areas.
As in many matters during his years in the White House, Carter was frustrated in his first choice for CIA director. Theodore Sorensen, Carter’s nominee, had to withdraw when his nomination ran into strident congressional opposition. Next Carter turned to Adm. Stansfield Turner, a naval officer, then NATO commander in Italy. Turner and Carter had been classmates at Annapolis. Although regulations forced him to retire from the navy to accept the offer, Turner took the DCI job. A novice at intelligence, the admiral provided strong, reformist leadership.
Despite being able, Turner was an outsider at Langley and remained unpopular. He gained no friends when, like Porter Goss early in the twenty-first century, Turner showed up with a coterie, mostly former naval officers, as his inner staff. One, Rusty Williams, did a global evaluation of the Directorate for Operations, visiting stations, poking into all manner of things. The rumor mill buzzed with accusations that the DCI’s man regaled the front office with innuendo about people’s escapades on station.
Any chance of Turner’s being accepted evaporated with the staffing reductions he needed to meet budget limits. Although the DO passed its evaluation, those personnel studies from the Bush era had still to be faced. When the director asked Bill Wells what ought to be done, the DDO did not oppose reduction. Admiral Turner actually cut back planned staff reductions by more than a third. To cut the time of hysteria, the DCI shortened the layoffs from five years to two. While more than eight hundred staff slots were dropped, the DCI insisted these be almost entirely from headquarters. (Some sources report a quarter were field positions, Turner says none.) The remainder were support jobs.
Most of the reduction came from early retirement and attrition, with real firings minimal. The admiral actually forced only about 150 officers into retirement—Cord Meyer being one example—and fired just 17. Although the DO declined from its Vietnam War peak of about 7,500 to roughly 4,750, that total is rather close to strength in the mid-sixties (5,500). There were actually more reductions under Schlesinger and Colby than under Turner.
But the handling of the cutback was abysmal. Turner allowed himself to be convinced that CIA would avoid legal liability by simply serving up pink slips rather than graciously commending officers’ service, which might furnish grounds to question the personnel actions. Retirements were dictated by edict. Personnel officers went through their files and culled the oldest and the bottom 5 percent of performers, the latter by taking the lowest-ranked officers within their grade levels. The old hands were the most numerous (92 percent of those let go were over age forty), with the most experience and usually at least one language. Some young officers were victimized. At least one, dismissed from a European station, hired Mitchell Rogovin (back in private practice), showed that his rankings had been based on differences with a station chief who wrote his efficiency reports, and was eventually rehired to avoid the lawsuit he threatened.
Inexperienced at Langley, the admiral did not know he had been set up. Turner’s strategy gained the DCI no friends and alienated the clandestine service. President Carter could not miss the torrent of complaints reflected in media reporting. He asked Pennsylvania governor William Scranton to look into the CIA personnel mess. Scranton gave Admiral Turner a pass. That did not stop officers from blaming him. Many would agree with the DO’s Floyd Paseman who writes, “Our collection capability was decimated.” Turner would argue it had been improved. Some sided with him. Tom Gilligan, who had served both in stations and undercover, believes that “Turner’s decision to make the cuts evenly from top to bottom made more sense than the plan proposed by [DO] management.” Turner himself, in retrospect, believes he should have done the same as George Bush—nothing—and passed the problem on.
The cutback issue played out over years. So did an unsavory scandal over former DO officer Edwin P. Wilson that began a few weeks after Turner became DCI. The Wilson scandal added to criticisms of the admiral, who felt obliged in the course of it to replace DDCI Hank Knocke and discipline Ted Shackley, a Wilson associate, as well as fire a couple of other officers. That did not add to his luster.
Then there is the denouement of the Helms affair. Admiral Turner found Helms very defensive when they met. Little wonder. The forces that had stalled the Justice Department in this matter were eroding. Prosecutors had impaneled a grand jury late in 1976. As Carter took office, Helms was told he was a target of the inquiry. The secret document issue persisted into the fall of 1977—the CIA had turned over sixty documents to Justice, but they could not be given to the grand jury until declassified, and Bush had stalled that. There is no evidence whether Turner had a direct role, but the Helms indictment went forward in September. That November Helms pleaded no contest to two counts of perjury. Declared guilty, he received a suspended sentence and a fine, collected from former comrades in cash donations one afternoon at a country club lunch. No matter Turner’s role, he could not but suffer as CIA veterans bristled at the treatment meted out to Helms.
It is to Director Turner’s credit that he persisted and did what he could to make the community responsive and responsible. In the DO, Turner brought forward John N. McMahon, whose background lay in technical intelligence. On a temporary assignment in charge of the intelligence community staff, he impressed the DCI so much that in 1978 Turner had McMahon replace Bill Wells. Everywhere Turner sought to manage the colossus. Clandestine service gadfly Duane Clarridge, never slow to criticize weakness, credits Turner with trying to transform the DDO into the lead manager of a directorate, leaving behind his traditional role as “nominal ‘chief spy.’ ” McMahon as DDO played his own part, among other things reinvigorating field training for operations officers at Camp Peary and personally selecting graduates’ assignments. Admiral Turner conceded in later interviews that he had not paid as much attention to the DO as the service wanted, but he certainly had not ignored it. Still, the former DCI recalls, “Being confident that the organization was not out of control was not the same as feeling that it was adequately under control.”
As for congressional oversight, Stansfield Turner felt it a positive benefit to the CIA—a view decidedly unconventional at that time. He strongly resisted prior notification of covert operations to Congress. He also advocated restricting reporting to the intelligence committees and adopted harsh strictures against leaks. Most of this Congress yielded with the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, passed as an amendment to the fiscal 1981 budget, repealing Hughes-Ryan. Congress did insist on being “fully and currently informed,” and got some definition of elements that belonged in a proper finding. Senators who wanted a comprehensive intelligence charter gave up.
As one of his policy review initiatives, President Carter ordered a study of intelligence, completed in February 1977. Although it centered on resource allocation and the responsiveness to the president and other consumers, the review gave some attention to covert operations. The chief consequence was an expression of interest in developing a new standard doctrine, but the paper saw procedures for controlling action as adequate. The Carter review also observed that the procedures, not only maintained, might “perhaps [be] put into statute.” The administration’s willingness to concede on this issue remained untested.
Meanwhile the DO stayed in business. Leery of covert operations as Carter may have been, his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski demanded action. Robert M. Gates served during this period successively as CIA analyst, special assistant to Turner, and NSC staff director for intelligence. Gates dealt with both Brzezinski and his deputy, David Aaron. He recalls, “The most frequent criticism of CIA that I heard . . . was its lack of enthusiasm for covert action and its lack of imagination and boldness in implementing the President’s ‘findings.’ ” Preoccupied with his duties as manager of the intelligence community as a whole, Admiral Turner left the covert action role to his deputy Frank Carlucci.
Within two months of his arrival at the White House Brzezinski, who had a major interest in nationality questions as an avenue to the breakup of the Soviet Union, had already begun insisting on new propaganda efforts to reach into Russia. These White House demands were slow to gather momentum, in part because Brzezinski first tried to work through CIA’s Soviet/East European Division, whose expertise lay in running spies. Richard F. Stolz headed the division at the time, and he not only numbered among the anointed spy chiefs but had several successful espionage penetrations against the Russians active at that time.
Once Brzezinski connected with the Covert Action Staff, propaganda projects began to move. Paul Henze, seconded from CIA to the NSC staff to help Brzezinski on intelligence, had an extensive background in propaganda and political action and helped refine these programs. Underground literature that Soviet dissidents knew as samizdat received a boost from CIA xerox machines. Russian exiles in Western Europe and elsewhere got help from the agency for more formal publishing efforts. Toward the end of 1977 the agency established that the Russians were running their own propaganda operation to stoke up anti-nuclear opposition in Western Europe. Langley worked to expose Moscow’s activity through British journalists and others.
Findings were also approved for operations against a pro-Cuban government in Grenada, a political action in Jamaica, and actions in Nicaragua and El Salvador as those governments faced Marxist guerrilla movements. Some of these findings occasioned strong objections when they were described to the oversight committees in Congress, but there is no recorded instance in which a covert action was called off due to such complaints. In late 1979 President Carter signed a finding authorizing the CIA to block Cuban activities throughout Latin America.
Turner wanted capability in reserve and wished to avoid squandering it on insignificant moves. He preferred highly directed operations, such as one mounted in an East African country to recover certain equipment from a downed aircraft. Carlucci has been especially identified with a paramilitary venture in concert with the British and, for the first time, Saudi Arabia, that began in South Yemen in February 1979 when that country attacked North Yemen. Turner is reported to have thought this project ridiculous, but others forged ahead. Vice President Walter Mondale, formerly a senator and a member of the Church Committee, supported the effort. The CIA recruited several dozen Yemenis and formed two strike teams, one of which ended up in Yemeni prisons, the other withdrawn. Secret warriors terminated the operation at that point. The United States also sent $390 million in military aid to North Yemen and eventually helped broker an uneasy unification of the two states in 1990.
By 1980 the pendulum had swung from restraining the “rogue elephant” to “unleashing” the CIA. International events as well as public opinion account for much of the impetus for the shift. Four developments especially affected the debate over the role of covert operations and controls over them: the advent of human rights as a foreign policy focus, the rising incidence of terrorism, the fall of the Shah of Iran, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Human rights, the enshrinement of which proved to be Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy legacy, at first appears antithetical to covert action, indeed not a policy issue at all. Certainly many at the time resisted thinking of human rights abroad as a policy goal or issue. But in fact the goal could easily be manipulated to cloak cynical aims, as Zbigniew Brzezinski did with his effort to destabilize Russia through its nationalities. The succeeding Reagan administration would be especially adept at this exercise, used to justify covert action.
The rise of terrorism, on which the Carter administration took a hard line, led to renewed attention to military special warfare forces. This ended the post-Vietnam doldrums of Special Forces. These had fallen to only 3,600 in three groups, all deployed in the United States, with detachments in Europe and the Far East plus a battalion in Panama. Reserve and National Guard units assumed the bulk of the special warfare mission, with a force level of 5,800. Anti-terrorism provided a new rationale, much as counterinsurgency had under Kennedy. With the support of chief of staff Gen. Edward C. “Shy” Meyer, the army formed two elite commando units, Blue Light and Delta. These initiatives received personal attention from Brzezinski.
The third development was the fall of the Shah of Iran—what followed in its wake. Policymakers and intelligence analysts either refused to recognize the shah’s growing vulnerability or could not agree on what to do. Carter at one point complained to Turner, Brzezinski, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance about the poor quality of political intelligence he received. Similarly, more detailed criticism emerged from a House intelligence committee study, repeated extensively in the press and by opinion leaders.
The Iranian crisis of 1978–1980 ended by calling into question U.S. special warfare capability. Diplomats were unable to preserve friendly relations with the Islamic Republic under the Ayatollah Khomeini. As already recounted, Iranian militants took over the U.S. embassy on November 4, 1979. National security adviser Brzezinski ordered preparation of a rescue mission. Secretary of State Vance strongly resisted a resort to force. In Teheran the militants released thirteen black and women hostages, and later they freed one man, Richard Queen, who had contracted multiple sclerosis during captivity. Otherwise diplomatic efforts were of no avail. On January 29, 1980, when the Canadians smuggled six Americans out of their embassy in Teheran, Director Turner gave no prior notice to the intelligence committees, who were briefed hours after the Americans were out of the country. That pushing at the envelope of newly established congressional oversight, allowed to pass at the time, became characteristic of the system.
The losses at Desert One, the failed helicopter rescue mission, obliged Carter, through Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and the Joint Chiefs, to reveal the existence of Operation Eagle Claw. The Carter administration faced ridicule from many quarters. Cyrus Vance, who perhaps had earned the right to criticize, remained charitably silent. Nevertheless Carter continued to maintain a military option as part of his search for a way out of the hostage crisis.
Gen. James Vaught continued leading the joint task force, which prepared a larger-scale plan, Honey Badger. Vaught had some of the best covert operations people around. His air commander, Brig. Gen. Richard V. Secord, had worked on supplies to the Kurds, been a sparkplug in Laos, and had special operations experience going back to “Jungle Jim.” Secord had also been air advisory group boss in Iran from 1975 to 1978. Vaught’s chief operations planner, Col. Robert C. Dutton, held three Distinguished Flying Crosses for his exploits flying out of Thailand in the Vietnam War. Dutton had served under Secord in Iran. The joint task force staff worked in unison. Individual will and a desire to get the hostages out overcame Pentagon politics, in this case the services’ demands that each be part of the task force.
Some criticisms of Eagle Claw centered on inadequate planning. There had not been enough helicopters; the requirement to use a “unit” precluded a Pentagon-wide search for the best pilots; the many exercises had never included a complete rehearsal of all phases of the operation. Honey Badger was to correct these deficiencies. Even worse than before, however, the problem was intelligence. The Iranians dispersed the hostages and redoubled their vigilance. In desperation and in hope, the United States turned to expatriate Iranians, who flocked to volunteer their contacts. One who did this was Albert Hakim, to the extent of putting his Multitech Corporation, which still functioned in Teheran, at the disposal of the Americans. The degree to which Iranian exiles considered this patriotic may be gauged from the fact that Hakim went to General Secord after having been turned down by him for lucrative business contracts. Now Secord put Hakim in touch with air force intelligence.
A flood of reports came from Hakim and the other sources. General Secord remembers hundreds. But no one ever pinned down the hostage locations because there was no way to check the reports (and because the Iranians began moving the hostages around Teheran, keeping them in small groups). Uncertainty continued, with the joint task force in constant consultation with the CIA. In October 1980 Langley suddenly announced it had new information, presenting an elaborate briefing. Secord called this the “Eureka” briefing because of the abrupt claim that CIA had all the answers—this might just be someone’s wild idea. Joint task force intelligence had no information to corroborate Langley’s view. General Secord actually escalated this dispute up the chain of command to the White House, where Carter policymakers were reminded of the insoluble intelligence problems of the rescue option.
By comparison, the military side was in much better shape. The Honey Badger force stood ready from August 1980. Whenever there was fair consensus on the intelligence picture, Dutton and the operations staff put together a new plan. General Vaught’s forces conducted at least six major exercises rehearsing successive versions of Honey Badger. The secret warriors also made a start toward filling the void of in-place assets with the army’s formation of a Foreign Operations Group (FOG), a unit to facilitate deep-cover missions, soon renamed the Intelligence Support Activity. Air force HH-53 helicopters, with better avionics to navigate through sandstorms, were substituted for the navy craft used in Eagle Claw.
As preparations continued, costs mounted. Honey Badger was of such importance, however, that General Vaught spent the money and only then went to the services to tell each how much it owed. They intended to go to Congress later to seek a supplemental appropriation. But Honey Badger never went down. Instead diplomatic prospects improved, an accommodation was arranged, and after 444 days of captivity the Americans were released on January 20, 1981. Subsequent debriefing of the hostages by joint task force intelligence showed that the “Eureka” data had indeed been mistaken.
Fiasco in the Iran hostage crisis crystallized opinion on the need to strengthen special warfare capabilities. As Stansfield Turner put it, “The talent necessary for covert action is available in the CIA and it must be preserved.” The military wanted capability at the Pentagon.
At this juncture, as Washington began to resurrect covert action, another international development intervened, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Langley, already involved in a minor key, immediately prepared plans for operations and gave prior notice to the congressional committees. The first known Hill briefings on this subject took place on January 9, 1980. Langley’s representatives were Frank Carlucci and John N. McMahon, the director of operations. The secret warriors were back in the saddle.
* In fact, Kissinger’s difficulties on nuclear arms control derived from a set of problems that had little to do with Angola: differences over the coverage of specific weapons systems, fears of compliance, a decline in political support related to Kissinger’s own overselling of his achievements, Soviet intransigence over Jewish emigration, Kissinger’s struggles with the Pentagon over what U.S. weapons systems should be constrained, and general suspicions of the Soviet Union. Angola had a role in distrust of the Soviets, but a small one compared to other issues. The counterfactual here—that Moscow would have agreed to nuclear weapons limits if only it had looked like the CIA was winning in Angola—is so absurd it clearly demonstrates the emptiness of this argument.