9

SALT, DÉTENTE, AND THE INTELLIGENCE WARS OF THE SEVENTIES

THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE the new Ford administration faced in foreign policy was to negotiate the second round of the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT II) to control the costs and dangers of the spiraling nuclear arms race. Scowcroft’s primary role was to see to it that the president’s policy was coordinated and carried out. But he also served as Ford’s and Kissinger’s adviser on strategic issues and military affairs, and the longer he worked in the White House, the more he served as an equal partner in guiding US national security policy.

With SALT set to expire in October 1977, President Nixon had arranged to meet with Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev at Vladivostok on November 23 and 24, 1974, following stops in Japan and South Korea. SALT II was more complex than SALT because the United States and Soviet Union had asymmetrical forces built under different concepts—differences that had become increasingly pronounced under SALT. The Soviets now led in the number of launchers and mega-tonnage, whereas the United States had more warheads, since it had many more missiles with multiple warheads (MIRVs). The Soviets were proceeding rapidly on four new types of ICBMs, and the United States was developing the B-1 bomber, the Trident nuclear submarine, and an anti-ballistic-missile system (ABM).¹⁶³

That same asymmetry of US-Soviet nuclear forces made the administration a ready target for criticism from hard-line anti-Soviets and political conservatives. Sen. Henry Jackson pointed out that SALT put no limits on the numbers of heavy bombers or MIRVed missiles, since it simply froze the total number of sea- and land-based ICBMs at 2,360 for the Soviet Union and 1,710 for the United States. Scoop Jackson, Paul Nitze, political scientist and commentator Jeane Kirkpatrick, and other politicians, newspaper pundits, and military experts feared that Soviet Union could overtake the United States if it had more missiles with multiple warheads and built more long-range bombers.

Given these criticisms and the upcoming 1976 presidential elections, Ford kept to Nixon’s plan to meet at Vladivostok (actually at a secluded spa just outside the port city on the Sea of Japan). He wanted to use the summit to secure agreements on the number of nuclear delivery vehicles (missiles, bombers, and submarines) and the number of missiles with multiple warheads, which could serve as the foundation for SALT II.

The meeting largely succeeded. After hours of negotiations, Ford and Brezhnev agreed to establish a ceiling of 2,400 nuclear delivery vehicles each and to limit the number of missiles with multiple warheads to 1,320 each. They further agreed not to build more nuclear missile silos or to enlarge their existing missile silos by more than 15 percent, and they agreed to ban testing and deployment of sea- and ground-launched cruise missiles with ranges greater than six hundred kilometers. Air-launched cruise missiles with a range greater than six hundred kilometers would be included under the ceiling on nuclear delivery vehicles. Brezhnev also agreed to drop the demand that European and Communist Chinese nuclear weapons and US bombers based in Europe also be factored in. Neither did the United States have to stop production of the Trident submarine or cancel plans for the B-1. The agreement, if approved, was to last until 1985.

The president was delighted with the Vladivostok summit, since the long hours of difficult negotiations had led him to believe that the Soviets would never agree to numerical equality in ballistic missiles. The summit exceeded his expectations, he writes in his memoirs.164

But the Vladivostok agreement had to be approved by the Senate if there was to be a SALT II—and, as a practical matter, the Pentagon also had to sign off. On both points the administration met with failure.

Scowcroft, who’d advised Ford and Kissinger during the summit, observed that the US Joint Chiefs were “tending toward signing the Vladivostok position and exempting cruise missiles and Backfire.” Keeping the cruise missiles off the table helped the United States, while excluding the Backfire, a Soviet medium-range bomber, presumably helped the USSR. (The Soviets denied it was a long-range bomber; US experts said it had such capability with in-flight refueling.) Kissinger, for his part, dreaded taking the agreement to the Senate. “I am not anxious for an agreement,” he said, “because it just gets me into a brutal fight with [Senator] Jackson.” Scowcroft agreed, saying, “Jackson will attack it no matter what.”¹⁶⁵

Scoop Jackson, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Arms Control, would twice seek the Democratic presidential nomination, and in 1968 he had declined Nixon’s offer to become secretary of defense (the job went to Melvin Laird). Jackson now joined with other Democratic hawks and Republican conservatives, as well as many in the Pentagon, in attacking the Vladivostok agreement. He contended the deal would allow the Soviet Union to produce an intercontinental delivery vehicle, the Backfire, while the United States had to give up the Tomahawk cruise missile. The agreement, he contended, eliminated any incentive for the United States to improve its weapon systems, while the Soviet Union would gain parity and the potential to achieve superiority over the United States. Meanwhile, critics on the left pointed out how high the new weapons ceilings were and that they represented little constraint on the arms race. Lacking the support he needed, Ford backed away from the Vladivostok agreements and SALT II. The Backfire and cruise missile issues never got resolved, and SALT II would die under the Carter administration.166

Meanwhile, the Ford administration was suffering other blows. Less than two months after the Vladivostok meetings, on January 3, 1975, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment became law. Members of Congress had been outraged to learn that shortly after 1972 summit, the Soviet Union had imposed an exit tax on Soviet emigration. Although the tax was relatively insignificant, given the other practices of the Soviet police state, it induced Jackson and Representative Charles Vanik to attach an amendment to a trade bill that would deny most-favored-nation trade status, credits, and other economic benefits to any “non-market economy” that inhibited the right to emigrate. Kissinger and Scowcroft believed that the Jackson-Vanik Amendment interfered with US-Soviet relations and tied their hands in dealing with the Soviets. They further contended that it jeopardized détente by using crude legislative clout where quiet diplomacy would be more effective.¹⁶⁷

In fact, emigration from the Soviet Union had increased in recent years, but after the passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, it began to fall. Not until December 2012 was Jackson-Vanik repealed.¹⁶⁸

In mid-1975, the administration came under more fire from anti-Soviet conservatives when the Soviet dissident novelist and Gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to visit the United States. AFL-CIO president George Meany invited Ford to a June 30 banquet in honor of Solzhenitsyn. A week later, Sen. Jesse Helms and Sen. Strom Thurmond also separately invited President Ford to meet with Solzhenitsyn.

John “Jack” Marsh, Ford’s congressional liaison, Rumsfeld, and Cheney all advised the president to accept the invitation and attend the dinner. But Kissinger and Scowcroft “strongly argued against it,” fearing that if Ford met with Solzhenitsyn—a private citizen whom European leaders had refused to agree to meet—it would sabotage the upcoming negotiations with the Soviets at the Helsinki conference, only a few weeks away. Ford accepted his advisers’ suggestion and declined to see Solzhenitsyn. Notwithstanding the dissident’s great personal courage and devout Christianity, the president considered Solzhenitsyn—who opposed détente and East-West coexistence and disdained American popular culture and Western consumerism—arrogant and “a goddamned horse’s ass.” But when the news leaked that the president wouldn’t be meeting with Solzhenitsyn, the resulting uproar caused Ford to reverse his decision and invite Solzhenitsyn to the White House after the Helsinki conference. Solzhenitsyn said he was too busy.169

Ford paid a heavy political price. “That refusal to see the most powerful witness against Soviet tyranny,” Cheney later remarked, “became a centerpiece of the conservative foreign policy against Ford.”¹⁷⁰

Conservatives and human rights advocates likewise vigorously criticized Ford, Kissinger, and the administration for the president’s participation in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Since the 1950s, Soviet leaders had wanted their European and US counterparts to recognize the boundaries established after the Second World War. US presidents had seen no advantage in doing so until the early 1970s under Nixon, when the Soviets made concessions with respect to the status of West Berlin, agreed to meet with US and European officials in Vienna on mutual and balanced force reduction (MBFR), and embarked on détente.¹⁷¹

So in 1973 President Nixon had begun to make plans for a CSCE conference to be held in Helsinki in two years’ time. Thirty-five countries were to be represented, as well as the Vatican, which would make the Helsinki meeting the largest gathering of European states since the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Kissinger approved of the conference, insofar as the United States needed to support its European and NATO allies and demonstrate the administration’s commitment to staying engaged in international affairs. Although the CSCE results (which were essentially all negotiated in advance of the meeting—hence its title, the Helsinki Final Act) recognized the post–World War II boundaries, they were “not wholly what the Soviets wanted,” as Kissinger noted. They did nothing to undermine NATO and were largely permeated with the philosophical assumptions shared by “the West’s open societies.”¹⁷²

The CIA’s analysis stated, “In summary, the agreements that will be signed in Helsinki touch on virtually all areas of critical interest to Europe. But they will not have a decisive impact on European events, and the future course of détente in Europe will be much more affected by West European and US cooperation,” by “the possible emergence of new leadership in Moscow,” and by the “growth of East-West economic interdependence,” among other factors.173

The Helsinki Final Act itself, to which all of the attendees agreed, laid out a set of recommendations in four categories, or “baskets”: (1) the observation of boundaries and respect for human rights, (2) improved cooperation on economic issues, (3) support for human rights, media information, and free movement of people and ideas, and (4) instruments for monitoring compliance and scheduling future conferences. If the Soviets benefited more from the first two baskets, the West had more to gain from the third and fourth, which had the potential to undermine the legitimacy of the Soviet police state and ultimately endanger the Soviet Union.¹⁷⁴

In the end, Kissinger was ambivalent about the Helsinki Final Act, and by the time of the meeting he was at pains to distance himself from the accords. He feared the Soviets were using the CSCE in an attempt to weaken the European commitment to NATO. He also thought the accords were a “bunch of crappy ideas,” especially the third basket on human rights. “A lot of conservatives are screaming that the Security Conference is sanctifying the Soviet presence in Europe,” he told the writer William F. Buckley. “The Conference wasn’t our idea. It isn’t something I’m proud of. Our instructions to our men was to stay ½ step behind the Europeans. . . . The territorial integrity issue is something they have gone over for years. It isn’t in our interests,” he added, “to build up something that isn’t that important.”¹⁷⁵

The CIA, too, was ambivalent, concerned that the Soviets were trying to use the Helsinki accords to split the United States from its European allies. According to Ford’s briefing book for the conference, prepared by the NSC staff, Soviet officials perceived the CSCE as means by which “the Soviet Union hope first to freeze the political map of Europe and thereby extend its political influence westward.”¹⁷⁶

By contrast, Scowcroft was firmly committed to the Helsinki conference. Not only did he appreciate that the United States’ European allies very much wanted the CSCE conference, but he thought it could help unite the West, ease East-West tensions, and provide extra impetus to the ongoing SALT negotiations. Furthermore, the Helsinki meeting could show that the administration cared about human rights, contrary to the accusations of both the right and the left.¹⁷⁷ Scowcroft realized that the agreement didn’t change political and strategic realities in Europe, but he saw it as constituting a promising step. This wasn’t so much an ideological issue for Scowcroft, since he viewed Soviet motives from a perspective of their own national security, but a matter of practical diplomacy: the Helsinki accords would strengthen US relations with Europe and improve the United States’ and the West’s positions vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc at minimal cost.

With this larger, longer-term picture in mind, Scowcroft ended up at the last minute drafting a speech for the president to deliver at Andrews Air Force Base just before his departure for Bonn, Warsaw, and then Helsinki. A speech had already been drafted by Hartmann and Ford’s speechwriting staff, though because the speechwriters hadn’t consulted with the NSC (ostensibly because Kissinger had never informed the White House how the United States and the Ford administration stood to gain from the Helsinki conference), the speech had negative, hostile overtones.

When Scowcroft saw it, he realized that he had to write a completely separate speech if the president was going to salvage the CSCE conference for the purposes of the United States’ international diplomacy. It spoke of President Ford’s “mission of peace and progress,” of the hopes of the people of Eastern Europe that depended upon “increased cooperation and stability between the East [and] the West,” and of the United States’ support “for the aspirations for freedom and national independence of peoples everywhere.” The Helsinki accords, Scowcroft wrote, constituted a “forward step for freedom.”178 Ford chose to deliver Scowcroft’s speech.

In the conference’s closing ceremony, Ford reemphasized the same ideas. “These principles are not clichés or empty phrases,” he stated. “We take this work and these words very seriously. We will spare no effort to ease tensions and to solve problems between [the United States and the Soviet Union],” he said, “but it is important that [Secretary Brezhnev] realize the deep devotion of the American people and their government to human rights and fundamental freedoms and thus to the pledges that this conference has made regarding the freer movement of people, ideas, and information.”¹⁷⁹

For Scowcroft, the “great achievement” of the Helsinki accords “was that it started the process that undermined Moscow’s ability to dominate its neighbors.” With the Helsinki Final Act, party secretary Leonid Brezhnev committed the Soviet Union to an international agreement that recognized that “the participating states will respect each other’s sovereign equality and individuality . . . including in particular the right of every state to juridical equality, to territorial integrity, and to freedom and political independence.” As Ford points out in A Time to Heal, the Soviet leader was effectively renouncing the Brezhnev Doctrine, which claimed the right of the Soviet Union to intervene militarily so as to protect existing communist governments, as with its intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968.¹⁸⁰ What’s more, the United States and the other member states agreed to West Germany’s proposal that it be allowed to peacefully change its borders as long as both East Germany and West Germany were in agreement.

The US delegation in Helsinki, unfortunately, made no further progress toward resolving the sticky issues in the SALT negotiations—specifically, the status of the Soviet Backfire bomber and the US cruise missiles. But the Helsinki Final Act put into play the very forces that would eventually end the Cold War.181 In just fifteen years’ time, Germany would be reunified, Poland and other Eastern bloc states would be independent, the Baltic nations would be free, and the Soviet Union would be on its way to oblivion. Even in the short run, the CSCE agreements seemed to have an effect: in the months following Helsinki, Soviet authorities began to allow ethnic Germans to leave Poland as well as the Soviet Union for West Germany. The Soviets began to provide advance notice to European countries of Warsaw Pact military exercises and to invite the attendance of European observers to those exercises. And they began to allow more Soviet Jews to emigrate.

Nonetheless, those on the right in both American political parties likened the CSCE to Yalta. They didn’t care for it beforehand, and they didn’t approve of it afterward. “Don’t go,” editorialized the Wall Street Journal. Governor Ronald Reagan declared that “all Americans should be against it,” and others—even including some White House aides—joined in openly condemning the Helsinki Final Act.

After the conference, Congress established the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, consisting of twelve members of Congress and three executive officials charged with monitoring compliance with the Helsinki Final Act. Congress would at once impel the administration to move aggressively on human rights and keep tabs on the Soviet Union’s progress with respect to human rights.¹⁸²

Besides displeasing hard-line members of Congress, conservative Republicans, and Washington pundits, the summit angered ethnic groups representing various Eastern European countries. Prior to the CSCE meeting, they threatened to vote against Ford in 1976 should he go to Helsinki, and they were hostile now that he had signed the Helsinki Final Act—this despite the crowds in Poland, Yugoslavia, and Romania who enthusiastically cheered President Ford during his East European tour. Ford’s approval ratings fell after the CSCE conference.

Unhappiness over Helsinki, SALT, détente, and the fall of Vietnam fed a wider perception of US weakness. “The United States now faces its first defeat in 200 years of independent history” stated the London-based Financial Times. One German writer wondered about the United States’ commitment to freedom: “The Americans did nothing to interfere with the erection of the Berlin Wall” fifteen years after the post–World War II division of Germany. “Now, 30 years later, I am convinced they would not go to war if the Soviets decided to straighten out what they would doubtlessly call a ‘cold war abnormality’ and made an overnight grab for West Berlin.”183 And James Schlesinger—after he was dismissed from his position as secretary of defense—wrote of other nations’ perceptions of America’s waning strength, not only among European countries but also China and in Latin America.¹⁸⁴

This rightward shift and the mobilization of Democrats, Republicans, and much of the Beltway community against Nixon’s foreign policy was the product of design. In two famous articles published in 1974, Albert Wohlstetter argued that the United States was declining vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, and the Defense Department assisted the spread of such perceptions by leaking relevant materials to Senator Jackson and a cross section of columnists of various political persuasions, including Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, Joseph Kraft, James Kilpatrick, Tom Wicker, Anthony Lewis, and William Safire.

Some began to organize around their belief that the United States was falling behind. In July 1974—perhaps earlier—Paul Nitze, Eugene Rostow, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, and a handful of others began to get together to map out a strategy for shifting US foreign policy. Two years later, Rostow gathered like-minded people at the Metropolitan Club in New York City to set up the National Emergency Committee on Foreign and Defense Policy. Rostow, Nitze, Richard Pipes, Jeane Kirkpatrick, journalist Midge Decter, and Richard Perle, then an aide to Senator Jackson, planned on raising funds from the “Scaifes and the Richardson Foundation,” to use the media, to publish articles in specialized journals, and to enlist prominent policy makers, experts, scientists, and academics to warn of the grave threats facing the United States as a result of recent US presidents’ attempts to negotiate with and appease the Soviet Union.¹⁸⁵

Less than two months later, on May 11, 1976, Rostow and Nitze formalized what they had started by forming the bipartisan Committee on the Present Danger. Other members of the committee included Gen. Andrew Goodpaster and Scowcroft’s former superior officer Gen. John Vogt. Much later Scowcroft said he hadn’t realized either man was a member.¹⁸⁶

To some degree, Scowcroft shared in this rightward shift. By the time he wrote about the US-Soviet relationship in the late 1970s, following the Ford presidency, he had come to realize that the Soviets regarded détente as a tactic, not an end in itself, and that they played strategic hardball. He recognized that Nixon and Kissinger had oversold the benefits of SALT and détente, even if both were still worth pursuing. And though Scowcroft was by no means a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, he was as dedicated to containing the Soviet Union as anyone else. However, Scowcroft’s opposition was based on the threat posed by Soviet military capabilities, views shaped by his study of Russian history and his observations from being in Yugoslavia rather than his ideological differences. He also firmly believed that US presidents had to have the wherewithal to maneuver politically, acquire information, conduct espionage, and embark on covert operations without being under the prying eyes of Congress and the press.

Meanwhile, the administration faced as least as strong a threat from the Democrat-controlled Congress and the political left. This threat to the presidency became perhaps most apparent at the end of 1974 and over the next fourteen months, with revelations about systematic abuses by the CIA.

FLYING OUT TO Vail on December 22 for the 1974 Christmas holidays, President Ford read a New York Times front-page article by Seymour Hersh about how the CIA had engaged in massive domestic spying in the 1950s and 1960s. Ford contacted the director of central intelligence (DCI), William Colby, who partly confirmed the story but also said it overstated the CIA’s culpability (the same thing Colby had told Hersh). It was then that Colby told the president of the “skeletons” or “family jewels”—an extensive set of top-secret documents on improper behavior by the CIA that had been compiled by agency officials at the request of DCI James R. Schlesinger (on Nixon’s directive) in early 1973.187

Among the family jewels were records concerning the CIA’s wiretapping of more than 9,900 American citizens, keeping files on a hundred thousand Americans, opening Americans’ first-class mail, infiltrating domestic antiwar and black activist groups, and conducting psychological experiments on civilians—all legally prohibited. Among the CIA’s other improper surveillance activities were illegal breaking and entering at of the premises of two former CIA employees, the placement of wiretaps on two newspaper columnists, and the physical surveillance of three former CIA employees and five reporters (Jack Anderson and two of Anderson’s staff members as well as Brit Hume and a Washington Post reporter). The CIA had also recruited paid informants among Washington-area dissident groups, opened the mail of those corresponding between the United States and “certain communist countries” (namely, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China), and recruited people to infiltrate US dissident groups for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence.¹⁸⁸

Not only did these revelations cast doubt on the capabilities and competence of the CIA and intelligence community, but they further damaged the administration, shifting the balance of power away from the executive branch and toward the legislative. For many in the press and among the public, it appeared the whole national security apparatus had gone awry and that US presidents and their advisers weren’t minding the shop—and hadn’t been doing so for decades.

Although the CIA had been created by Congress via the National Security Act of 1947, the intelligence community hadn’t been subject to close scrutiny up to this point. Now that was about to change. Congress could assert its ultimate control and subject the agency to its investigations. The CIA had violated the trust of Congress and the American public; its “secrecy,” John Ranelagh writes in The Agency, “was the mask for disgrace.” Nixon had been right not to trust the CIA—except that Nixon himself had relied on the organization to infiltrate the antiwar movement, to help him in Watergate, and to act against President Salvador Allende in Chile. By so doing, Nixon himself further damaged the reputation of the agency.189

Ford and his advisers had several immediate objectives. They wanted to escape any taint of a cover-up. They wanted to ensure that the CIA’s misdeeds weren’t repeated. They wanted to limit the damage to the CIA. And they hoped, by moving quickly, to avoid any intrusive congressional investigations.

The day after the story broke, Kissinger advised Rumsfeld that the White House needed to act fast “to head off, if possible, a full-blown congressional investigation outside of the normal legislative channels.” President Ford agreed. As a member of the intelligence subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, Ford had been among the few members of Congress privy to CIA secrets. He’d also served on the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President Kennedy, and in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster, he’d come out in defense of DCI Allen Dulles and the CIA.¹⁹⁰

Eight days later, with Executive Order 11828 of January 4, 1975, President Ford established an eight-member independent commission, chaired by Vice President Rockefeller, to investigate the CIA’s domestic operations and make recommendations as to how the agency should be administered. It had three months to produce its report—a short period designed to preempt the findings of any congressional investigations. But its chief objective, Rumsfeld noted, was to be “a damage-limiting operation for the President.”¹⁹¹

Meanwhile, CBS News’s Daniel Schorr reported that the CIA had been involved with at least three assassination attempts, targeting Fidel Castro of Cuba, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. Ford himself generated the story—perhaps intentionally, perhaps not—by telling reporters about the CIA’s dark secrets at an off-the-record White House luncheon. Additional stories then broke on the CIA’s complicity in coups in Guatemala, Iran, the Congo, Brazil, and Indonesia. With the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X still fresh in American memory, the revelation of foreign assassinations at the behest of US government officials resonated uncomfortably.192

Reporters and their editors and producers figured they had another Watergate on their hands. And when the Rockefeller Commission finished its work in the summer of 1975, after being granted a two-month extension, the press believed there’d been yet another cover-up, since the commission’s report drew no conclusions about CIA assassination attempts, merely referring to allegations of such attempts.¹⁹³

On January 27, 1975, the Senate voted 82–4 to create the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, also known as the Church Committee after its chairman, Idaho senator Frank Church. Just a few weeks later, the House of Representatives created a similar committee under the leadership of New York congressman Otis Pike.

Scowcroft had no alternative to being involved in the investigations, especially since the national security advisor had formal oversight of intelligence and covert actions. But to handle Congress’s growing demands for classified documents, chief of staff Don Rumsfeld created the Intelligence Coordinating Group, with Michael Raoul-Duval, a White House lawyer, as its executive director. Members of Congress and their staffers also worked through White House counsel Philip Buchen. Scowcroft was therefore spared the day-to-day challenge of responding to Congress’s demands for documents. The congressional investigations nonetheless took up some 25–30 percent of his time on top of his already huge workload.¹⁹⁴

Scowcroft became caught up in three aspects of the intelligence mess in particular. One involved deciding how to respond to congressional requests—whether to release classified information, to redact classified documents before handing them over, or to provide paraphrased versions of those same documents. He wanted to manage the release of information that could hurt the CIA, degrade the effectiveness of the intelligence community, and handicap national security policy—and possibly that of succeeding presidents. And to Scowcroft’s dismay, the information was being leaked. He didn’t blame the reporters or editors who printed the leaks. “The real problem is the people who are leaking the material to the press,” he told President Ford. “They are the ones we have to go after.”195

Chief among the newspapers’ sources was DCI William Colby—making Colby the second part of the CIA scandal Scowcroft had to handle.

Colby had had an outstanding record in World War II, in postwar Italy, and then in Vietnam with the controversial Phoenix program (which arrested, interrogated, tortured, and eventually killed thousands of suspected Viet Cong). Scowcroft, who worked closely on intelligence issues as deputy national security advisor, said he had gotten to know Colby “quite well.” But after the disclosure of the “family jewels” and with the investigations by the Church and Pike Committees, Colby decided to come clean. He made thirty-two trips to Capitol Hill to testify over a twelve-month period, revealing many of the CIA’s activities (although he did withhold information on the CIA’s human sources and its proprietary technology). Colby also said he intended to hand CIA documents over to Senator Church—even though Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft, the president’s general counsel, and others in the administration hadn’t yet agreed whether they should submit the documents.¹⁹⁶

Scowcroft did not understand how Colby could side with Congress rather than the executive branch. “Bill really became a tortured soul in this period. He saw his life and his life’s work crumbling,” Scowcroft told Colby’s son, Carl Colby. “I often wondered if Bill was not expiating his sins, starting with the Phoenix program and whatever had gone wrong in it that he felt responsible for.” Scowcroft said he thought Colby was “always deeply disturbed by the Phoenix program” and that the “Phoenix program wrenched him fundamentally.” He also mentioned “the tragedy of [Colby’s] daughter,” who died as a young adult from a combination of epilepsy and anorexia nervosa. “Maybe, like Job, he had to atone,” Scowcroft continued. “I would never say he fell apart. But it was a very traumatic period and I think he could be excused for feeling overwhelmed at times.”¹⁹⁷ He thought that Colby was behaving “very, very differently” from the person he had earlier known. Colby, he concluded, was a “troubled man.”¹⁹⁸

Kissinger had a stronger reaction. Upon learning that Colby intended to give files to members of Congress, including ones the Church Committee hadn’t even asked for, Kissinger was enraged. “Goddamn Colby,” he exclaimed. “They charge him with shoplifting; he confesses to murder.” To Colby himself, Kissinger joked, “Bill, you know what you do when you go up to the Hill? You go to confession.”¹⁹⁹

What Scowcroft and Kissinger regarded as betrayal, however, others saw differently. The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus saw Colby as being committed to uphold the oath he had taken to protect the Constitution. Rumsfeld thought Colby felt caught between the legislative and executive branches. And Bob Woodward figured that Colby believed that the administration he served and the laws he followed had both lost their moral authority.200 As one CIA official later put it, “The tragedy was that he believed.”²⁰¹

For his part, Colby regarded Scowcroft as being fiercely loyal “to the Presidential command structure.”²⁰² And he was right. Scowcroft’s concern with Colby derived from his larger concern with protecting executive privilege. Both the Church and Pike Committees “were undermining the executive branch,” Scowcroft said, and “were doing so in an unthoughtful way.” The congressional investigations amounted to a “witch hunt” and were “extremely stressful,” he said, given “everything else that was going on.” So whereas “Colby wanted to have open files,” Scowcroft wanted “to protect records” and didn’t allow Colby to take all that he wanted—although he “allowed him to look at particular ones.” Together with chief of staff Dick Cheney, Scowcroft considered Congress to be “taking advantage of the weak executive.”²⁰³

Scowcroft, like Kissinger, was also very much opposed to Colby’s actions and White House leaks:

Kissinger: On this intelligence business, I want you to know I think I cannot tolerate junior people testifying on policy issues. Nor am I willing to follow Colby’s precedent of letting them paw through cables. Then there is this NSA [National Security Agency] stuff coming out.

President: Can’t we prosecute?

Scowcroft: Yes. I am suggesting we look into that. There is a more damaging article by Tad Szulc in Penthouse.

Kissinger: It is disastrous. We have no secrets left.²⁰⁴

(The Szulc article accused the Federal Republic of Germany, with US involvement, of conducting secret NATO-sponsored intermediate-range nuclear missile and cruise missile tests in Zaire, the former Belgian Congo.)

As a realist and as a military man who believed in centralized control, Scowcroft felt it was essential to defend the US intelligence community against its critics on Capitol Hill and in the press. For Scowcroft, Colby’s faith in the wisdom of Americans’ representations in Congress was foolhardy, a recipe for degrading the influence of the executive branch and for weakening the ability of the United States to act overseas. Scowcroft believed that the president had preeminent authority over US foreign policy and national security and that allowing interference from Congress was unwise, especially at this crucial moment in the life-and-death struggle between the West and the East. Such interference would slow down decision making, produce leaks, and gum up the works. If the Church Committee decided to “publish a report at all,” in Scowcroft’s view, it would be “irresponsible.”205

Not everyone in the Ford administration agreed with Scowcroft and Kissinger. Robert Hartmann, Jack Marsh, Philip Buchen, and others thought that stonewalling Congress would be counterproductive, and they argued for more cooperation.²⁰⁶ They often had the president on their side. And if Scowcroft got to “spend five minutes with the president,” Bud McFarlane observed, Marsh and Hartmann would then spend “thirty minutes with the President.” Scowcroft thus learned to pick his fights, realizing that the president wasn’t as adamant as he was about protecting executive privilege, with McFarlane once remarking that “Brent didn’t back me up” with respect to records McFarlane had stored in the White House basement and which Marsh wanted to turn over to over to Congress. But Ford had limited political capital, and Scowcroft was most likely aware of how far he could—and should—push the president.²⁰⁷

Toward the end of Colby’s tenure as DCI and following his repeated trips to the Hill, members of Congress—perhaps in response to a ground-swell of reaction among many Americans and more cautionary coverage in the press—began to pull back. The CIA may have made errors, but almost everyone agreed it didn’t warrant being dismantled. By the time the Church Committee released its two-foot-thick report in May 1976, the rush to condemn the CIA had somewhat abated. For one thing, it had become obvious that the CIA’s misdeeds had a bipartisan pedigree. Colby and the Church Committee both discovered that both John and Robert Kennedy were implicated in the CIA’s illegalities, as were LBJ and other Democrats. These revelations greatly diminished the value of the scandal as a weapon of partisanship. Then the assassination of the CIA station chief in Greece in December 1975, followed by Ford’s statement about it in his 1976 State of the Union address, fueled a backlash against the attacks on the CIA.

Perhaps reflecting this altered climate, the Church Committee ended up taking moderate positions in its report and succeeded in keeping the report secret. (By contrast, the Pike Report was leaked to the press, with major portions published in the Village Voice.) Contrary to Church’s declaration in the Senate that the CIA was a “rogue elephant”—a statement many saw as grandstanding spurred by Church’s own presidential ambitions—his committee made no such claim in its report. The Church Committee found serious errors, abuses, and oversights, but nothing of a gross or systematic nature. Rather, everything the CIA had done had been in accordance with explicit or implicit instructions from the White House.208

The intelligence scandal prompted Scowcroft to figure out how the White House could reform the intelligence system to improve its functioning. This was the third part of his involvement with the crisis in the intelligence community. When the Rockefeller Commission finished its report, Scowcroft ordered a comprehensive study of the organization and management of the entire intelligence community to be led by Donald Ogilvie, the associate director of the Office of Management and Budget. The report was to follow up on the findings of the Rockefeller Commission, include a report on foreign policy and intelligence compiled by Under Secretary of State Robert Murphy, and follow up on the “decision book” that Michael Raoul-Duval had spent six months producing for Dick Cheney, which sorted out the functions of the intelligence agencies. Scowcroft’s hope was to get the administration out ahead of the issue before either of the congressional reports forced its hand.

Scowcroft then met with the president and his top advisers on January 6 and February 16, 1976, where Ford agreed with Scowcroft, Bush, Buchen, Marsh, and attorney general Edward H. Levi to define the intelligence agencies in terms of their public charters and to vest control in the DCI. (By contrast, Rumsfeld, deputy secretary of defense Robert Ellsworth, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. George S. Brown wanted to leave line authority to other agencies.)²⁰⁹

In a two-hour meeting on January 10, 1976, with the president and his chief foreign policy advisers (including Colby, who stayed on as DCI for another few months), Scowcroft addressed a number of key issues. He discussed the sharing of information between the foreign intelligence community and the FBI, whether the president should have an independent intelligence adviser, and how covert action proposals should be handled. He also made recommendations as to how the leadership of the intelligence community should be improved, how intelligence should be consolidated, and how analysis and production of intelligence should be realigned. He also discussed whether covert action should be separated from the CIA, and he speculated about the major reorganization options for the community.²¹⁰

Five weeks later, on February 18, in an effort to get ahead of the issue and spare the intelligence community further damage, the president released the administration’s plans to “strengthen our foreign intelligence capability” to “gather and evaluate foreign intelligence and conduct necessary covert action.” In a special message to Congress of February 18, Ford announced that in order to conduct intelligence activities “in a Constitutional and lawful manner, never aimed at our own citizens,” and to establish an effective process to prevent abuses, he was issuing an omnibus executive order (EO 11905) based on twenty of the thirty recommendations in the Rockefeller Commission report and on Duval’s “decision book.” In order to get other reforms passed, the president asked members of Congress to draft legislation that would protect individuals, concentrate supervision of intelligence in Congress, and discourage leaks on foreign intelligence.211

The establishment of the new ground rules for intelligence essentially retained oversight in the National Security Council, following the original 1947 National Security Act. Now, however, the president’s assistant for national security affairs—the national security advisor—would be in control. Intelligence planning was to originate with the NSC, which was to conduct semiannual policy reviews of foreign intelligence activities and to manage and control the foreign intelligence community through the Committee on Foreign Intelligence, which was to consist of the DCI, the deputy secretary of defense for intelligence, and the deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs.

Covert actions were to be reviewed and recommended by a new Operations Advisory Group, consisting of the national security advisor (chair), the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the DCI, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, with the attorney general and the head of the Office of Management and Budget as observers. General oversight of the CIA was to be conducted by the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), a three-person subgroup of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which would receive and consider reports on a quarterly basis, review the practices and procedures of the intelligence community, and make periodic reports. EO 11905 specified the distinct responsibilities of the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, and Defense Intelligence Agency, among other agencies, and prohibited or severely restricted the collection of information on US citizens, opening mail, infiltrating domestic groups, and physical or electronic surveillance of US citizens, among other activities. It also put explicit restrictions on surveillance both personal and electronic, experimentation, and assassinations.²¹²

Ford wanted to clean house, but he refused “to be a party to the dismantling of the CIA and other intelligence agencies.” Critics in fact claimed that the new organizational structure served to heighten presidential involvement in agency activities and reinforced the barriers between the executive and legislative branches.²¹³ According to Newsweek magazine, the biggest winner was George H. W. Bush, the newly appointed DCI, since the director of central intelligence now oversaw the intelligence budgets (together with the assistant secretary of defense and the deputy national security advisor). And Scowcroft, as national security advisor, now chaired the Operations Advisory Group (which was essentially a reconstituted version of the 40 Committee, which oversaw US covert activities during the Nixon and Ford administrations). Meanwhile, to the satisfaction of Scowcroft, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, and other national security hawks, Ford sent Congress a bill that imposed criminal and civil penalties on government employees who disclosed information involving “intelligence sources and methods.”214

Despite this effort to respond to and defuse the CIA scandal, the Ford administration couldn’t escape further controversy on intelligence. The infamous Team B exercise was the brainchild of critics on the political right who were unhappy with the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimates. At the suggestion of physicist John Foster, Adm. George Anderson, the PFIAB chairman, requested that an outside group of experts be convened to evaluate the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimates. Specifically, there were to be three separate external review panels on air defense, missile accuracy, and strategic objectives. Then-DCI Colby rejected Anderson’s proposal, although he tried to appease the critics by ordering an analysis of the agency’s track record on air defense, missile accuracy, and strategic objectives. However, since the analysis was conducted by active and recently retired CIA personnel, it didn’t mollify the critics.²¹⁵

In late 1976, DCI Bush agreed to Anderson’s request. And while personnel within CIA were split on the advisability of the exercise, Scowcroft and Kissinger signed off on the competitive analysis. Kissinger, for one, thought that an external review might do some good and offer the CIA some alternatives. Scowcroft, by then national security advisor, told interviewers in 1999 for his oral history at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center that he enthusiastically supported the Team B exercise. Speaking more recently, he said he hadn’t thought it could hurt to try the exercise, and his deputy, William Hyland, had agreed. He may also have been willing to go along with Bush in the hope of allaying further criticism of the CIA.²¹⁶

The Team B analysis of the Soviet threat was charged with duplicating the CIA’s in-house National Intelligence Estimate while making different initial assumptions about Soviet decision makers. The experiment was to disclose to what degree the two estimates differed based on their distinct premises. The staff of the IOB recommended the members of Team B.

To serve as chairman of Team B, Bush selected Richard Pipes after others declined. Pipes was a Russian specialist at Harvard, a staunch conservative, and a Polish émigré. Pipes and the IOB together chose the other members of Team B, and they selected older, experienced individuals, including academics, scientists, and former military officers and government officials.217

Team B came to grim conclusions about the military dangers posed by the Soviet Union, conventional and nuclear alike, and soundly trounced the much younger, less experienced officials the CIA selected to explain and defend its own analysis. The competitive process seemed to vindicate the critics of the CIA’s intelligence estimates: that the threat from the Soviet Union was much worse than the agency had led the White House and Congress to believe.

Unfortunately, the effect of the leak of the Team B report was to further polarize the country. Some observers believed that the Ford administration had been dissembling—that the president was deliberately obscuring the risks of détente and the extent of Soviet gains thanks to the SALT I agreement. Others considered the Team B enterprise the fruit of a right-wing effort to undermine international diplomacy and perpetuate the Cold War. Interestingly, when the Team B exercise became controversial, both Ford and Kissinger complained about how Team B had been set up.²¹⁸

Scowcroft said his only objection to the Team B exercise was that someone leaked its findings to the press, since Team B’s report was intended for the White House’s internal use only. Although he also noted that Team B was “somewhat excessive” and depicted the Soviets as monsters, he largely agreed with the harsh report. Speaking after the much later collapse of the Soviet Union, he acknowledged that the Soviets remained a military threat until the very end. They were “deploying system after system at what would for us be enormous cost, and at a rate we couldn’t begin to match—partly because of our politics. . . . Were [these systems] as good as ours? No, but they were okay,” he said. “We tended to solve our problems of physics with exquisitely designed systems, thus very temperamental systems. The Soviets didn’t take that approach . . . so they overwhelmed physics with brute force. That’s why their weapons were bigger. They didn’t depend on this exquisite timing of the primer and so on.” At sea, however, “they never did match us, but . . . in ICBMs they were good.”²¹⁹

As the intelligence controversies vividly illustrate, by the mid-1970s America was becoming more and more ideologically divided. On one hand, the failure in Vietnam, the revelations about the CIA, the stench of Watergate, and the controversy over the Nixon pardon bolstered the Democratic Party and the political left, leading to the election of Jimmy Carter as president and strengthening Democratic control of Congress. On the other hand, the defeat in Vietnam, the rise of the Soviet Union as a military adversary, and the perceived failure of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy gave rise to a resurgent conservative movement on the right. These conflicting currents meant that Scowcroft and the Ford administration had to work within an extremely challenging political climate.

Intelligence remained an abiding interest for Scowcroft, and two years after leaving office he expressed some of his ideas on intelligence in an article published in 1979 in the Naval War College Review:

Intelligence is one of our vital tools in preserving our security. And our security is a prerequisite for the advancement of the ideals for which we stand. . . . Our opponents will not hesitate to employ any means to advance their cause. Intelligence is by its nature an unpleasant amoral business and there have perhaps been times when our practitioners may have been inclined to play the game for its own sake. On balance, however, when one considers the requirements for secrecy, compartmentation, the numbers of people involved, and the need for flexible operating rules, the amazing thing to me is not that there were mistakes, but that so very little [over] so long a period did go wrong. In any event, it is vital that a few aberrations not blind us to the absolute requirements for a strong aggressive intelligence organization if we are to survive. In my opinion we have hurt ourselves badly, both substantively and procedurally. Just imagine the effort the Soviets would have been willing to expend to acquire the evidence of our intelligence operations that was spread across the front pages of our newspapers during the recent investigations. If we cripple our ability to compete in this vital, but arcane field we hurt only ourselves, and of course delight our opponents.220

Scowcroft would himself later serve as the chairman of PFIAB and would once again be in a position to reform the intelligence community. The next time, however, the central problem wouldn’t be errors of commission, as when the CIA engaged in illegal domestic spying and planned foreign assassinations, but errors of omission—its failure to adapt organizationally after the end of the Cold War and its inability to foresee and prevent the terrorist attacks of September 11.