Being DCI changed Bill Colby; he had run large, complex operations before—the Saigon station, the Far East Division, CORDS, and Plans/Operations—but now he was a public figure who was expected to be on top of world events and a person of gravitas within and without the administration. He was a player on the Washington stage whether he liked it or not. Increasingly he did.
When Colby was not out of the country on an inspection tour or meeting with the head of a friendly foreign intelligence service, his day resembled that of a major cabinet officer. At 6:30 A.M. the alarm went off and he climbed out of bed. After retrieving and reading the Washington Post, it was calisthenics and a light breakfast. At 8:00 his driver and security officer picked him up in a dark blue, armor-plated Chevrolet. On the drive to the office he read the New York Times and the Daily Intelligencer. Colby wanted to know by the time he got to Langley what was going on in the world that would be of particular interest to the Agency and how American intelligence was being treated in that day’s columns. At 8:25 A.M., his auto dropped him off; the director walked through the marble entrance hall and took his private elevator to the seventh floor. Huddling briefly with his secretary, Barbara Pindar, and his assistant, Jenonne Walker, he then walked into the conference room at 9:00 sharp to meet with his principal deputies. At 10:00, it was the turn of the US Intelligence Board, which he chaired. Frequently, before going to lunch in the general dining room, he would award a medal to some deserving operator just out of the bush in Southeast Asia or Africa. From 1:30 to 3:00, Colby might prepare for a National Security Council meeting in the White House basement; there, he would brief Kissinger and the other members of the national security team on the ongoing North Vietnamese buildup in South Vietnam or some other topic. Then it was back through rush-hour traffic to Langley, where he spent a couple of hours on crisis management. At 7:00 it was home to a quiet dinner and more document perusal, or to get dressed for one of Washington’s ubiquitous dinners or receptions.1
By the fall of 1974, Colby’s chief preoccupation had become defense of his beloved CIA from its growing number of critics. With President Richard Nixon’s resignation in August over charges that he had obstructed justice in the Watergate affair, many Americans concluded that the government itself was not to be trusted. But what had gone wrong? There was a constitution, one of the most respected in the world; the United States, for better or worse, was a democracy. There must be an evil force working outside the grid, unseen and unaccountable to anyone. Perhaps what was wrong with American politics and foreign policy was that it was controlled by that “invisible government” that David Wise had talked about. The onslaught that had begun with the 1967 Ramparts article exposing CIA front organizations, then the Phoenix probe and Watergate, would continue with a massive congressional and media examination of America’s role in the rise and fall of Salvador Allende.
In the spring of 1973, while Colby was still deputy director for plans, Senator Frank Church (D-ID), a key figure in the congressional anti–Vietnam War movement, had launched an investigation of multinational corporations. Chairing a special subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Church and his team of investigators uncovered the fact that International Telephone and Telegraph had played a role in aiding opponents of Salvador Allende in Chile’s 1970 presidential elections. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under J. William Fulbright, had long had its knife sharpened for what it considered illegal and immoral interference by the United States in the political affairs of other nations. Indeed, in 1970, as Richard Helms was leaving after testifying before the committee, Fulbright had pulled him aside and said, “Dick, if I catch you trying to upset the Chilean election, I will get up on the Senate floor and blow the operation.”2 DCI Schlesinger did not appear before the Church subcommittee, but he had testified to the CIA’s oversight committees on the relationship between the Agency and ITT during the 1970 Chilean elections. He omitted any discussion of Track II, which, among other things, referred explicitly to US support for a coup. The previous month, Helms, during his confirmation hearings to be ambassador to Iran, had been asked by members of the Fulbright committee about the CIA’s role in Chilean politics. Stuart Symington, who was a member of both the Senate Armed Services Committee, a CIA oversight body, and the Foreign Relations Committee, put the questions:
“Did you try in the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the government of Chile?”
“No, sir,” Helms replied.
“Did you have any money passed to opponents of Allende?”
“No, sir.”
“So the stories you were in that war are wrong?”
“Yes, sir.”3
Later, Helms would recall that in authorizing Track II, Nixon had ordered him to keep it secret from anyone not directly involved, including the secretaries of state and defense. Perhaps so, but the CIA had clearly supplied funds to opposition parties under Track I, the plan to prevent Allende’s election. Depending on one’s interpretation of the law, Helms had perjured himself.
There matters rested until Allende’s bloody overthrow on September 11, 1973. Allende’s ouster, as luck would have it, occurred during Kissinger’s confirmation hearings to be secretary of state. Fulbright and his colleagues asked him about Chile. “The C.I.A had nothing to do with the coup, to the best of my knowledge and belief,” he said, “and I only put in that qualification in case some madman appears down there who without instructions talked to somebody. I have absolutely no reason to suppose it.”4
At this point, Representative Michael J. Harrington (D-MA), long a critic of US foreign policy in Central and South America, decided to make the CIA and Chile his personal crusade. Convinced that the Agency, in alliance with multinational corporations and the Chilean military, had intervened to overthrow a democratically elected government, he persuaded the Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs to hold hearings on Chile. Colby testified but would not discuss CIA activities in Chile. Frustrated, Harrington persuaded Lucien Nedzi, chair of the Intelligence Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee (a CIA oversight body), to hold full hearings on US activity in Chile. Nedzi, who knew of Track I, was not enthusiastic, but he felt he had no choice. On April 22, 1974, Colby appeared before the Nedzi subcommittee in secret session. Harrington was not present. The DCI began with Track I, revealing that the United States, acting through the CIA, had funneled $8 million to Allende’s opponents and, following Allende’s election, had worked to make conditions in Chile so uncomfortable that its citizenry would rebel against the new president. Colby made it clear that the CIA was not acting on its own but at the behest of President Nixon and the 40 Committee chaired by Henry Kissinger.
On his way to the hearing, Colby had debated what to do about Track II, which linked the United States to a coup attempt. Nixon had ordered Helms and the Agency to hold Track II in strictest confidence, but Colby had given assurances during his confirmation hearings that he would be absolutely frank with the oversight committees. “I considered it my responsibility to keep them informed,” he wrote in Honorable Men, “even about CIA matters that they would have no way of even suspecting, and therefore would be unable to question me on.”5 Thus, after the formal hearings were over, Colby took Nedzi and the committee counsel aside and told them about Track II. The chairman, taken aback, paused and then demanded assurances that Track II had ended after Allende’s election and that the Agency had had nothing to do with the coup that overthrew him in 1973. Colby gladly gave those assurances, and both men hoped that the matter had ended there.
Harrington had planned well. Taking advantage of the long-standing House rule that entitled any member to review the transcript of any committee of the House, he demanded to see Colby’s secret testimony. Grudgingly, Nedzi agreed. On September 7, Harrington summarized Colby’s testimony in a letter to Representative Thomas E. Morgan (D-PA), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and offered it as proof that the CIA had indeed worked to “destabilize” the Allende regime. Harrington subsequently had his letter published in the Congressional Record.6
Smelling new blood in the water, reporter Seymour Hersh launched himself. In September and October, claiming to have obtained the minutes of 40 Committee meetings, he wrote a series of articles in the New York Times on the CIA and Chile. This was the first the American public had ever heard of the 40 Committee’s existence. With Kissinger once again threatened by the undertow of negative media coverage, his team at the State Department pressured Colby to deny everything. Instead, the DCI gave an exclusive interview to Time magazine writer Strobe Talbott, admitting US interference in Chilean affairs but justifying it in the context of the Cold War.7
The previous summer, Colby had agreed to participate in a conference entitled “The Central Intelligence Agency and Covert Actions,” sponsored by the Center for National Security Studies. The center was dedicated to uncovering the secrets of a presumably nefarious national security state; it was, among other things, an instrument of the New Left, and particularly the anti–Vietnam War movement. Colby was aware that he would be Daniel before the lions, but he had, “somewhat defiantly,” as he put it, decided to make an appearance at the coliseum. Senator James Abourezk (DSD) chaired the meeting, which was held in the cavernous congressional conference room on September 13. Other panelists included Daniel Ellsberg; Fred Branfman, a leading critic of the US air war in Indochina; David Wise; historian Richard Barnet; Congressman Harrington; and former CIA covert operative Paul Sakwa. Sakwa, whom journalist Neil Sheehan described as “nuts,” had long believed that Desmond FitzGerald, Colby, and others were fathers of a scheme to deepen the crisis in Vietnam in order to provoke a showdown with Communist China. The audience ran the gamut of the antiwar movement, from hippies, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and Quakers to Black Power advocates.8
The DCI led off with a short speech justifying the CIA and covert action from World War II through the Chilean election. He observed that thus far, the US clandestine services had succeeded in preventing World War III, implying that if there had been a CIA following the Great War, World War II might have been avoided. He then took questions. In response to a query from Harrington, Colby declared that the CIA had had nothing to do with the coup in Santiago. “We did look forward to a change in government,” he said, an observation met with laughter and derisive hoots. “How many did you kill in Phoenix?” a young woman shouted from the audience. “I’d like to answer that,” Colby said, “I didn’t kill any.” Another collective guffaw. He persisted: “The Phoenix program was designed and started in about 1968 in order to bring some degree of order and regularity to a very unpleasant, nasty war that had preceded it.” Colby was asked if the CIA was above the law: Should Agency operatives be held to US statutes for actions taken outside the country? “There are a lot of illegal things done overseas by our standards,” he retorted.9
Ellsberg was next. He questioned his old counterinsurgency colleague about the break-in to his psychiatrist’s office. Why had the CIA destroyed taped conversations dealing with the incident? Standard procedure, the DCI replied. What about the “tiger cages” on Con Son Island? The Agency had moved expeditiously to get the South Vietnamese to end mistreatment at the facility, Colby replied. More laughter and catcalls. “What exactly was the morality of torture?” Branfman asked. “My morality is to try to help produce a better world,” the former Jedburgh declared, “and not to insist on a perfect one, Mr. Branfman.” At this point Branfman’s wife, whom Sheehan described as “a skinny Vietnamese bitch,” rose and began abusing Colby in “her strident, Vietnamese market-place voice.” Another panelist: “The techniques of covert action include blackmail, burglary, subversion, and assassination. . . . Are these techniques justified in the name of national security?” Colby was unequivocal: “I think the use of an atomic bomb is justified in the interests of national security.” Stunned silence. The gathering closed with another denunciation from an audience member: “You’re not only a liar, you’re not only a racist, you’re a Nazi war criminal.”10
That the director of the Central Intelligence Agency should be treated in such a manner in a public venue was stunning, almost as astounding as Colby’s decision to volunteer for such punishment. Sheehan, who was as close to an unbiased observer as there was in the conference room, painted a picture of the DCI under fire and speculated on his motives: “Sharp features with a slightly receding hairline, piercing grey eyes, pursed lips and folded hands.” Dressed in a light gray suit and a pink and red regimental tie, the DCI had remained the picture of composure, his hands trembling only slightly during one of the Phoenix queries. His facial expressions alternated between bemusement and sincerity. “He is really tough, extraordinarily tough,” Sheehan wrote, “to stand up to that group and keep his cool. . . . There was an incredible venting of rage in that room, particularly from the young people, who really wanted Colby’s blood.” Sheehan and his wife, Susan, also a writer, speculated that Colby felt guilt over what he had been involved in, particularly the Phoenix program, and as a good Catholic was seeking redemptive punishment. Marcus Raskin, who, along with Barnet, had founded the Institute for Policy Studies, disagreed. “He’s a cold-blooded killer,” he told Sheehan. “Just look at those eyes.”11
In the end, Sheehan returned to his thought of Colby as the American Felix Dzerzhinsky, the notorious founder and first head of the Soviet intelligence apparatus. Anything was permissible as long as it was authorized by the “duly constituted authority.” Colby would not have disagreed with this last observation, but he would have pointed out that the duly constituted authorities he and Dzerzhinsky were serving were vastly different. And, in truth, Colby’s actions in the ensuing days were designed to affirm the rule of law and the intelligence community’s commitment to a liberal democratic system (in the United States, if not abroad), even above a White House determined to protect itself at all costs or a cold war against the Kremlin.
Chile continued to dominate headlines, columns, and editorials. The Christian Science Monitor in September 1974 accused the Agency of a double standard, acting against governments it did not like—usually left-leaning regimes such as Allende’s—but abiding and even aiding governments it did like—generally rightwing regimes such as those in Greece and South Korea. The question is, columnist Tom Wicker declared in the New York Times, whether an administration had “the constitutional authority to order taxpayers’ money spent for clandestine warfare against the legitimate government of a sovereign country.” Daniel Schorr, a reporter who had covered Watergate for CBS, launched his own investigation, which led to a two-part television documentary on Chile, Allende, and the CIA. At a news conference on September 16, President Ford affirmed that CIA activities in Chile had been authorized by the White House; a few days later, he and Kissinger briefed top congressional leaders on Tracks I and II. Congress was not appeased. It subsequently enacted the Hughes-Ryan Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, stipulating that no funds could be expended on a covert operation unless the president declared it vital to the national security and the activity was vetted in advance before no fewer than eight congressional committees.12
The day after Ford’s press conference, the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee recommended that perjury charges be brought against Richard Helms for testimony given during his confirmation hearings. The principal piece of evidence in any trial would be Colby’s testimony before the Nedzi Committee, subsequently made public by Harrington, as to the existence of Track II. The ball was in Colby’s court. The issue, he recalled, “was about as welcome on my desk as a cobra, and as hard to handle. . . . Helms was a totally loyal servant of his President and his intelligence profession had manfully tried to keep the secret he had been directed to keep.” But secrecy would not be possible. According to Colby, a “middle-grade officer” in the Agency, reacting to the Schlesinger-Colby directive that all “questionable” matters be reported, observed in a memo to the director that Helms might in fact have committed perjury and recommended an investigation. What Colby did not say in his memoirs was that the press would inevitably compare Colby’s and Helms’s testimonies and demand to know which one of them was lying. Colby’s reputation and that of his Agency were on the line. Here was that question again: Was the CIA solely an instrument of the White House, or was it part of the executive branch and subject to constitutional checks and balances?13
Implicitly acknowledging that he was a party to the dispute, Colby had the Agency’s inspector general put together a three-person panel to examine the record and submit a finding as to whether Helms had lied before a congressional committee. In the end, the panel could not decide, but advised the DCI that he was legally bound to turn the matter over to the Justice Department. Colby resisted; he recalled a 1954 “agreement” between the CIA and Justice to the effect that the Agency, and the Agency alone, would decide if and when any of its personnel—past or present—would be made available to the attorney general for prosecution. Both agencies had agreed that the overriding interest was national security, the need to cover trails from which intelligence sources and methods might be gleaned. If Colby stonewalled on this, the inspector general’s panel advised, the matter would surely leak to the press, and the CIA would be accused of a cover-up. Reluctantly, Colby made an appointment to see Acting Attorney General Laurence Silberman.
The DCI began the meeting by bringing up the 1954 arrangement. “Come on, Bill,” Silberman said. “You’re a lawyer. You know better than that. I don’t care what the past arrangements might have been. In this day and age, there’s no way in the world the CIA is going to be given the extralegal privilege of deciding unilaterally which of its employees should be prosecuted and who shouldn’t. . . . So come on now, let’s get down to cases. Who or what are you talking about?” The next day, Colby had the files on Track II and Helms’s testimony delivered to Justice. A year later, while he was ambassador to Iran, Helms pleaded “no contest” to a misdemeanor charge that he had misled Congress.14
Colby’s decision to turn the Helms matter over to the attorney general split the CIA. Helms’s followers—and they were still legion—viewed Colby’s decision to go to Justice as nothing less than a betrayal of a mentor and colleague, and more important, a betrayal of the culture of secrecy. While the case against Helms was still under internal Agency review, one Directorate of Plans officer had written, “This mongoloid baby should have been strangled in its cradle,” rather than being allowed to grow into “an irresponsible, uncontrolled and uncontrollable monster that threatens the integrity of the clandestine services.” Another, referring to Colby’s Catholicism, urged that the case be filed and forgotten, because it “has turned into a moralistic crusade to expiate our sins and exorcise the Satan from within the CIA corpus by sacrificing an as yet unknown number of officers.” One thing was certain: from that point on, Richard Helms was Colby’s sworn enemy, an enemy with influential friends.15
On the evening of February 1, 1975, journalist and former CIA officer Tom Braden hosted a dinner party. Among those present were Averell Harriman, Stuart Symington, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, and celebrity journalist Barbara Walters. According to another guest, columnist William Greider, the group had assembled “to cheer up an old friend, a comrade wounded by recent events.” The person in question was Richard Helms, whom Henry Kissinger pronounced an “honorable man.” Kissinger added a few words of rebuke for Colby, who was not there. Greider compared the two DCIs in an article written shortly thereafter: “When old colleagues describe Helms, he emerges as a man of deeper intellect, more flexible, more cynical, quite skilled at crossing the sliding sands of Washington’s bureaucratic struggles. Colby is more obvious, more straightforward and even moralistic, according to friends and non-friends. Helms is the urbanity of the Chevy Chase Club; Colby is the Boy Scouts in Springfield, Va, where he lives.” (Greider was incorrect on that point at least.)16
Colby later wrote that he had not only had no choice but was proud of what he had done. “I was persuaded [by the inspector general’s three-person panel] that I had no right to make a decision on this matter alone or to preempt a ruling by the proper authorities, whether the dangers to intelligence security would prevent prosecution or investigation in the case. And I am glad they did, requiring me to uphold my oath to the Constitution and really demonstrate that a new and American intelligence [community] had been born, not just talked about.” As Colby was to learn, the labor pains had just begun.17
Meanwhile, the ongoing Colby-Angleton feud had come to a head. A few months after the Yom Kippur War, the DCI had paid a visit to the Middle East. At Kissinger’s request, he had stayed away from East Jerusalem for fear of alienating the Arabs who disputed Israeli claims to the area. Privately, Angleton, who continued to view the Agency’s Middle East Division as pro-Arab, rebuked Colby for giving in to Kissinger.
In late August 1974, a counterintelligence officer submitted a report to the CIA’s security office in which an Agency informant fingered Angleton himself as a Soviet spy. According to the informant’s story, Golitsin was a Soviet agent who had been dispatched to act as Angleton’s case officer and to question the bona fides of subsequent Soviet defectors. Colby put together a panel under former deputy director Bronson Tweedy to investigate. Tweedy and his colleagues gave the counterintelligence chief a clean bill of health, but to Colby, the episode was just one more proof of the bizarre atmosphere that prevailed in the counterintelligence branch.18
On the morning of December 17, the DCI summoned Angleton to his office. He was relieving him of his duties both as Israeli liaison and chief of counterintelligence, he said. Colby offered Angleton “separate status” within the Agency, in which he could offer advice and act as a consultant, but without operational or policy control. Angleton protested—there was a “big fight,” he later told a friend. Colby told him to take a couple of days to think about it and dismissed him.19
The day following his encounter with Angleton, Colby received a call from Seymour Hersh. “I’ve got a story bigger than My Lai,” he told the DCI, adding that he needed to see him. Colby acceded and in the meeting that ensued, the reporter said he had uncovered a “massive effort” by the Agency to spy on the anti–Vietnam War movement, including wiretaps, break-ins, mail intercepts, and surveillances of American citizens. Colby later recalled that he was shocked but not surprised. Indeed, the call on December 18 was just the culmination of a drama that had begun two weeks earlier.
Hersh had telephoned Colby on December 9 to tell him he was working on a story on past illegal CIA operations within the United States. “I think if I crapped around long enough [on this] I could come up with a half-assed story,” he said. “I understand there is nothing [earth-shaking],” Hersh went on, that they were routine activities that were curtailed. Colby confided to Hersh that he had instructed his officers some months earlier to report any instances of such illegalities or questionable activities: “We sent out a memo to our people saying ‘If you hear anything tell us.’ We got a few blips.” Later that same day, Colby had informed House oversight committee chair Nedzi of the conversation, but Hersh, it seemed, had already called the congressman.20
A week later, on December 16, former deputy director for operations Tom Karamessines told Colby that he, too, had heard from Hersh, who claimed that he could prove that both Helms and Angleton had engaged in domestic operations in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which guaranteed citizens protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The next day, Deputy Director for Operations William Nelson phoned to tell his boss that Hersh had found out about the “family jewels” and was about to hang Angleton. On the afternoon of the 18th, following the first conversation of the day between Hersh and Colby, Hersh called again and left a phone message for the DCI: “I figure I have about one-tenth of one percent of the story which you and I talked about which is more than enough. . . . I want to write it this weekend. I am willing to trade with you. I will trade you Jim Angleton for fourteen files of my choice. I will be in my office at the Times in 30 minutes.”21 The story linking counterintelligence to Operation MH/Chaos would not only further embarrass the CIA but also lead to Angleton’s ouster. Colby, Hersh reasoned, must have understood that a disgruntled officer, forced out of the CIA in disgrace, would be more dangerous than one kept in-house under watch. This was particularly true of Angleton, who knew everything. From his point of view, Hersh must have seen an advantage in Angleton’s staying on; he could blackmail him over MH/Chaos for more Agency secrets. Apparently, the journalist was unaware that Colby hoped to get rid of Angleton.
In a conversation with Lucien Nedzi on December 19, Colby learned that Angleton had confirmed the existence of the family jewels to Hersh. “I talked with him [Hersh] a short time ago,” Nedzi said. “Who is Jim Angleton?”
“He is the head of our counterintelligence,” Colby replied. “He is kind of a legendary character. He has been around for 150 years or so. He is a very spooky guy. His reputation is one of total secrecy and no one knows what he is doing. . . . He is a little bit out of date in terms of seeing Soviets under every bush.”
“What is he doing talking to Hersh?” Nedzi asked.
“I didn’t think he was.”
“Sy showed me notes of what he said and claims he [Angleton] was drunk.”
“You catch me twelve hours ahead of an unpleasant chore of talking to him about a substantial change of his [Angleton’s] responsibilities.”
“The problem that occurs to me right now is here is a guy who is trying to expose the Agency, and all of a sudden he gets sacked.”
“Yes, I think what I’ll do is talk to Hersh[,] . . . but brace myself for whatever he does write and be prepared to answer whatever comes out. Meanwhile, I have to proceed on the Angleton thing anyway. I wanted to do it about six to eight months ago and was dissuaded out of human compassion.”22
The DCI later wrote that he had feelings of both trust and obligation toward Hersh. The journalist had gotten wind of the Glomar Explorer adventure early on, but after Colby implored him, he had sat on the story. Indeed, he was still sitting on the story. Jack Anderson’s broadcast on the secret mission to raise the Soviet sub, and Hersh’s follow-up article in the Times, would not appear until March 18 and 19, 1975. Colby must have decided that continued secrecy for the as-yet-to-be-revealed Project Azorian trumped confirming Hersh’s impending story about the CIA and domestic spying. The best he could do was to try to get Hersh to put his story in context. “Look, Sy,” Colby said during their December 20 meeting, “what you’re onto here are two very separate and distinct matters that you’ve gotten mixed up and distorted.”There was the effort at the behest of the White House to uncover foreign influence in the antiwar movement, but after none was discovered, the operation was terminated. Mail intercepts and surveillance of American citizens had to do with counterespionage against the Soviet Union. Overzealous agents may have overstepped the bounds of the Agency’s charter, but there had been no further incidents since Schlesinger’s orders of 1973, orders that had been reiterated by Colby after he became DCI.23
Later that same day, Colby called Angleton to his office and told him that Sy Hersh was going to go public with the Operation MH/Chaos story and that counterintelligence would be singled out. “This story is going to be tough to handle,” the DCI said. “We’ve talked about you leaving before. You will now leave, period.” Colby was not above a little turning of the knife: “I told him that no one in the world would believe his leaving his job was not the result of the article. But both Jim and I would know it was not, which was the important part to me.” Peter Wright, MI-6 liaison with the counterintelligence branch, was waiting for Angleton in the latter’s office. His face tinged with a gray-blue pallor when he returned, Angleton cried, “Peter, I’ve just been fired.”24
When the story broke, the press rushed to Angleton’s house in North Arlington. Daniel Schorr was first to ring the doorbell. “A groggy-looking man in pajamas opens the door,” Schorr later wrote of the encounter. The journalist asked to come in, and Angleton admitted him. “It looks like the home of a somewhat disorderly professor,” Schorr recalled, “books in many languages, memorabilia of Italy and Israel, a worn rug, pictures of wife and two sons. But no preparations for Christmas.” For the next four hours, Angleton rambled on about the fiction of a divided communist camp. Holding up a picture of Yasser Arafat at Lenin’s tomb, the former counterintelligence guru cited it as proof that the Palestinian leader was a KGB colonel. He then related the details of his firing.
Later that day, dressed in his black overcoat and fedora, Angleton emerged from his house to face the cameras and answer questions. He was so unsteady that he appeared drunk, Schorr wrote, but the journalist thought Angleton was shell-shocked rather than inebriated. Whatever the case, James Jesus Angleton would regain his balance. Bill Colby’s longtime adversary had become a bitter and dangerous enemy.25
Meanwhile, Colby knew that Hersh was going to publish a major story on the family jewels, but he did not know how extensive it would be. The reporter’s ability to acquire information was uncanny. On December 21, Larry Silberman called the DCI: the acting attorney general recalled that Hersh had told him that Colby was coming to see him, Silberman, about Helms’s possible perjury even before the meeting took place. “I am absolutely staggered that he knew that I was going to see you,” Colby said. “The SOB has sources that are absolutely beyond comparison.” Jenonne Walker, Colby’s assistant, later recalled that Hersh seemed to know more about the Agency’s secrets than she and Colby did.26
The headline in the New York Times morning edition for Sunday, December 22, read: “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.” The story described CIA activities undertaken in the course of MH/Chaos and cited various scholars on their legality or illegality. Hersh informed his readers that the contents of the story had been confirmed by a “high government official,” and that MH/Chaos had been lodged in counterintelligence.
Paul Colby later recalled that his dad had decided to spend that Sunday at home with the family. It was snowing, and father and son walked to the corner to get the Times from a vending machine. Bill opened the paper, read the front page, folded the paper, and carried on the rest of the day as if nothing had happened. Paul told the story to demonstrate his father’s calm under fire, but he may have had reason to be calm. The Hersh story had given him cover in his firing of Angleton, and it undercut to a degree Kissinger’s ongoing effort to get Colby and the CIA to take the fall for various misdeeds of the Nixon administration.27
In his memoir, Colby recalled that he did not immediately foresee the huge flap that the Hersh article would cause. The Agency had been the subject of negative headlines before, and the ensuing outcry had quickly died down. Taken in context, the CIA’s misdeeds were few and far between. If the Agency avoided the mistakes of the Watergate scandal—seeking to “distance” itself from the situation, thus arousing suspicion and eliciting charges of a cover-up—the crisis would pass. Colby decided to speak frankly and openly to Congress and the media (excluding sources and methods ) and reiterate that nothing akin to MH/Chaos was going on at present—indeed such things had been explicitly prohibited by the Agency’s leadership—and would not transpire in the future. And in fact, in the two or three days following publication of the Hersh article, the media hesitated. There were no substantive follow-up stories on Monday or Tuesday, and when Hersh published again it was largely to quote his own article: “A New York Times story reported . . . ”28
Hersh had won a Pulitzer for his story on My Lai, but he had an unsavory reputation. “Hersh’s technique is to wear down reluctant sources through tenacious pursuit by phone—often badgering, terrorizing, insulting,” wrote a colleague. “I don’t know of anyone other than Don Rickles who can be as disgustingly insulting, yet have the right touch for getting someone to respond.” He did not feel constrained, as did some of his colleagues, by concerns about national security. “He was at a seminar at the Naval War College,” CIA officer David Phillips recalled, “and one of the guys stood up and said, ‘Mr. Hersh, if it were wartime and you found out about a troop ship sailing out of New York, would you break that information?’ He said, ‘You bet.’ That’s Hersh.” Some suspected that the editorial board at the New York Times, having been repeatedly scooped by the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal, was making a mountain out of a molehill. There was certainly no question about the rivalry. Hersh, Times executive editor A. M. Rosenthal once said, “is like a puppy that isn’t quite housebroken, but as long as he’s pissing on [Washington Post editor] Ben Bradlee’s carpet, let him go.”29
For its part, the White House sensed the advent of a major scandal. In his memoir, Kissinger observed that the Hersh story had the effect of tossing “a burning match in a gasoline depot.” When Colby called the White House that Sunday afternoon, he could feel the heat. What the hell was going on? Deputy National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft asked. Was there more to come out? Another aide advised Colby to call the president, who was then on board Air Force One en route to a ski vacation at Vail, and fill him in. In due course, Colby had the White House operator put him through. As explicitly as he could over an unsecure circuit, the DCI attempted to bring Ford up to speed. “Mr. President,” he said, “on the story in the Times this morning I want to assure you that nothing comparable to the article’s allegations is going on in the Agency at this time.” The material in the Hersh article was a distortion, and “all misdeeds of the past had been corrected in 1973.” Ford thanked him and asked for a report. Upon landing at Vail, the president was besieged by reporters badgering him for comment on the Hersh article. He merely repeated what Colby had told him—that the Agency was not currently engaged in domestic spying or illegal activities of any other kind. He had asked Kissinger as his national security adviser to secure a report on the matter from the DCI.30
The White House was understandably stunned that this was the first it had heard of the “family jewels.” When asked about the omission later, Colby said, “I never really thought about it. . . . I think I didn’t think of it because Schlesinger was still in charge, and he didn’t think of it. I asked him about it one time and he said something to the effect that, ‘Oh, hell, with that bunch of characters down there.’ So it was almost as though he had made a decision not to brief them.”31 Once he was in the saddle, Colby declared, he kept treating the issue as an internal matter. That the thought of briefing the president’s men never crossed the DCI’s mind is doubtful. He was dealing initially with the Nixon White House, which was in the process of trying to shift the blame for Watergate to the CIA, and during both the Nixon and Ford administrations with a national security adviser who was determined to marginalize the Agency. Why give the enemy bullets with which to fire at you?
By December 24 Colby had his report ready. It hit the high points of Operation MH/Chaos and then noted that the break-ins, surveillance of US citizens, and electronic bugs cited in Hersh’s article had nothing to do with MH/Chaos. The report went on to describe those operations and attempted to justify them. “There are certain other matters in the history of the Agency which are subject to question,” Colby warned.32
The cover letter and report had to go to Kissinger first. As soon as he received a copy, the national security adviser/secretary of state summoned the DCI. Colby had heard through the grapevine that Kissinger had been extremely critical of him—“making caustic comments about me,” as Colby put it—for the previous two days. Kissinger was afraid of being linked to the Huston Plan for illegal spying on domestic “radicals” and to Allende’s overthrow in Chile. As soon as the Hersh story broke, he had contacted Helms in Tehran using a backchannel. “This is an issue that’s not going away,” Kissinger declared, and ordered Helms home from Iran to help with damage control. Both men were convinced that Colby was Hersh’s primary and only source.33
What else is there? Kissinger asked Colby. Colby handed him a document summarizing the family jewels. The CIA was linked to various assassination plots, especially the conspiracy to kill Castro, which also involved contacts with the Mafia. There were drug experiments on Americans, the Agency’s involvement in the Huston Plan, and Angleton’s imprisonment and torture of Yuri Nosenko. Kissinger thumbed through the report hurriedly, Colby recalled, but when he came to the section on assassinations, he stopped and read. Their meeting over, Kissinger hand-carried Colby’s report to Ford in Colorado. “I have discussed these activities [the ‘certain other matters’ mentioned in Colby’s cover letter] with him, and must tell you that some few of them clearly were illegal, while others—though not technically illegal—raise profound moral questions,” he memoed Ford. “A number, while neither illegal nor morally unsound, demonstrated very poor judgment.”34
Bill and Barbara had planned a family ski trip to Pennsylvania during the Christmas holidays, but in view of the emerging crisis over the Hersh article and the family jewels, Bill had opted to stay behind in Washington. He anticipated being summoned to Vail to be part of the team that was strategizing over damage control. What he hoped, he recalled in his memoir, was that the president would release his report verbatim—he had made sure that all of the material in it was declassified—and that it would stand as the administration’s defense. But that was not to be; nor was Colby to be included in the decisionmaking process. The two things were related.
In Vail, Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft, Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, his assistant, decided on a course of action. They considered doing as Colby wished, releasing the report and thus making it the White House’s own. But that would saddle the Ford administration with the sins of past administrations. The president and his advisers decided to name an “independent Blue Ribbon Panel” composed of distinguished Americans and chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to investigate past CIA misdeeds and recommend reforms.35
Meanwhile, Colby grew increasingly uneasy. “The silence from there [Vail] was deafening,” he later observed. The Ford administration was circling the wagons, and apparently he was to be left outside to deal with the hostiles by himself. “I felt very lonely,” he recalled. “I decided that if I would have to fight the problem out alone, I at least would be free to use my strategy to save intelligence and not have to defer to every tactical move concocted in the White House.”36
The die was cast.