Henry Kissinger’s and Bill Colby’s frames of reference and modi operandi could not have been more different. Kissinger, the academic turned diplomat, was secretive when he did not have to be, trusting only himself and a few subordinates. He was a master at deception, loved complexity for complexity’s sake, and cared little about legal or constitutional niceties. Kissinger was skilled at acquiring and exploiting the influence he gained through personal relationships and cultivation of the media. Philosophically, he was a conservative internationalist with a Metternichian commitment to realpolitik. Like Metternich, the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation, he tended to confuse stability with the status quo. Colby was relatively simple by contrast—not simple-minded, but straightforward—often to a fault. He preferred friendship and trust in acquiring assets rather than threats and blackmail. He loved the clandestine world and covert operations because of the opportunity they provided for creativity. Colby was a liberal internationalist with all of the missionary baggage that went with the philosophy.
Colby’s son John described his father’s mindset well: “Up to 1973, [he] was less an intelligence professional than a special ops, covert action kind of guy. Here’s a mission; go do it.” First it was the Nazis, then the communists. In Italy he knew what to do, what was right. In Vietnam, the situation was murkier, but he pressed ahead. The problems he faced as DCI were more complicated. “In each case,” John observed, “he looked at the situation, at his values and his perception of the national interest, and acted. If he believed in the value of intelligence and covert action—which he did all his life—then he was going to act to preserve it.”1
Protecting the national security when confronted by totalitarian regimes bent on world domination meant frequently choosing the lesser of two evils—the Ngo brothers and Thieu over Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Sukarno over the PKI in Indonesia, Pinochet over Allende in Chile. In a perfect world, it was the responsibility of Americans and others who enjoyed the blessings of constitutional government, the rule of law, and respect for individual rights to take action to prevent gross abuses of human rights. He would throughout his life speak out against ethnic cleansing, whether it involved Nazi crimes against the Jews and Gypsies or Serbian campaigns against Balkan Muslims. He spoke of “an international conscience” and the duty of the international community to take action “even by overstepping longstanding prohibitions against intervening in the offending nation’s ‘internal affairs.’” The notion of an “international conscience” was, of course, absolutely foreign to Henry Kissinger.2
In Honorable Men, Colby claimed that during the Christmas holidays, while he was cooling his heels at Langley, Larry Silberman called him in. The deputy attorney general, who had acted as a go-between for Colby with Hersh during the Glomar Explorer episode, said that he had read the original New York Times article. “What else have you boys got tucked away up your sleeves?” he is said to have asked the DCI. Colby told him what he had told the president. “Tell me, did you turn over that list [the family jewels] to the Justice Department?” Silberman asked. After Colby said no, Silberman advised him that in withholding information concerning possible illegal action, the DCI himself was open to prosecution for obstruction of justice.3
The meeting may or may not have taken place. What is certain is that on December 31, Colby and CIA general counsel John Warner paid a visit to Silberman’s office. According to Silberman, it was Colby who contacted him, not vice versa. Colby began by describing the management style of Richard Helms—based on “compartmentation”—comparing it to spokes on a wheel with Helms as the hub. Much had transpired in the Agency without the left hand knowing what the right was doing. Colby then summarized the “family jewels,” including Operation MH/Chaos and other activities mandated by Ehrlichman, Huston, and their underlings; the Nosenko imprisonment; various wiretaps and break-ins; “personal surveillances” of Jack Anderson and other journalists; the mail-intercept program; the testing of experimental drugs on unwitting persons; and the fact that the CIA had “plotted” the assassination of foreign leaders, including Castro, Trujillo, and Lumumba.4
By January 3, 1975, Ford, Kissinger, and their staffs were back from Vail and ready to move on the family jewels matter. By this point, the White House had in its collective hands a report from Silberman on his meeting with Colby. He informed the president that the Justice Department had not yet decided “whether any of the items are prosecutable or appropriate for prosecution.” The president should also be aware that as a result of another report from DCI Colby, former director Richard Helms might be indicted for perjury. Therefore, the White House should either avoid discussing possible CIA misdeeds with Helms or read him his rights if it did.5
At noon, President Ford, with Philip Buchen, counsel to the president, and Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger’s deputy, met with former DCI and now secretary of defense James Schlesinger to discuss strategy. Schlesinger endorsed the decision to distance the White House from the Colby report and to appoint a blue-ribbon panel to investigate possible CIA wrongdoing. At 5:30 P.M. it was finally Colby’s turn to meet with Ford, Scowcroft, and Buchen. “I think we have a 25-year-old institution which has done some things it shouldn’t have,” he began. He went over the charges in Hersh’s article and then discussed some others, but not all the items on the “skeletons list,” as he termed the family jewels. “We have run operations to assassinate foreign leaders,” he declared. “We have never succeeded.” Then, “A defector we suspected of being a double agent we kept confined for three years.” The president pressed him to say who approved the various shady operations. Some occurred under the leadership of Dulles and Mc-Cone, but most were during Helms’s watch and carried out by James Angleton and Richard Ober, the man in charge of Operation MH/Chaos, he said. Ford then instructed his DCI as to how the matter would be handled. First, the CIA would be told publicly to obey the law; second, the president would announce the formation of a panel of luminaries to investigate past misdeeds. And he would suggest that Congress establish a joint committee to carry out its own investigation. Meeting over.6
The following day found Kissinger in high dudgeon. “What is happening is worse than in the days of McCarthy,” he exclaimed to Ford and Scowcroft. “He [Colby] has turned over to the FBI the whole of his operation. Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg. If they come out, blood will flow. . . . What Colby has done is a disgrace.” It was his own blood that Kissinger was worried about. “The Chilean thing—that is not in any report,” he noted, but that was because Colby was going to use it to “blackmail” him. Should he fire the DCI? Ford asked. Not until the investigation was over, Kissinger said, and then the president should move in someone of “towering integrity.”7
Shortly afterward, Ford met with Helms, who had flown back from Tehran. The president assured him of his admiration. “I automatically assume what you did was right, unless it’s proved otherwise,” he told the man who kept the secrets. Helms declared that “a lot of dead cats will come out,” and if they did, he would sling some of his own. Still later in the day, Ford met with Rockefeller to discuss the makeup of the blue-ribbon panel. Kissinger, who had once advised Rockefeller when he was governor of New York and had benefited enormously from his patronage, was present at this meeting. “Colby has gone to Silberman not only with his report but with numerous other allegations,” Ford told Rockefeller. “At your request?” the latter asked. “Without my knowledge,” the president responded. “Colby must be brought under control,” Kissinger interjected.8
On January 6, the White House announced the formation of what became known as the Rockefeller Commission. The body included, in addition to the vice president, California governor Ronald Reagan; former secretary of commerce John T. Connor; retired army general Lyman Lemnitzer; Edgar F. Shannon Jr., a former president of the University of Virginia; former Treasury secretary Douglas Dillon; the AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland; and former solicitor general Erwin A. Griswold. Ford, who had served on the Warren Commission to investigate the circumstances surrounding JFK’s assassination, suggested David W. Belin, Warren’s assistant counsel, as executive director of the commission’s staff. It was a suggestion that he and Kissinger would live to regret.
The Rockefeller Commission’s charge was carefully drawn, its charter limited to probing the CIA’s alleged misdeeds in the domestic arena—Operation MH/Chaos, the mail-intercept program, and spying on journalists. Colby did not say so at the time, but he recognized that the Rockefeller Commission would not suffice. “The atmosphere in the nation had far too radically changed—in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate—for the Executive Branch to get away . . . with keeping the cloak-and-dagger world of intelligence strictly its own prerogative and affair,” he subsequently wrote.9
That President Ford seemed to be inept rather than Machiavellian did not lessen the general anxiety. Putting Rockefeller in charge of a body to investigate the CIA was just one of President Ford’s “latest blunders,” columnist Nick Thimmesch wrote in the Los Angeles Times. The vice president was just “too, too close” to Henry Kissinger, who might very well be implicated in the scandal. Those reservations were reflected in a public opinion poll. Forty-nine percent of the people surveyed by Louis Harris believed that an executive commission would be too influenced by the White House, compared with 35 percent who supported Ford’s action. Despite a reservoir of goodwill in Congress toward both Ford and Kissinger, the intelligence subcommittees of the Senate’s Armed Services and Appropriations Committees announced that they, too, would hold hearings on Hersh’s allegations against the Agency. Not to be outdone, the House announced it was launching its own probe. Over the course of the next year, Bill Colby would testify more than thirty-five times before various congressional bodies.10
As Colby recognized, the Ninety-fourth Congress, elected in 1974 in the wake of Richard Nixon’s resignation, was not about to give way before claims of executive privilege. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) termed the House and Senate that convened in January 1975 “probably the most dangerous Congress the country had ever known.” Ten new senators were elected, and the House counted seventy-five freshmen, with the Democrats enjoying comfortable majorities in both chambers. In the House, the insurgents unseated four elderly committee chairmen, including longtime CIA friend and overseer Edward Hebert of Armed Services. The members of “the fighting Ninety-fourth,” according to one observer, seemed “exultant in the muscle that they had used to bring a President down, willing and able to challenge the Executive as well as its own Congressional hierarchy, intense over morality in government [and] extremely sensitive to press and public pressures.”11
More significant, by 1975 the Cold War consensus that had dominated US foreign policy for a quarter century was beginning to break apart. Within the anti–Vietnam War movement, doves had questioned the assumptions underlying the conflict in Southeast Asia—the monolithic communist threat, the Munich analogy, the domino theory—which were also the assumptions that underlay the broader Cold War. Hawks remained unshaken in their belief in the existence of an “evil empire,” to anticipate a phrase made famous by a later president, but they began to recognize that there were limits on American power and to call for a more restrained foreign policy. Henry Kissinger seemed not to recognize the irony of his position. In urging détente, in engineering the openings to Beijing and Moscow, he, more than any other figure, had helped to undermine the Cold War consensus, thus making it politically possible to question the practicality and morality of institutions like the CIA.
In the wake of the publication of the Hersh article, Colby decided to attempt a preemptive strike that might head off a full-scale investigation. The senators before whom Colby had testified during his initial trip to Capitol Hill in January 1975 were comfortably familiar: Stennis, Symington, John McClellan of Arkansas, men who for years had listened to generalized reports delivered in executive session and then emerged not only to defend the CIA but to sing its praises. But these hoary-headed guardians of the nation’s security were also aware of the nation’s post-Watergate mood, and they asked Colby to give his testimony in open session. The DCI readily agreed. What he did was to lay before the committee and the public the report he had delivered to Ford on December 24. He saw it as a corrective to Hersh’s sensationalized story, a refutation of the notion that the CIA had initiated a “massive” campaign of domestic spying. But the media chose to view his testimony, including information that the CIA had indeed sent out undercover agents to infiltrate dissident groups and had collected files on close to ten thousand American citizens, as confirmation of Hersh’s story. The New York Times printed his statement verbatim beginning on the front page. The Washington Post and Newsweek noted that Colby had in fact confirmed much of what Hersh had reported. “On my way down from the Hill that afternoon,” Colby wrote in Honorable Men, “I realized that I had not told the White House what was coming in the press the next day, so I stopped there to give Scowcroft a copy of the statement the Committee had released.” Ford, Kissinger, and Helms continued to seethe.12
On January 27, 1975, the Senate voted 82–4 to establish the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield had intended to appoint Philip Hart chair, but had to look elsewhere after the Pennsylvanian was diagnosed with cancer. He turned finally to a man who had actively campaigned for the post, Frank Church of Idaho. Not to be outdone, the House reconstituted its Select Committee on Intelligence with Lucien Nedzi as its chair, but the House body was much more divided than its Senate counterpart. Consequently, it was the Church Committee that would initially be the focus of the struggle between Congress and the executive branch over the family jewels.
The White House was deeply distrustful of Frank Church, viewing him as a man who intended to ride the investigation of CIA abuses—real and imagined—into the Oval Office. In Washington, the Idaho Democrat had a reputation as a straight arrow—and perhaps more. His penchant for moralizing speeches and his shunning of the Georgetown cocktail circuit earned him the sobriquets “Frank Sunday School” and “Frank Cathedral.” Initially a strong supporter of the Cold War consensus, he—like Fulbright, McGovern, and others—had grown disillusioned during the Vietnam War. By 1966, he had emerged as one of the leading critics of the Indochinese conflict and a crusader on behalf of congressional prerogatives in foreign policy. Church, along with Fulbright, had led the way in demanding greater congressional oversight of the CIA.13
As soon as he learned of the Senate probe into the family jewels, Colby phoned Church and John Tower (R-TX), the ranking minority member, to offer his cooperation. He confided in his memoir that he had dreaded the process that would inevitably follow—the Agency’s secrets would be gradually revealed to the Church Committee and inevitably leaked to the press. He shuddered to think, he wrote, of “the sensations created by everybody and his brother engaging in cheap TV theatrics at the expense of the CIA’s secrets.” And then there were the politics of the matter. The White House did not seem to understand that the center of power had shifted in Washington. Gone was the time when those who investigated the national security state would be labeled unpatriotic and turned out of office. Colby was determined to reverse the growing tendency to portray US intelligence as unconstitutional and improper. If those myths took root, he observed, “we can make our own mistaken Aztec sacrifice—American intelligence—in the belief that only thus can the democratic sun of our free society rise.”14
On February 20, Schlesinger, Colby, and Silberman met with Kissinger to discuss how best to handle the looming inquiry. The national security adviser wanted to stonewall; it was especially dangerous to allow congressional investigators to delve into covert operations. “But we are doing so little in covert activities it is not too damaging,” Colby declared. “Then disclosing them will show us to the world as a cream puff,” Kissinger replied. Silberman backed Colby. Congress had the power of subpoena. The Justice Department had already announced that it was investigating possible illegal activity. Silberman, like David Belin of the Rockefeller Commission and Colby, thought that the White House was blowing the family jewels thing all out of proportion. For an intelligence agency of a major power that had functioned for twenty-five years at the height of the Cold War, the list of misdeeds was surprisingly mild, Colby again observed. Protect names and sources, ensure that America’s sister services were not dragged into the affair. It wasn’t going to be that simple, the stonewallers replied. Once the elephant got its nose under the tent . . . John Marsh, counselor to the president, subsequently told the CIA legislative liaison that the White House staff, “including the President,” was afraid that the congressional probes would result in the disclosure of the links between the Glomar Explorer operation and the Hughes Corporation, and between covert US activities in Cuba and Robert Maheu of the Hughes Corporation, as well as Maheu’s involvement in Watergate and the plots to kill Castro.15
Shortly thereafter, the White House attempted to co-opt the Justice Department. “Obviously, we need someone to corral this Silberman,” Marsh told Ford.16 “During the family jewels crisis,” the deputy attorney general later recalled, “the President and Rumsfeld called me to the White House three days in a row and tried to persuade me to take the position of assistant to the President for intelligence. It would be my responsibility to deal with the exploding bombs.” Each time he refused. On the third day, Ford said, “Would you at least talk to Henry?” The president was even weaker than he believed, Silberman thought at the time, but he went to see Kissinger. Kissinger pleaded with him:
“Colby is going to give away the store.”
“Would you take the job if you were me?” Silberman asked.
“I would if I trusted the President,” Kissinger said.
“Exactly,” said Silberman, and departed.17
In truth, Kissinger wanted to kill two birds with one stone. “Colby [is] . . . scared and out of control,” he told Ford. “You should consider Silberman for Colby,” he said. The president’s other advisers scotched that idea. Firing Colby just as the congressional probe was getting underway would surely evoke memories of Watergate.18
The second week in March, Colby established a mechanism within the Agency to screen requests for classified and unclassified documents. Walter N. Elder, a twenty-four-year CIA veteran, headed the Church Committee team, and Donald Gregg, who had worked for Colby in Vietnam, was in charge of the Nedzi group. To his credit, Colby listened to all comers when it came to ground rules for releasing sensitive material. “Many long-time professionals in the Agency were anything but happy with my approach,” he later observed. Angleton loyalists were for absolute secrecy. Helms’s partisans continued to insist that intelligence was the prerogative of the executive and the executive alone. Both groups recalled the Doolittle Report and the directives of the early 1950s, when the CIA had been called upon to fight the Soviets on their own terms. They invoked Allen Dulles, who had once observed that it was absurd to argue that the CIA should be constrained by international law “or domestic law for that matter.” Another group eschewed these extreme positions but argued that the Agency and the White House should contest each item requested by the congressional committees and that they be turned over only when there was no other option.19
Both George Carver and Deputy Director of Operations William Nelson, close colleagues of Colby, warned him that his commitment to openness was incompatible with the central mission of the Agency. “I believe it is almost impossible for the DCI to discuss operational matters including covert arrangements,” Nelson wrote to him in a memo, “without inviting headlines and stories which seriously degrade the fabric of our security and no matter what the original intent, lead inevitably to a further exposure of intelligence sources and methods by persons inside and outside the Agency who take their cue from the man directly charged with this responsibility.” Carver told his old friend from Vietnam days that he—Colby—was trying to educate people who did not understand the issues and who were not CIA’s friends anyway.20
Colby directed the CIA’s general counsel to employ a lawyer experienced in criminal and civil practice who could provide advice to any employee faced with questions of criminal liability. Some comfort! Langley’s denizens thought; the very fact that such a step was necessary was demoralizing. Most found the process of congressional investigation demeaning. Those in the Directorate of Operations “suffered the trauma of having total strangers from Congressional staffs ask for some of the Directorate’s innermost secrets,” Donald Gregg later recalled, “with the full expectation of receiving comprehensive replies. This experience ran counter to all that had been ingrained in Directorate personnel throughout their careers.” Still others resented that everyone was being tarred with the same brush. “People on the clandestine side would come to me and say, ‘How can I face my kids?’” Jenonne Walker remembered. “‘For years I have told them that these stories were not true. As a senior official in the Agency, I would know.’”21
“I could not and would not agree [with those who wanted him to relent],” Colby wrote in Honorable Men. The guidelines he released on March 4 divided materials into four categories. Unclassified material, which dealt primarily with historical, organizational, and budget data, would be given to the committee staffs freely and could be retained in their files. More sensitive data would be “sanitized,” that is, portions would be redacted, and rendered up. A third category would comprise material that could only be viewed by committee members and staff at Langley. Colby termed these “fondling” files. The last category, including 40 Committee documents and memoranda to the president, would not be revealed at all but used only to prepare briefs. At the same time, the DCI ordered Nelson to have his staff scour the records to ensure that there were no additional “surprises.”22
To some, Colby’s approach seemed reasonable under the circumstances, but not to the Agency diehards and the White House. David Atlee Phillips, a prominent operations officer who had played a large role in the Chilean affair, resigned in order to speak out publicly. On March 20, he and others formed the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers and launched a campaign to compel the CIA to keep its secrets. There were those who blamed Schlesinger. According to Ray Rocca, Angleton’s deputy and no friend of Colby’s, Schlesinger was guilty of “the most absurd act in completely losing his head in the ‘tell me everything’ matter of what became known as the ‘family jewels.’” According to former CIA officer Ray Cline, Schlesinger had ordered the original search that unearthed the CIA’s deepest secrets to “cover his ass. I’ve always seen this experience of Colby’s as something of a Greek fate overcoming Bill, because, when he became DCI he couldn’t get out from under, and because this caused him to run afoul of Dick Helms—who represented an entirely different world and a different time.”23
Whatever the division of opinion within the Agency, Kissinger, Ford, and their staffs viewed Colby’s guidelines as nothing less than a betrayal. “Bill Colby got off the reservation,” Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger’s factotum as deputy national security adviser, declared. “He wanted to open the files and I said no. These are executive files.” Scowcroft told the DCI to respond only to specific requests for specific documents, an old catch-22 stratagem that had worked many times in the past. “What he did was to allow the committee staff to come down and look at the files and then go back and request specific documents they had seen and could identify. It defeated the whole purpose.”24
While Colby and the Ford White House sparred over tactics for dealing with current and future congressional investigations, the issue of CIA involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders—long rumored—hit the front pages. On September 16, 1975, the president had granted an off-the-record interview to the editorial board of the New York Times. During lunch at the White House, the journalists observed that the composition of the blue-ribbon panel raised questions as to its credibility. The members had been carefully chosen, the president retorted, because if it was not careful, the Rockefeller panel would trip over matters—a “cesspool,” Ford termed it—that might ruin America’s image around the world. Like what? they asked. Like assassinations. Stunned, the Times people pleaded with the president to allow them to go on the record. Ford refused, but within days rumors began to circulate.25 Daniel Schorr, who had termed the flap over the Hersh article “Son of Watergate,” got wind of Ford’s admission to the Times editors and arranged an interview with Colby. After a half-hour chitchat about Watergate, E. Howard Hunt, and other matters, Schorr asked, “Has the CIA ever killed anybody?” Colby recalled that he was completely taken off guard. He did not know how specific the president had been.
“Not in this country,” the DCI replied.
“Who?”
“I can’t talk about it.”26
Colby then volunteered the information that assassination plots had been banned since 1973 when they were uncovered by the inspector general and that the whole matter had been kept from President Ford.27 When Schorr subsequently published the meat of the interview, Kissinger and Helms cringed. Colby’s response implied that the CIA had in fact conducted assassination operations against foreign citizens.
The evening following his interview with Colby at the director’s Langley office, Daniel Schorr appeared in the middle of the CBS Evening News broadcast. He told viewers that President Ford had “reportedly warned associates that if current investigations go too far, they could uncover several assassinations of foreign officials in which the CIA was involved.” He concluded with a delicious irony. “Colby is on the record saying, ‘I think that family skeletons are best left where they are, in the closet.’ He apparently had some literal skeletons in mind.” “There was no stopping the press or Congress now,” Colby later wrote in Honorable Men. “A hysteria seized Washington: sensation came to rule the day.” “Abolish the CIA!” editorialized A. J. Langguth in Newsweek. Jim Garrison, that conspiracy theorist of yesteryear, emerged from the sidelines to pitch in. “John Kennedy, the murder of Robert Kennedy, the murder of Martin Luther King. . . . Each of them bears consistent earmarks of the involvement of government intelligence operations,” he told the Washington Star.28