After the fall of South Vietnam, a return to the “family jewels” crisis was almost a relief for DCI Colby. There was another good fight to be fought. The reputation and perhaps the very existence of the Agency to which he had devoted his life were in peril. If he had not been able to save South Vietnam, he could save the Agency. At least, the DCI believed, there was a chance. To succeed, however, Colby was going to have to change the very culture of intelligence in the United States and overcome powerful opposition from within the intelligence community as well as the White House.
All of Henry Kissinger’s worst fears were coming to pass in the late spring and early summer of 1975. There was not only the fall of Saigon and the accompanying humiliation, but the damned mess with the CIA to dog him. Both situations were undermining America’s position in the world. A growing segment of the international community now saw the United States as the evil empire or a laughingstock—or both. And then there was always his personal reputation to worry about. Not only was there the Track II Chilean thing, but Kissinger had chaired the 40 Committee since he had come on board as national security adviser in 1969. Every covert operation initiated by the CIA since then had been undertaken with his personal approval. Perhaps his former patron, Nelson Rockefeller, could staunch the flow of damaging information. He tried in his own way to do just that. After one of Colby’s appearances before the Rockefeller Commission, the vice president drew Colby aside. “Bill,” he said, “do you really have to present all this material to us? We realize that there are secrets that you fellows need to keep.” Not surprisingly, Rockefeller wanted nothing to do with the assassinations issue—but others with presidential ambitions, including President Ford and commission member Ronald Reagan, insisted on pursuing the matter. And so it was that the White House announced that the blue-ribbon panel’s mandate was being extended two months so it could look into alleged plots to kill foreign leaders.1
David Belin, the Rockefeller Commission’s executive director, took the commission’s new charge seriously. He immediately requested all pertinent documents from the CIA, no matter how sensitive. Colby resisted. He could see no good whatsoever coming from this line of inquiry, he said. It would not matter that the CIA had never assassinated a foreign leader; it was clearly implicated in at least one plot—against Castro—and revelations concerning Mongoose would be enough to destroy the good name of not only the Agency but the United States. But he protested in vain. The commission, he was told, was part of the executive branch, and thus there was no reason to withhold anything from it, including information about sources and methods. Belin and his staff duly uncovered the Agency’s involvement with Operation Mongoose, including attempts to enlist the Mafia, its connection to the deaths of Patrice Lumumba and Rafael Trujillo in 1961, and the abortive coup against President Sukarno of Indonesia in 1958. In April, Helms, called back once again from Tehran, testified before the commission in closed session for more than four hours. Exiting the committee room, he spotted Daniel Schorr, who had reported extensively on the assassination allegations, loitering with other reporters. “You son-of-a-bitch!” he yelled. “You killer! You cocksucker! Killer Schorr! That’s what they should call you.” On May 20, news of the plot against Castro and the Mafia connection hit the front pages.2
Belin and his staff had completed their work by the first week in June. Their draft report included an eighty-six-page section on CIA schemes to eliminate foreign leaders. “President Ford has firmly announced that assassination is not and should never be a tool of United States policy,” read its conclusion. But that section would not see the light of day for some time.3
On June 5, the White House discussed what in the Rockefeller Commission report should be released and what should not. Belin and his staff pushed strongly for inclusion of the assassination material: “The omission of these findings will be viewed as a cover-up and will cast doubt upon the rest of the report.” But Kissinger was adamant in his opposition to any mention in the report of plans to kill foreign leaders. A presidential commission admitting to assassination plots would be a disaster for US foreign policy, he declared. “Not since I have been here,” he said, “has there been anything even thought of. There was the killing of the Chilean Chief of Staff, but we had dissociated from that group when we heard they were plotting to kidnap him.” The assassinations were a “phenomenon of the Kennedys,” he asserted, and advised Ford to “cover-up a little for Kennedy.” Ford was persuaded. “I am not going to second guess my predecessors,” he declared. “If Church wants to, let him. The Kennedys will get him.”4
The report of the Rockefeller Commission was released on June 10. To the surprise of many observers, it was not a whitewash. The Times editorial board called the report “a trenchant, factual and plain-spoken document.” “The Rockefeller Report is in,” declared Newsweek, “and [it] found the agency guilty of nearly every serious allegation against it.” There was nothing, however, on assassinations. “The Commission staff began the required inquiry,” the document said, “but time did not permit a full investigation before this report was due.” At a press conference the day before the release, President Ford announced that he was ordering all of the commission’s assassination materials turned over to the Church Committee.5
Perhaps the most sensational family jewel exposed by the Rockefeller Commission was that concerning the drug experiments the CIA had conducted on individuals without their knowledge or permission in the 1950s. On July 17, a week after the commission issued its report, the surviving family of Dr. Frank Olson notified Colby that it was filing a wrongful-death suit against the Agency. Olson, a biochemist, had been a civilian employee of the US Army working on a cooperative effort with the CIA at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The task assigned to the team was to investigate the effects of mind-altering drugs on human behavior. On November 19, 1953, CIA personnel slipped a large dose of LSD into the drinks of Olson and other members of the group without their knowledge. By the time he was informed some twenty minutes later, Olson was hallucinating—experiencing “side-effects,” as the CIA report on the matter termed them. He was rushed to New York for treatment by Dr. Harold Abramson, “a consultant to the agency on drug-related matters.” Abramson prescribed hospitalization, but before Olson could be admitted, the terrified biochemist crashed through the closed window of his upper-floor hotel room and plunged to his death.
The CIA general counsel subsequently ruled that Olson had died from “circumstances arising out of an experiment undertaken in the course of his official duties for the U.S. Government.” From 1953 through 1975, the family received survivor’s benefits, but his family was never told the truth concerning his death. Colby recalled that he knew of a fatality connected to the drug research program, but he was “shocked and shamed” to learn of the circumstances. President Ford met with the family at the White House and issued a public apology. Colby followed suit and at the president’s direction had the CIA’s lawyers settle the family’s claims. The press pounced on the story.6
In the early summer of 1975, in anticipation of his private confrontation with the White House over whether to cooperate with Congress, as well as his public one with the Church and Nedzi Committees over which CIA activities should be kept secret and which should not, Colby hired a personal lawyer. His choice was inspired—Mitchell Rogovin of the powerhouse Arnold and Porter law firm in Washington. The genius of the selection was that Rogovin had made his name as a civil liberties lawyer; for the previous twenty-five years, he had waged an almost constant war against the political establishment. A good friend of journalist Seymour Hersh, Rogovin had helped Common Cause successfully sue the Committee to Reelect the President, forcing the disclosure of Richard Nixon’s campaign financing schemes. When John Warner, CIA’s chief counsel, contacted Rogovin, he was representing the Institute for Policy Studies in its suit against former Nixon administration officials, including Kissinger, for wiretapping. Larry Silberman, whom Colby consulted, thoroughly approved: “Bill wanted a Democratic lawyer. He was a savvy operator.” Rogovin was struck with Colby’s sincerity; it seemed to him that the DCI was battling a corrupt political establishment, that Colby genuinely wanted an intelligence agency that conformed to the Constitution and obeyed the law. Throughout the summer and fall, the short, stocky forty-four-year-old attorney would be constantly at the DCI’s side, advising him and mediating between him and committee staffs.7
On May 13, 1975, Kissinger and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger met with Colby to set the ground rules for dealing with the Church Committee. Kissinger quoted Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson: “The golden word of intelligence is silence. More can be lost by saying too much, too soon, than by saying too little, too slowly.” In regard to past covert actions, the DCI should brief Church and Tower only in order to get them to appreciate the extreme sensitivity of much of the information. The purpose of this initial limited briefing “will be to induce the Chairman and Ranking Minority Member to impose limitations on the further investigation of the subjects covered.”The national security adviser seemed oblivious to the fact that most of the cat was already out of the bag.8
Colby made his first appearance before the Church Committee on May 21. “All the questions were on assassination and it was like ‘when did you stop beating your wife,’” he subsequently reported to the White House. He tried to put covert action in historical context, he said, and pointed out how little the Agency had been involved in would-be assassinations. He had pressed the committee to acknowledge “the delicacy of the problem,” but had had no luck. One of the members had asked Colby if the Agency killed its own, referring to the Green Beret incident in Vietnam in which a double agent had been murdered in cold blood. No, the DCI had replied, noting that President Ford had given strict orders to the federal government to have nothing to do with assassinations. Church had wound up the proceedings by observing that what was needed was a law prohibiting the killing of foreign leaders in peacetime. Those in the Oval Office were stunned. “It is an act of insanity and national humiliation,” Kissinger interjected during a meeting with Scowcroft and Schlesinger, “to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassinations.”9
As the Church Committee hearings got underway, the CIA’s reputation was approaching its nadir. A 1975 Gallup Poll registered an approval rating for the Agency of only 14 percent. Among college students, who constituted the Agency’s prime recruiting pool, the figure stood at 7 percent.10 But the US Senate was far from unanimous in its views on America’s spies and their handlers. There were conservatives on both sides of the congressional aisle, such as Barry Goldwater and John Stennis, who continued to see the CIA as one of the nation’s primary weapons in the ongoing struggle against international communism. Once they recognized that both Democratic and Republican presidents would be tarred with the assassination brush, mainstream politicians like Howard Baker (R-TN) and Church himself began to advocate restraint.
In addition, many of the most strident antiwar activists—those who had previously denounced the CIA as an instrument of the imperial presidency—were enthusiastic supporters of détente. Some, such as J. William Fulbright, had been captivated by Henry Kissinger and the openings to Moscow and Beijing. The two men developed what Fulbright thought was a personal as well as a professional relationship. Early on, Kissinger had cultivated the Foreign Relations Committee chair by showing deference to his views and appearing to confide in him. Thus it was that Fulbright, the author of The Arrogance of Power, published a 1975 article in the Columbia Journalism Review urging journalists to abandon what he called their “inquisition psychology.” What the American people required, he wrote, was “restored stability and confidence.” The accusations against the CIA might be true, “but I have come to feel of late that these are not the kind of truths we most need now,” he added.11
In contrast to the Senate, the House was not interested in reform but rather sought a “thorough housecleaning” of agencies that had violated the law. The House Select Committee on Intelligence (different from the permanent subcommittee that Lucien Nedzi chaired) included five harsh critics of the CIA, including the ubiquitous Michael Harrington, three hardline defenders, and only one moderate. House Speaker Carl Albert named as chairman of the committee Otis Pike, a conservative Democrat and longtime representative of his Long Island district. Rather than being sanctimonious like Church, Pike was irreverent; he was also abrasive and confrontational. There was in him, however, a genuine concern that over the years Congress had gradually ceded its prerogatives to the executive branch, thus making abuses such as Watergate possible. Under his leadership, the House committee decided to focus on the answers to three questions: How much did the intelligence community cost the taxpayer? How effective was it? And what risks did its activities pose to the constitutional and political health of the country? Colby would view the Pike Committee with deep suspicion, sensing, as he later wrote, that the majority was determined to do a “hatchet job on the Agency.”12
Harrington and Pike were not the only openly hostile House members that Colby had to deal with. Twice, on March 5 and then again on June 25, the DCI was called before the Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights, chaired by the flamboyant and iconoclastic congresswoman from New York, Bella Abzug. Abzug had discovered that the CIA had included her name in its reports from Paris about visitors to the Vietnamese communist delegation, and she was furious. Colby had to endure a “day-long tongue-lashing,” he later recalled, but kept his composure and held his ground. At one point he told Abzug “that if she visited such people abroad [North Vietnamese], such enemies of the United States, there was no way that I was going to keep her name out of our records.” When Abzug declared at the second session that she had the right to call and compel testimony from anyone she chose, Colby quietly responded that she did not, and he would fight any effort to compromise the Agency’s sources and methods.13
During the summer and fall of 1975, the DCI was forced to visit the Hill several times a week to testify. His colleagues marveled at his equanimity. “He looked like he had just been home for lunch and a nap,” Deputy Director Vernon Walters remarked after one particularly contentious session. “Bill Colby could be doing a talk show on television with a mad dog chewing his leg off under the table and you would never know it,” remarked longtime friend Stan Temko. In a 1976 interview with Colby, Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci asked, “What could shake your icy imperturbability? You never do show your emotions, do you?”
“I am not emotional,” he replied. “I admit it. Just a few things bother me. For instance . . . when I was nominated and some people put posters around Washington. . . . They called me a murderer. And my children had to live with that. But it didn’t really bother me. Oh, don’t watch me like that. You’re looking for something underneath which isn’t there. It’s all here on the surface, believe me.”14
While the House tried to get itself in order, the Church Committee honed in on the assassination issue. It was the most sensational of the family jewels and the one most certain to garner headlines day after day. But the members of the committee immediately sensed a minefield. Both Democratic and Republican administrations were implicated. Idealists worried that the public’s faith in the presidency and the federal government in general—already weakened by Vietnam and Watergate—would be further eroded. The simplest thing to do was to blame the Agency rather than the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon White Houses.
The concept of plausible deniability proved convenient to the task. This was a catch-22 that allowed the leaders of the intelligence community to shield political leaders from potentially embarrassing operations. Plausible deniability was one of the reasons why Eisenhower had set up the 5412 Group in 1955. That body, which morphed into the 303 Committee and then the 40 Committee in 1970, served the purpose of preserving the president’s deniability while maintaining some White House control over Agency operations.15 In this regard, there was a telling exchange between Republican senator Charles Mathias of Maryland and Richard Helms during the latter’s testimony before the Church Committee:
“Let me draw an example from history,” Mathias offered. “When Thomas Becket was proving to be an annoyance, as Castro, the King said who will rid me of this man. He didn’t say to somebody, go out and murder him.”
“That is a warming reference to the problem,” Helms replied.
“You feel that spans the generations and the centuries?”
“I think it does, sir. . . . I think that any of us would have found it very difficult to discuss assassinations with a President of the U.S. . . . We all had the feeling that we’re hired to keep those things out of the Oval Office.”16
Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, and Eisenhower after the downing of the U-2, had refused to hide behind plausible deniability—to the detriment of US foreign policy, some critics said. In his testimony before the Church Committee, Colby took the position that the CIA was and always had been an instrument of the president. He claimed that he had always been opposed to plausible denial and observed that it had become “outmoded and contentious in today’s environment.” Church and his colleagues took the easy way out, however. Following one meeting, Church told the press that the committee had not found any evidence “that would directly link the CIA involvement in this kind of activity with the President of the United States.” The CIA, he subsequently observed, could be compared to a “rogue elephant on a rampage.”17
On June 19, the night before he was to testify before the Church Committee, Sam Giancana, the Mafia figure who had been linked to the CIA plot to assassinate Castro, was murdered. The press went berserk. Senator John Tower (R-TX), who presided over hearings on the 20th, declared: “The committee, of course, notes with interest that Mr. Giancana was done away with.” Colby, who testified later in the day on Phoenix, was cornered by reporters as he left the Capitol building and forced to deny that the CIA had anything to do with the former Mafia boss’s murder.18
In contrast to its Senate counterpart, the Pike Committee was determined to trace CIA wrongdoings directly to the White House and to force a constitutional confrontation if the executive branch did not agree to give up all its secrets to Congress. Though a Democrat, Pike, a World War II bomber pilot and supporter of the Vietnam War, was not a liberal in the George McGovern–Michael Harrington vein. Like Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC), he was genuinely concerned with constitutional issues, such as separation of powers and checks and balances. He believed that Congress had failed in its duty to hold the White House accountable for its actions. As the House investigation began, Pike made no secret of the fact that he was convinced that the CIA had committed misdeeds and blunders that it was trying to cover up, and that the cover-up was being aided and abetted by the White House.
In his usual “come, let us reason together” mode, Colby called Pike and set up a meeting to work out ground rules for the upcoming investigation. The DCI quickly learned that, unlike Church and Rockefeller, Pike was not interested in compromise. The CIA had no right to withhold any document from the committee, he informed Colby. He refused to accept a classification system or to compel his staff to sign secrecy agreements. The chairman subsequently told a staff member: “Don’t bring back anything the agencies want you to have; just get what they don’t want you to have.” A few days after their meeting, Pike wrote the DCI a sarcastic letter: “It’s a delight to receive two letters from you not stamped ‘Secret’ on every page. . . . You are concerned with the concept of ‘need to know’ and I am concerned with the concept of ‘right to know.’” Representative James Johnson (R-CO) set the tone for the relationship between the committee and the Agency when he told Seymour Bolten, chief of the CIA’s Review Staff (the team Colby had assembled to decide which documents should be provided to Congress), “You, the CIA, are the enemy.” Colby was appalled, particularly because he viewed the committee staff as a “ragtag” collection of “immature and publicity-seeking . . . children.” Deputy Director for Intelligence Edward Proctor recalled that “a Pike committee staffer came to my office to interview me. She had on blue jeans that had been cut off at the calf and shredded, and she was barefoot.” A more neutral observer, Church Committee counsel F.A.O. Schwarz Jr., observed that the Pike staff thought “they alone possessed virtue. They were all true believers.” Colby feared that the Pike Committee would sensationalize at every opportunity and leak like a sieve. His fears were soon borne out.19
To help it prepare for hearings, Langley supplied Pike and his colleagues with a document listing the family jewels. The staff quickly began searching the document for gems that had not already been mined. A nugget, if not a jewel, soon appeared. One of the staffers discovered that over the years the Agency had detailed officers to various other bureaus and departments to act as liaisons. The sole object, Colby wrote in his memoir, was to enable the CIA to learn the ways of sister bureaucracies in order to better cooperate with them. Every agency head was aware of the officer’s mission and identity, he claimed. Nevertheless, in 1973, Colby had issued an order terminating the liaison structure because, in a few “questionable” instances, the officers’ activities “could be construed as involving the Agency in domestic activity [spying].” The wording of Colby’s directive was unfortunate: the CIA “will not develop operations to penetrate another government agency, even with the approval of its leadership.”20
On July 9, Searle Fields, staff director of the Pike Committee, sent a memo to committee members saying that the CIA had infiltrated other federal agencies, including the White House. The memo was immediately leaked to ABC News. Shortly thereafter, Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, a CIA contract officer who had soured on the Agency, called reporter Daniel Schorr. The CIA had had a man in the Nixon White House, and he knew who he was: Alexander Butterfield. Schorr could hardly believe his ears—and his good luck. Butterfield was the man who had ratted out the Nixon White House on the existence of a secret taping system. His mind, Schorr later recalled, leaped back “to all the hints and rumors that the CIA pulled the plug on Nixon.”21
On July 11, Bruce Morton and Schorr interviewed Prouty on the CBS Morning News. Prouty fingered Butterfield as the CIA’s man in the White House and expressed the opinion that neither Nixon nor any of his aides knew his true mission, something that former White House aide Charles Colson subsequently affirmed. The program aired an interview with Colby, taped earlier, in which he declared: “I say that’s outrageous and vicious nonsense. The CIA has never done anything with respect to the White House that’s not known to the White House.” Butterfield, who subsequently denied the allegation, might or might not have been the Agency’s spy in the White House, but the CIA had penetrated the federal bureaucracy at a number of levels. Mole hunter Jim Angleton had spies everywhere. That fact was what lay behind Colby’s 1973 decree terminating the liaison structure.22
The Pike Committee began its hearings by summoning budget director James Lynn in an attempt to uncover the CIA’s money trail. Pike read Article 1, section 8, of the Constitution, which states, “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law and a regular statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.” Lynn stonewalled. Pike did not get any numbers, but the committee revealed that the General Accounting Office (GAO)—the independent arm of Congress that audits government agencies—had not been permitted to examine the CIA’s books since 1962.23
When the misuse of taxpayer money issue did not strike a responsive chord with the media and the public, Pike and his colleagues moved on to more promising ground, namely, that the CIA was incompetent—that is, not only did the public not know how much it was spending on intelligence, but it wasn’t getting much for its money. First up was the Yom Kippur War. There had already been reports that Langley’s warriors had missed the boat badly, but Pike wanted to prove it. The committee subpoenaed a twenty-five-page internal postmortem prepared by the CIA. The retrospective was brutally frank—the Agency was not at all above learning from its mistakes—noting that intelligence on the crisis was “quite simply, obviously, and starkly wrong.” To reveal the full extent of Agency incompetence, the committee wanted to make public the entire six-page summary of the report. The CIA, in turn, insisted that five paragraphs of the document be kept secret.24
The battle was joined at a committee meeting on the afternoon of September 11. Mitchell Rogovin represented the Agency. In an increasingly heated exchange, the staff insisted that Colby had ordered the five paragraphs struck not to protect sources and methods but to shield the Agency from further embarrassment. Repeatedly, Rogovin excused himself to phone Colby to ask for guidance. Time after time the DCI gave way, but he finally dug in his heels over four words—“and greater communications security.” The words, referring to enhanced procedures to protect Egyptian military and diplomatic communications traffic, were part of the CIA station’s report on the impending crisis in the Middle East; they implied that the Agency had the ability to monitor encrypted Egyptian traffic and, in fact, was doing so.25
Pike viewed the words not as a threat to sources and methods but as proof of how badly the Agency had blundered. America’s spies were able to read Egypt’s secret communications and still had not been able to predict the war. (President Anwar Sadat’s regime knew of or suspected US surveillance and had sent misleading messages.) During a press conference at Langley shortly after the committee meeting, Colby explained why the seemingly innocuous words were potentially harmful to US interests. “Very expert analysts go over it,” he said, referring to materials made public by congressional committees. “They examine their own machinery to see if there are chinks in the armor and whether there are gaps in their ability to keep secrets that they want to keep secret.”26
As sources within the intelligence community would subsequently tell the New York Times, the Soviets and the Egyptians already knew about US spy capabilities. Indeed, Kissinger, in a very flattering biography written by Marvin and Bernard Kalb, had revealed that he had chosen to confide in the Soviets. Rogovin later reflected on Colby’s reasoning: “Well, maybe those four words aren’t that important, but if they disregard us on this, they’ll disregard us on four other words.” Disregard the administration is exactly what the Pike Committee did. Following a 6-to-3 vote, the chairman called a press conference to give a play-by-play account of the battle and then, over the formal protests of Rogovin and Assistant Attorney General Rex Lee, read the entire six-page report summary, including the four forbidden words, into the Congressional Record. “Obviously, we had reached a critical moment in the investigations,” Colby wrote in Honorable Men.27
President Ford convened an emergency meeting at the White House to discuss the executive branch’s response to the Pike Committee’s challenge. He agreed that it wasn’t so much the significance of the four words but the challenge inherent in the decision to release them. “For the committee to flatly ignore my protest and release what I regarded as legitimate secrets placed all our classified material and sensitive information at hazard,” Colby later observed. Kissinger demanded a confrontation, insisting that no more classified material be turned over to the House committee and that everything of a sensitive nature that had been delivered be taken back. Schlesinger and Brent Scowcroft supported him. Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and White House counsel John Marsh, both of whom had been congressmen, blanched at the prospect of a no-holds-barred showdown. How were documents already in the committee’s hands to be recovered—through a contest of arms between the House sergeant at arms and a group of CIA operatives? “I was certainly with the ‘doves,’” Colby later recalled, “holding that the committees should be given the material they requested with the exception of those that revealed the identities of our officers and agents, our relations with foreign intelligence services, and particularly sensitive technological data.” The hardliners prevailed. “Bill, you know what you do when you go up to the Hill?” Kissinger cracked. “You go to confession.”28
The morning following the gathering at the White House, Rex Lee arrived at the committee’s public meeting to drop a bombshell. Until Chairman Pike promised that he would never again release classified information without permission, the executive branch would withhold classified documents. Moreover, the president would prohibit officials of the executive branch from testifying, and he had ordered that all sensitive materials be returned by the committee. Pike responded with righteous indignation. Sources and methods indeed! The issue was, “Shall Congress be a coequal branch of the Government?” It was secrecy versus democracy. Apparently, Pike declared, the CIA “would simply prefer that we operated in a dictatorship where only one branch of the Government has any power over secrecy.” House members, disgusted with congressional pusillanimity during Vietnam and Watergate, temporarily rallied to the flag.29
Meanwhile, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue an appointed president was being urged to prevent any further erosion of executive power. “The House’s action in releasing classified information over the protests of the executive,” Kissinger wrote in a memo to Jack Marsh, “constitutes a challenge to the President’s constitutional responsibility to conduct foreign affairs and protect the national security of the United States.” Ford declared that he would ignore any subpoenas issued by the House for classified material. Pike retorted that, in that case, Congress would take the president to court. The New York Times declared the dispute “the most serious constitutional confrontation between the legislative and executive branches since the Watergate scandal.”30
On Monday morning, September 29, the Pike Committee received a box of documents it had subpoenaed—the first such delivery since the committee had released the now-famous four words. To Pike’s disgust, the Agency had heavily redacted the material and indicated that it would continue to censor such documents in the future. The committee then voted 10–3 to ask the House to cite Colby for contempt. “My sense of isolation, of being out on a limb all on my own, was rapidly growing,” Colby wrote in Honorable Men. Morale at the Agency continued to deteriorate. Virtually all senior-level officials resented the congressional investigations, though for different reasons. Some were critical of the DCI for allegedly betraying Helms and breaking the Agency’s code of secrets; others defended Colby, taking the position that he had had no choice in the matter and was being unfairly blamed for the sins of others. Regardless of their opinion of Colby, all of the Agency officials were offended not only by the Pike Committee but also by the irresponsible coverage by some media outlets. Colby was able to take some comfort from a blurb that Daniel Schorr read on the CBS Evening News: “Congress has its responsibilities, but Colby has his and he’s prepared to take his chances. So, welcome Bill Colby to the club of potential jailbirds for principle!” But, surprisingly enough, it was aid and comfort—albeit indirectly—from another source—Henry Kissinger—that saved the DCI from a contempt citation.31
In line with its ongoing effort to prove CIA incompetence, the Pike Committee launched an investigation into the Greek-Turkish crisis that had temporarily gripped the world in the summer of 1974. In the course of the investigation, staff members learned of a memo written by Thomas Boyatt, the head of the State Department’s Cyprus desk, critical of the intelligence he had received prior to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Subsequently fired from his post, Boyatt considered himself a whistle-blower and offered to help the committee. But on September 25, Lawrence Eagleburger, a Kissinger protégé and assistant secretary of state, appeared before Pike and his colleagues and informed them that the State Department would bar its personnel from testifying on policy matters and that no documents pertaining to Boyatt and the Cyprus crisis would be released to Congress. When Pike protested, Eagleburger compared the committee’s demand for the Boyatt memo to the tactics employed by Senator Joe McCarthy during the Second Red Scare. Kissinger had ratcheted the confrontation between Congress and the executive branch up to a new level. Hitherto, Ford had not denied legislators the right to examine classified documents, only to release all or parts of them to the public.32
Having Colby and the CIA as an adversary was one thing; having Henry Kissinger was another. There was some mud from Watergate and the Allende coup still clinging to Kissinger’s shoes, but in the fall of 1974, he was at the height of his power. No public official enjoyed a better press. The enormous amount of time he spent with journalists—rewarding allies, punishing enemies—was paying off in spades. Time called the secretary/adviser a “brilliant” policymaker with “diverse talents, energy and intellect.” As the confrontation with the Pike Committee evolved, Kissinger rallied his troops in the press corps. Aaron Donner, chief counsel of the Pike Committee, recalled receiving a phone call from columnist James “Scotty” Reston in the midst of the brouhaha. “This is Scotty Reston of the [New York] Times,” he growled into the phone. “What the hell are you guys doing down there? Are you reviving McCarthyism?” Both the Times and the Washington Post subsequently sided with Ford and Kissinger. Republicans on the committee began to get cold feet. Suddenly Pike’s crusade was off the tracks. Though there was hardly a parallel, the ongoing comparison to McCarthyism proved devastating.33
It was time for a compromise, Bill Colby decided. While he, Rogovin, and Marsh worked on the White House, Pike Committee member Robert McClory, a moderate Illinois Republican hoping to avoid the humiliation of either his president or his committee, pushed Pike to be reasonable. Meanwhile, finally convinced that he had the upper hand, Kissinger agreed that “differences between the legislative and executive branches shouldn’t be pushed to the point of law but decided on the basis of joint understanding and reconciliation.” On September 30, Colby wrote Pike proposing an arrangement. In the future, there would be no disclosure of classified material by the committee without prior executive-branch review. In the event of a disagreement, the matter would be referred to the president. If he continued to object, the committee could still not release but would reserve the right to submit the matter to judicial review. That same day, Colby delivered a bundle of documents with only fifty words deleted. The committee subsequently agreed to the proposed compromise.34
Meanwhile, with the Pike Committee dominating the news, Church decided to hold public hearings, his committee’s first. And the staff had a new jewel, one that was guaranteed to titillate. Sometime in the 1960s, zealous scientists in the technical branch of the Directorate of Operations—James Bond’s “M” and his team—had collected 11 grams of shellfish toxin and 8 milligrams of cobra venom—enough, if dispersed widely, to kill thousands of people and, if applied discreetly, to assassinate a foreign leader. Indeed, one of the scenarios for doing away with Castro was to smear shellfish toxin on his scuba gear. In 1970, in the midst of negotiations over a multilateral treaty banning chemical and biological weapons, President Nixon had ordered all weapons-grade poisonous substances destroyed. The toxins and venom had been expensive and difficult to obtain, however, and a mid-level CIA officer took it upon himself to secret the poisons away in a secure storeroom. Shortly thereafter, the officer in question retired. His replacement assumed that the decision to retain the biological weapons had been approved by the DCI. Reacting to Colby’s continual prodding to discover and divulge any and every CIA misdeed, Carl Duckett, deputy director for science and technology, came upon the cache of poisons and informed Colby. Aware that “we had something we should not have,” Colby and Duckett reported the matter to the White House and subsequently to the Church Committee. “I unwittingly handed the committee a corker on a silver platter,” Colby later recalled.35
On September 16, 1975, Colby and Rogovin appeared before the Church Committee in open session with the major networks televising the proceedings live. Colby calmly described the decision to retain the biological weapons and their subsequent discovery. The committee wanted the details of “Project Naomi,” of which the toxins and venom were only a part. Were there other poisons? Yes, Colby replied—strychnine, cyanide, and a compound labeled “BZ” that attacked the nervous system. How were these agents to be delivered? Again Colby was prepared. He produced several dart guns and a .45-caliber-sized electric pistol capable of silently firing poison pellets. To the mirth of all present—except, of course, the CIA people—Colby referred to the pistol as “a nondiscernable micro-bioinoculator.” Newspapers all across the country ran pictures of Church and Goldwater handling the dart guns. As Colby later wrote, “the overall impact was of the wildest hugger-mugger of the cloak-and-dagger world.” Church subsequently used the CIA’s “Show and Tell,” as Newsweek dubbed it, to reinforce two points. The CIA was indeed in the business of assassination, and it was an Agency run amok, deliberately ignoring an order of the president. The New York Times agreed, terming the CIA handling of toxins and venom “the most reckless kind of insubordination.” Times columnist Tom Wicker declared that the existence of the poisons was “only one more bit of evidence that this agency is a Frankenstein’s monster that must be destroyed.”36
According to Colby, the incident was “the last straw” as far as the White House was concerned. “From the outset,” he later wrote, “I had been . . . aware that many in the administration did not approve of my cooperative approach to the investigations. I had been blamed for not categorically denying Hersh’s story [concerning the CIA’s role in spying on domestic radicals] at the very beginning; I had been criticized for turning material on Helms over to the Department of Justice; I had been chided for being too forthcoming to the Rockefeller Commission; I had been scolded for not stonewalling at every Congressional hearing.” The White House had wanted to get rid of Colby ever since his January 1975 visit to Deputy Attorney General Laurence Silberman, when he—without Ford’s knowledge—had delivered a list of possible criminal activities by Agency operatives. But in the wake of Hersh’s revelations and those coming out of the congressional committees, firing the DCI then would have been seen as a cover-up. By summer, Washington was full of rumors that Colby’s time had come. On June 20, CBS News had reported that Rockefeller and Kissinger were pressing for his dismissal. The vice president was quoted as saying that Colby was “a weak person who lacks strength of character.” In the diary he wrote during the family jewels affair (later published in Rolling Stone), Dan Schorr speculated that “Kissinger is afraid that if Helms goes down, he’ll be dragged down too.”37
In fact, Kissinger had already misled the Church Committee. In testimony before that body, he had declared that Track II of the Chilean operation had ended on October 15, 1970, after he and Alexander Haig had met at the White House with Thomas Karamessines, the CIA’s deputy director of plans. He was reminded that the DDP had recently testified that “as far as I was concerned, Track II was really never ended.” Karamessines was misremembering, Kissinger replied. But the evidence said otherwise. Karamessines’s cable to the CIA station in Chile, stating that “it is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup,” was dated October 16, 1970, the day after Track II had allegedly been terminated.38
Colby was not taking all this sitting down. On August 1, Mitch Rogovin told journalist Neil Sheehan that he and Colby had the goods on Kissinger. They had been able to obtain backchannel communications implicating him in the kidnapping and murder of Chilean general René Schneider. “He’s finished,” Rogovin said. Later, in his notes on the conversation, Sheehan observed, “I wonder if Ford can afford to fire Kissinger. Perhaps it will be Mitch and Colby who will be fired.”39
One Saturday morning in the early fall of 1975, Bill Colby, accompanied by two dark-suited security men, entered the back of a George Washington University auditorium. The distinguished classicist Bernard Knox, one of Colby’s Jedburgh comrades-in-arms, was lecturing on Sophocles’ Antigone. The title character was a young woman, the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, who defied the edict of her uncle, King Creon, by burying the body of her brother, who had led an enemy assault on his own city-state. In her eyes, she had done the honorable thing, but Creon condemned her to death. The gods sided with Antigone and reproached Creon. He, in turn, repented and went to free Antigone from prison, only to find that she had committed suicide. Creon’s son, Haemon, who was in love with Antigone, then killed himself upon discovering her body. So, too, did his mother, appalled by the injustice of it all. The name Antigone was interpreted by many scholars to mean “unbending.” You picked the appropriate lecture to attend, Knox remarked to his old friend after class. “Oh, I knew what you were going to talk about,” Colby replied.40
On the evening of October 31, 1975, on CBS Evening News, Daniel Schorr revealed that the CIA, earlier in the year, with the Shah of Iran’s approval, had been running a covert operation to help Kurdish tribesmen in their rebellion against the Iraqi government. “The operation had been described to the Pike committee only a few days before,” Colby wrote in Honorable Men, “so there was very little doubt in any one’s mind where the press had got hold of it.”41 The next morning, he went by the White House to discuss with Jack Marsh and others stratagems for keeping the Church Committee from issuing its report on assassinations and to commiserate over the irresponsibility of the Pike Committee. Shortly thereafter, Colby caught a plane for Jacksonville, Florida, where he was to discuss intelligence matters with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Sadat was so enthralled with journalist Barbara Walters, however, that Colby never got his audience.
When Colby returned to Washington that night, there was a message from Marsh waiting for him. He was to be at the White House at 8:00 sharp the next morning. When he arrived, the West Wing was deserted; there was no sign of the foreign policy team Colby had expected to see. He was ushered into the Oval Office. As soon as Ford mentioned his intention to shake up his national security team, Colby realized that his tenure as DCI was over. He immediately offered his resignation. Ford accepted it and offered Colby the post of ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He said he would have to talk to Barbara. Ford confided that he was bringing George H. W. Bush back from China, where he was serving as ambassador, to run the Agency.
On his way out, Colby ran into James Schlesinger going in. He wasn’t the only one being fired that day. Kissinger and Ford had had enough of the defense secretary’s plotting against SALT II and his criticism of détente. The press later referred to the twin firings as the “Halloween Massacre.” To undercut speculation that he was nothing more than Kissinger’s lap dog, Ford announced that he was relieving Kissinger of his duties as national security adviser, though he would still be secretary of state. Kissinger’s replacement would be Brent Scowcroft, his longtime deputy.
The first thing Bill did was call Barbara. The couple was scheduled to attend Mass at a Benedictine church where their sons had gone to school; instead, they received Communion at the parish church nearest their house and then began calling family and friends to break the news. Jenonne Walker later said that Colby knew from the outset of the family jewels crisis that he could not survive as DCI. Nevertheless, he was hurt and angry. “There goes twenty-five years just like that,” he remarked to his wife when he arrived home. “He was pissed,” Christine Colby, who was still in high school, later recalled.42
Bill and Barbara quickly decided that the NATO job was a dead end. He had the White House operator patch him through to Air Force One and so informed Ford, who was on his way to Miami for a dinner with Sadat. Dan Schorr called to check whether rumors he had heard of the twin firings were true. They were, Colby replied. “Colby, on the phone,” Schorr subsequently wrote, “sounds as shaken as I’ve ever heard him.” Late in the day, the Colbys paid a visit to the Schlesingers to commiserate. The newly ousted defense chief smiled at Bill and remarked, “It looks like Dick Helms outlasted both of us.”43
Colby’s firing precipitated a minor firestorm on Capitol Hill. Church called a press conference and, his voice quavering, declared that the decision to dismiss the DCI was just another part of a Watergate-style cover-up. “There seems to be a whole pattern developing of trying to thwart the committee’s work and suppress its findings.” At the time, the Church Committee was preparing its report on assassinations, and the White House was pulling every string to see that it was not made public. Church told reporters that there was no chance that the document would be suppressed. Other critics accused Ford of trying to politicize the CIA’s top spot. Wasn’t the president ignoring “the requirement that this be a non-partisan position?” a reporter subsequently asked White House press secretary Ronald Nessen, pointing out that George Bush was a former chair of the Republican National Committee.44
Kissinger and Ford had not thought matters out very well. It would be weeks, if not months, before Bush was ready to take over at Langley. Ford was scheduled to make a four-day visit to Beijing in December, and he wanted no changing of the guard at the American embassy there until after his trip. Even after Bush returned home, it would take time to have him confirmed. If Colby departed immediately, Vernon Walters would become acting DCI. The confrontations between the executive branch and the select committees were reaching a climax, and the White House did not want a man who had been tainted by the Watergate scandal to be chief spokesman for the intelligence community. According to Colby, it was Vernon Walters who pointed out the dilemma to the White House. This was probably not the case, but Walters did act as a go-between during the ensuing negotiations. Colby said he would agree to stay on, but he was scheduled to testify before various committees for at least the next six weeks, and he did not intend to be a mere pawn. Walters conveyed the message, and on Wednesday, November 5, Ford called Colby to the Oval Office once again.
Gracious as always, Colby took the initiative. “Mr. President, I don’t want to make this in any way difficult. I am fully prepared to stay on until George Bush can get here, but the DCI serves at the pleasure of the President. In order to be effective he must have the President’s full authority to act.” Ford readily concurred and asked Colby if he wanted him to put it in writing. Colby said no. In his subsequent press release announcing that Colby would stay on, the president emphasized that during this period the DCI would act with “the full authority” of the President.45
The Halloween Massacre unfolded in the midst of the Ford administration’s increasingly frantic effort to block publication of the Church Committee’s report on assassinations, an effort in which Bill Colby played a leading role. On October 21, Colby had written to Ford arguing that release of the report would do irreparable damage to the foreign policy of the United States and threaten “the lives and livelihood of a number of officers of this Agency.”
The Church Committee document examined in detail five alleged CIA plots to assassinate foreign leaders, in some cases naming names and in others re-creating scenarios that would enable foreign intelligence agencies to easily identify individuals. If the Church Committee were allowed to publish the results of the assassination investigation and its related probe into covert action, the CIA would in the future find it almost impossible to persuade citizens of foreign countries to cooperate with it, the DCI said. Some ten days later, Colby and Kissinger refused to testify at a public hearing that the Senate select committee had scheduled on Chile. Frustrated, Church reminded the White House that it was the president who had ordered the Rockefeller Commission’s assassination materials to be turned over to the Senate committee. Yes, Ford replied, but not with the intention of having them made public. On November 2, just hours before Colby’s firing, the Church Committee voted unanimously to approve the assassination report. But when members balked at making it public, Church threatened to resign. The committee then compromised by deciding to let the Senate as a whole decide.46
On November 19, Colby held only the second open press conference by a DCI in the CIA’s history. He outlined the dire consequences to follow if the assassination report was released. Behind the scenes, the Agency pleaded for the deletion of eleven names. The committee agreed to only one—Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who had been involved in the preparation of the poison designed to do away with Lumumba—but only because he had gone to court. Schorr learned the identity of some of the people whom Colby had hoped to shield from exposure, among them Robert Maheu and Johnny Roselli. “When you work with the Mafia and promise to try to protect them,” Schorr observed in his diary, “I guess you have to go down the line with them.” On the 20th in a closed-door session, the Senate refused to block the assassination report’s release, but it would not approve its publication, either. That same day, on his own authority, Church released the results of the investigation, nine months after Dan Schorr had reported on the matter and six months after the Rockefeller Commission had suppressed its conclusions.47
The Church Committee’s interim report on assassinations cleared the CIA of killing anyone, but it found that the Agency had tried and failed to assassinate Castro at least eight times, employing everything from toxic diving suits to syringes disguised as ballpoint pens. It also found that the CIA had acquired and dispatched an unnamed “lethal substance”—poisoned toothpaste—to the Congo to be used to eliminate Patrice Lumumba, but his enemies had killed him before US operatives could execute their plan. In three other cases, the CIA had encouraged the murders of foreign leaders—Rafael Trujillo, General René Schneider, and Salvador Allende—but was not complicit in their deaths. Washington had facilitated the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, but did not advocate his assassination. But who was more to blame, the presidents or the CIA “rogue elephant”? The report equivocated.48
Shortly after releasing the report, Church filed papers with the Federal Election Commission to create an “exploratory” Church for President Committee. In February 1976, President Ford would issue an executive order—“Restrictions on Intelligence Activities”—declaring, “No employee of the United States shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” In a 1978 Playboy interview, Bill Colby would observe that the Ugandan people would be morally justified in assassinating their brutal ruler, Idi Amin, and that if asked, the CIA would be justified in aiding such an effort.49
Meanwhile, the White House and the CIA had asked that they be allowed to review a draft of the Pike Committee report prior to its release. When it arrived the last week in October, President Ford and his advisers were appalled. The document was a litany of CIA failures substantiated by the Agency’s postmortems, but without any mention of the spy agency’s successes. More ominously, it contained specific information on covert operations in Iraq, Angola, and Italy. Shortly thereafter, portions of the report began leaking, and in the days that followed the trickle became a deluge. In a speech to the United States Navy League in October 1975, Colby asked rhetorically, “Is our intelligence to become mere theatre? Will it be exposed in successive re-runs for the amusement, or even amazement, of our people rather than being preserved and protected for the benefit of us all?”50
Even as leaks about the Pike Committee’s report were occurring, it issued subpoenas for new material, including intelligence reports on the Soviet Union, Portugal, and the Cyprus crisis; decision memoranda of the 40 Committee; and documents on Russian compliance with nuclear arms control agreements. Both Colby and Kissinger dug in their heels, and on November 16, Ford claimed executive privilege. On that same day, the House select committee voted 10–2 to cite Kissinger for contempt of Congress. Ford’s advisers told the president that they were not at all sure that the White House would win in the courts, and Kissinger, though likely to win, did not want to risk a contempt vote in the House. Ford proposed a compromise—a State Department official would read from the subpoenaed documents, but they would not be made available to committee members directly. Pike quickly accepted. His committee was deeply divided, and he sensed that the support he had in the House as a whole was crumbling. Then came the crowning blow.51
On December 23, 1975, Richard S. Welch, the CIA’s chief of station in Athens, and his wife attended a Christmas party hosted by Ambassador Jack Kubisch. Both men were new to their jobs, two of the most difficult US posts in the world. In 1967, a group of neo-fascist colonels had staged a coup and seized power in Greece. They installed George Papadopoulos, who had been on the CIA payroll off and on since the 1950s, as president. Relations between Washington and Athens were cold during the Johnson administration but improved dramatically under Nixon. By 1973, the United States was the only nation in the developed world on friendly terms with the junta, which regularly jailed and tortured its political foes. By the time Welch and his family arrived, anti-American sentiment in Athens was reaching a fever pitch. Ever since the Agency had first established a presence in Athens, the chief of station had lived rather conspicuously in the same large house. “I had made arrangements for him to go into a different residence and to live in a different part of town, to try and help conceal who he was and to give him some cover,” Kubisch later said. Welch refused. When the Christmas party at the ambassador’s house broke up, the chief of station and his wife drove the few blocks to their CIA villa in the fashionable suburb of Palaio Psychiko. Parked in their driveway was a small car containing four people. Three got out, pulled Welch from his auto, and shot him three times in the chest with a .45. This was the first assassination of a station chief in the history of the Agency.52
Welsh’s murder made the front page of newspapers across the United States. In still another press conference, Colby praised Welch and implied that he was a victim of the anti-CIA hysteria that was gripping the nation. More specifically, he pointed the finger at Counterspy, the magazine of an organization called The Fifth Estate. Among its members were disgruntled former CIA employees, including Philip Agee, as well as a number of anti-Vietnam War activists. In its winter 1974–1975 issue, Counterspy had listed Welch as the CIA chief of station at Lima, Peru. The magazine, whose chief financial angel was author Norman Mailer, was hardly repentant. “If anyone is to blame for Mr. Welch’s death,” the publication declared, “it is the CIA that sent him to Greece to spy and intervene in the affairs of the Greek people.” Soon afterward, Counterspy’s winter 1975–1976 issue hit the stands. It quoted Agee as saying, “The most effective and important systematic efforts to combat the CIA that can be undertaken right now are . . . the identification, exposure, and neutralization of its people working abroad.”53
Welch was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on January 6, 1976. Ford, Kissinger, and Colby attended. “The funeral was a rare and glittering tableau of the American national security establishment,” wrote Laurence Stern in the Washington Post, “with several generations of diplomats and spies gathered on the grassy slopes of Arlington to pay tribute to Welch and the institution he served.” “Welch in death may have started the rollback that President Ford, Secretary Kissinger and the whole CIA seemed unable to accomplish,” Daniel Schorr commented on CBS Nightly News. In 2002 a member of the radical Marxist organization 17 November (or 17N, for the date of an uprising in 1973) confessed to playing a role in Welch’s murder and named his accomplices. But the statute of limitations had run out.54
On January 15, President Ford, riding the backlash that followed in the wake of Welch’s murder, wrote Otis Pike, forbidding him to publish the details of various CIA covert operations. Colby called on the chairman to observe the terms of the “Colby compromise,” but Pike insisted that it applied only to the release of specific documents, not to the committee’s final report. With the committee’s mandate set to expire on January 31, its staffers and a CIA team headed by Mitchell Rogovin negotiated frantically over specific deletions. Pike accepted some Agency redactions but rejected 150 others. The House select committee approved its report on January 23, but on the 29th the chamber as a whole voted 246–124 against releasing the document.55
By then, however, much of what was in the report had already leaked to the press. On February 13, the Village Voice published the results of the Pike investigation in their entirety. It listed the CIA’s six most conspicuous “failures,” released material on the 40 Committee that proved decidedly unspectacular, and dealt with some ongoing CIA covert operations. Ironically, the Pike report was an indictment of the presidency rather than the CIA. In his testimony before the committee, in an effort to deflect attention from himself, Kissinger had given the coup de grace to plausible deniability when he declared that every single covert operation carried out in recent years had been approved by the White House. “All evidence in hand,” the committee report declared, “suggests that the CIA, far from being out of control, has been utterly responsive to the instructions of the President and the assistant to the president for National Security Affairs.” It was soon revealed that the source for the Village Voice article was Daniel Schorr. CBS immediately fired him, and the House subsequently cited him for contempt.56
There were those within and without the media who took the position that the family jewels flap was a product of post-Watergate journalism. “Had Seymour Hersh not written his CIA domestic surveillance stories for The New York Times in December 1974 (indeed, had not The Times seen fit to splash the first story across five columns of page one headlined ‘Massive Surveillance’),” wrote Timothy Hardy, a Rockefeller Commission staffer, “there seems little doubt that there never would have been a Rockefeller Commission, a Pike ‘Report,’ a Church committee. . . . Hersh, and Hersh alone, caused the President, and then Congress . . . to make intelligence a major issue of 1975.”57
Shortly after the original Hersh stories appeared, the respected Washington Post investigative reporter Walter Pincus wrote that “no series of news stories since Watergate has had so quick an impact on government, while generating so much discussion among journalists as the Hersh pieces.” Like many other reporters of that time, Pincus had long used CIA personnel as sources of information for news stories; they were usually the best-informed Americans about any particular foreign situation. It was well known that the Agency sometimes solicited and received information from newspeople and used jobs in the industry as cover. Pincus, a friend of Hersh’s, went on to show how Hersh and his editor, A. M. Rosenthal, had manipulated the scarce information they had—and had tricked Bill Colby into confirming information that they did not have—into a story that was at the least exaggerated and then helped prompt an investigation. Indeed, the first solon to demand a congressional probe was Senator William Proxmire (D-WI), whom Hersh had called seeking comments on his initial story. “Like it or not, he [Rosenthal] and his counterpart in The Washington Post are participants,” Pincus declared. “The front page story selections set an agenda for government.” In early 1976, shortly after the Pike report came out, Clare Boothe Luce observed to President Ford, “The press has arrogated to itself the right of secrecy . . . [and] no one else can have it.”58
As George Bush prepared to return to the United States and face confirmation hearings, Colby did everything he could to ease the transition. “We have arranged a suitable office here and will organize secretarial, transportation, etc.,” he cabled Bush, then en route from Beijing. Colby’s own office staff and the Agency’s senior officers would be at his service. “Also certainly would fully brief you on on-going ballgames with Senate and House Select Committees and, of course, the substantive business of intelligence.” Bush replied that it would probably be best for him not to take up residence before his confirmation, but he gladly accepted the offer of consultations. After his arrival, the DCI-designate met almost daily with Colby and the deputy directors. “Bill Colby . . . has been extraordinarily thoughtful to me,” Bush wrote President Ford.59
The Senate confirmed Bush as director on January 28, 1976; two days later, Colby received him and President Ford at Langley. The past and future DCIs were waiting at the entrance to the Agency’s auditorium and greeted Ford as he pulled up in his limousine. The three then entered the great hall, where CIA employees had assembled. Colby began: “Mr. President and Mr. Bush, I have the great honor to present to you an organization of dedicated professionals. Despite the turmoil and tumult of the past year, they continue to produce the best intelligence in the world.” He was treated to a standing ovation.
Following the swearing-in, the three emerged from the auditorium, but instead of accompanying Ford and Bush into the main office building, Colby inconspicuously walked away from them to the visitor’s parking lot, where Barbara’s rather dilapidated Buick Skylark was waiting. Ripples of applause followed him. An unassuming man making an unassuming exit. “It was an ending,” wrote Laurence Stern in the Washington Post, “that would have done justice to George Smiley, the antihero of spy novelist John Le Carre: understated and not without its ironies.”60
Shortly thereafter, journalist Neil Sheehan visited Langley and, viewing the portraits of past directors, was struck by the contrast between the ones of Bill Donovan and Bill Colby. “It was an interesting line . . . from Donovan, the somewhat flamboyant corporation lawyer/general to Colby, the self-effacing servant of the state, dressed in a business suit as Donovan was dressed in a warrior’s garb.”61 In truth, there were far more similarities between Donovan and Colby than differences. Both were warriors and covert operations addicts. And, like Donovan, Colby would remain closely associated with the CIA long after he had officially departed its ranks.