WHEN THE CHECK from the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs arrived at the NSA office, Michael Wood drew the only conclusion that made sense to him: the Central Intelligence Agency had weaseled its way back inside the association. Unaware of the officers’ intention of making this the final CIA grant, Wood concluded that Sherburne’s work had been in vain. Six months earlier, he and Sherburne had sparred over this point: Wood felt the only way to get the CIA out of the NSA was to go public.1 Sherburne said no. Now Wood felt that publicity was his only option. The question was, how to do it?
Unaware of Wood’s dilemma, Gene Groves and Rick Stearns grew increasingly irritated at his behavior. Wood got into fights with other staff members. He spent an inordinate amount of time working—or so they thought—outside the office on the campaign to lower the voting age to eighteen. Stearns later said that they feared his activities might jeopardize the NSA’s nonprofit tax-exempt status.2 Ed Schwartz said simply, “He was a pain in the ass.”3 The three officers made a decision: they fired Wood.
But Wood did not leave the NSA empty-handed. Once he had made the decision to go public with what he knew about the CIA, he had begun ferrying out caches of documents, financial and otherwise. He then assessed a number of news outlets, and finally decided to approach Ramparts, a small San Francisco–based magazine that had been founded by Edward Keating, a liberal Catholic, but had become more radical, especially on Vietnam.4 The February 1966 issue, for example, had featured an article by Donald Duncan, a former Green Beret who fought in Vietnam, in which the U.S. presence in Vietnam was compared to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Duncan warned, “We aren’t the freedom fighters. We are the Russian tanks blasting the hopes of an Asian Hungary.”5
What Wood did not know was that the CIA was already in hot pursuit of the magazine and its reporters. According to the late journalist Angus Mackenzie, a quick search of existing CIA files in March 1966 yielded information on approximately half of Ramparts’ fifty-five writers and editors, many of them freelance or episodic contributors.6 Primary targets included editor Robert (Bob) Scheer and Stanley Sheinbaum, a Michigan State University professor and the source for an upcoming article that would expose the CIA’s involvement in a university project. Sheinbaum oversaw a training program for South Vietnamese police forces. When he was drawn into a scheme to kill a Vietnamese leader, he asked himself what an economics professor was doing in the middle of an assassination plot.7 Shortly thereafter he resigned from the $25 million project and gave his story to Scheer.8 CIA director Raborn directed Chief of Security Howard J. Osborn to investigate further. Did Ramparts receive foreign funds? If so, a legal basis might exist to shut down the magazine.9
Citing Sheinbaum and Scheer by name, Raborn enlisted the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service in his assault on Ramparts. Raising the foreign funding canard, Raborn warned J. Edgar Hoover that the magazine might be a subversive operation, and ordered copies of its tax returns from the IRS. In addition, Raborn authorized agents to put a plant inside the magazine.10
Ramparts was not the only media outlet digging for information about the inscrutable CIA. A successful book on covert activities and a New York Times investigation had already laid bare some of the CIA’s secrets, to the consternation of all within the Agency. Before then, CIA officials could count on sympathetic senators and congressmen and tight-lipped White House officials to protect them from public scrutiny. The first time many Americans even knew about the CIA was in 1961 after the botched Bay of Pigs invasion; even then, President Kennedy took full responsibility and avoided a congressional investigation.
Then in 1964 Random House published Wise and Ross’s Invisible Government, which explored the CIA’s role in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Indonesia, Laos, and Vietnam, and raised fundamental questions.11 Did the CIA influence U.S. foreign policy? What were the links between the CIA and the military-industrial-congressional complex? When someone at Random House slipped a pre-publication copy to CIA officials, then-director John McCone summoned the two authors to Langley and demanded they make deletions. They refused.12
According to Wise, CIA officials considered buying up all the copies, but abandoned the idea when Random House chief Bennett Cerf pointed out that he could print a second edition. Instead, McCone formed a “special group” inside the Agency to sabotage the book. Its number 1 weapon: bad reviews written by CIA agents under code names and passed to cooperative journalists and publishers; among the fake reviewers was E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate burglary fame.13
Following that, in 1965, the New York Times decided to launch its own investigation of the CIA, triggered by a slip of the tongue by Congressman Wright Patman (D-Tex.) the previous year. As chair of the House Banking Committee, Patman had convened hearings to explore whether foundations were being used as tax dodges. The congressman inadvertently identified the J.M. Kaplan Fund as a CIA conduit, and named eight (phony) foundations that passed funds through it.14 CIA officials rushed to Patman’s office. The following day, Patman announced that the CIA had nothing to do with his hearings and declared the matter ended.15
But the episode caused the Times’ managing editor, Turner Catledge, to pay more attention to CIA activity. On September 2, 1965, Catledge noticed an odd story coming out of Singapore. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew publicly revealed that five years earlier the CIA had offered him a $3.3 million bribe for the release of two CIA agents who had been arrested. Yew had demanded $35 million, but ended up taking nothing in return for their release. Details of the story were truly bizarre, but the prime minister had produced as evidence a letter of apology from Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Times journalist Harrison Salisbury remembers Catledge thundering, “For God’s sake let’s find out what they are doing. They are endangering all of us.”16 The Times Washington Bureau chief, Tom Wicker, drafted a survey to send to the newspaper’s worldwide network of journalists asking what they knew about the CIA. What were their experiences with the agency?17
James Jesus Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence chief whose job was to look for Soviet moles, had a copy of the survey before the ink was dry. The legendary Angleton had grown steadily paranoid after decades of professionally suspecting everyone of pro-Moscow sympathies. According to Salisbury, Angleton regarded the journalistic survey as a KGB instrument; the very phrasing of the questions “betrayed the hand of Soviet operatives.”18 While Angleton’s reaction might have seemed extreme, the response to the Times survey at CIA stations around the world was similar.
CIA media liaison Colonel Stanley Grogan sent a memo to McCone, “NEW YORK TIMES Threat to Safety of the Nation,” in which he suggested using the CIA’s “heaviest weapons,” including White House pressure, to combat the Times.19 Salisbury, who saw the memo, described it as a scream from outer space. “Any questions, any attempt to probe what the CIA was doing, how it operated, what its intentions might be was seen as hostile, dangerous and frightening, capable of destroying the agency.”20
In late April 1966, in the midst of the CIA furor over the two Ramparts articles, the Times published the fruits of its investigation in a series of five articles. While listing some of the CIA accomplishments, the articles depicted the Agency as without oversight; seemingly the government had no control over its increasingly questionable behavior.21 Richard Helms, then Raborn’s deputy, moved quickly to contain the damage, successfully killing a planned book based on the articles. Most of all, Salisbury noted in his memoir, the CIA feared a permanent record, available and accessible to all. He and Wicker thought that the CIA response was hysterical in the extreme, but they could not persuade the higher-ups to publish the book.22
Personal tragedies were also taking a toll on the clandestine activities of the CIA. On October 29, 1965, Frank Wisner, the covert entrepreneur and father of Mighty Wurlitzer projects, killed himself after a long period of mental instability that apparently began after the Hungarian uprising.23 Cord Meyer had moved up a notch, becoming deputy director for plans (covert operations). But by all accounts, including his own, Meyer was spinning out of control.
In 1965, Meyer confided to his diary that for the past three years he had been “drinking too much,” which had led to “scenes of deliberate and provocative rudeness on my part.”24 The murder on October 12, 1964, of Meyer’s former wife, Mary Pinchot Meyer, left him further distraught.25 The Times Washington bureau chief was among those who felt Meyer’s rage after the Times published its series on the Agency. Meyer poked his finger at Wicker’s chest at a cocktail party and shouted that Moscow must be pleased with him.26 Although he apologized afterward, the outburst presaged his rage toward anyone who challenged the CIA, a list that later included the vice president of the United States. Thus, by the time Michael Wood approached Ramparts, the entire top echelon of the CIA felt itself to be under siege from the American media, and from Ramparts in particular.
It is not clear when the two top officials of Covert Action 5, Bob Kiley and Matt Iverson, learned of Wood’s approach to Ramparts. In September 1966, before Wood was fired, they knew that a leak had occurred. Iverson traveled around the country trying to identify the culprit. He concentrated on former witting NSA staff.
My husband and I, grateful to have survived our brush with the CIA, were back in Boulder, hoping that we would never see the CIA men again. Without warning—we both remember the incident vividly—Iverson, Mike’s former case officer, rang the doorbell. Mike and Iverson disappeared into an unfinished basement area to talk. After Iverson left, Mike told me that someone had violated his security oath and Iverson wanted to know what he knew. Mike told Iverson truthfully that he knew nothing.27
Groves and Stearns did not know that Iverson had set out to find the leak. Nor did they know about Wood’s actions. Stearns later said that they would “never, ever” have fired Wood had they realized that he knew about the CIA.28 Stearns made that comment some thirty-five years after Wood’s departure, unaware that Wood’s decision to go public had occurred before he was fired, not because he was fired.
THROUGHOUT THE AUTUMN OF 1966, young activists and journalists began to get mysterious phone calls from Ramparts editors Bob Scheer and Sol Stern. Judith Coburn, a Village Voice columnist living in Washington, described her call from Scheer: “We need you to work on something, and somebody is going to call you.”29
“What’s all this about?” asked Coburn, thinking his call might lead to a big moment in her journalism career. It was difficult for women to break into the field, and the men who dominated radical journalism awed Coburn. Getting a call from Scheer was like “getting called by the big Hollywood producer.”
“I can’t tell you … it’s a long story … hush, hush,” Scheer responded.
Coburn remembers thinking, “Oh, for Pete’s sake. Everyone on the left always thinks that his phones are tapped. I … thought it was sort of melodramatic and a way of dramatizing yourself to say that your phone is tapped.” She pressed Scheer. “Oh come on.”
“Nope. Somebody’s going to call you.”
In Boston, Michael Ansara, a nineteen-year-old Harvard student who was active in the SDS, received a similar phone call: “This is Sol from Ramparts. Bob Scheer says you’re our man in Boston. I’m going to give you the names of two foundations in Boston. We need you to do some research.”30
“What kind of research?” Ansara queried.
“I can’t tell you,” Stern said.
“What’s it about?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Can you give me a clue?”
“No.”
Ansara remembers Stern saying before he hung up, “Don’t call me. I will call you and I want whatever you get.” Unlike Coburn, Ansara remembered to ask, “How much will you pay me?” Stern offered $500. “Done,” said Ansara, who was “dead broke” at the time. He had no idea what Stern was talking about, but if someone wanted to pay him for something, that sounded okay to him.
In Washington, a Ramparts editor approached Lee Webb, the former national secretary of SDS, then working at the Institute for Policy Studies, which had been founded by Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, left-wing policy intellectuals who had broken with the Johnson administration over Vietnam. Raskin also served as part-time editor of Ramparts. He asked Webb if he’d like to do some research; then Scheer followed up by phone and disclosed that the research involved the National Student Association. Unlike Ansara and Coburn, Webb had attended NSA Congresses, and knew several former NSA-SDS activists well, including Paul Potter, Paul Booth, and Tom Hayden. Scheer had been vague, but the project sounded interesting. Webb was in.31
Coburn waited for several weeks for a follow-up to the phone call from Scheer. Finally, she got another late-night call. It was local. The caller refused to identify himself, but said, “I have to come and see you.” Coburn, who did not want to invite a strange man over at midnight, repeated her question: “Well, who are you?”32
After a pause, the man responded, “The Ramparts people told me to come and see you.”
“Who are you?”
“I can’t say.”
Coburn reluctantly agreed to let him come over, all the while thinking, “Great … it’s the middle of the night and this guy is going to come over to my house. I tried to get him to meet me somewhere else, but he sounded so urgent: ‘No, no, I have to come over to your place.’”
When she opened the door she breathed a sigh of relief. “He was a large, bearlike, very sixties-ish-looking person, a completely familiar type to me, and that reassured me immediately.” Her visitor finally told her his name was Michael Wood and he was the treasurer of the National Student Association. [Coburn misremembered here: Wood was in fact the former director of development, not treasurer.] Then he said, “I think the CIA is running the National Student Association.”
Coburn suppressed a laugh; “This is the big story?” It was ridiculous. But she responded to his fear, since he seemed “scared out of his wits.”
Coburn was aware of the NSA, but she did not take it seriously. During her four years at Smith College, Coburn, the daughter of conservative Republican parents, had grown steadily more radical. By the time she graduated, in 1964, her political world consisted of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Liberation News Service, the American Friends Service Committee, the Student Peace Union, and Students for a Democratic Society. During college, she majored in African studies, demonstrated against the H-bomb, and fiercely opposed the first U.S. advisers who went to Vietnam.33
Unlike Wood, who had had to read up on the CIA after he learned what was going on, Coburn had a distinct view of the Agency: “Right-wing assassins.” The images that swam before her eyes were of Guatemala’s Arbenz [overthrown by the CIA], the Congo’s Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba [assassinated, CIA suspected], and Cuba’s Castro. Why would the CIA care about the NSA?34
It was “literally unbelievable,” Coburn recalled. “Well, I mean, it would be like someone walks into your house and says, So I met this guy from Mars the other day, and he says he could take us back there if you felt like going for a vacation.” The notion that the CIA would be involved in the NSA seemed “just about the craziest thing I’d ever heard.”35
Nevertheless, Coburn found Wood’s fear so compelling that she sat up with him most of the night. She said of the experience, “I was never the same person.” In the next few months, as she pursued the story, she discovered that one after another of her heroes had worked for the CIA, including Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam, who lately—and courageously in Coburn’s view—had been supporting resistance to the draft.36
Coburn decided to confront Coffin in person, and went up to New Haven. When she entered his office, Coburn blurted out, “Did you work for the CIA?” Coffin swiveled in his chair and kept his back to her. After a period of deliberation, he said yes.37 Coburn was torn. She wanted to ask Coffin, “Are you a bad guy?” But she also started to worry about what she was doing. “This was the first moment when I thought: I’m an enemy of the state.”38
Coburn speculates today that the reason she and other Ramparts investigators found the CIA tie to NSA so hard to comprehend was that they had no understanding of liberal anticommunism. Her political education came from the SDS’s Port Huron Statement, the quintessential document of the new left that criticized the American political system, not from Roosevelt liberals. She had no experience with people who distinguished their anticommunism from conservative, McCarthy-style witch hunts. Most of the Ramparts reporters viewed anticommunism as an overheated policy response, antithetical to civil liberties at home and destructive to U.S. foreign policy abroad.39
Meanwhile, Michael Ansara had begun his research in Boston. He had been given two names by Stern, the Sidney and Esther Rabb Foundation and the Independence Foundation. “Now what?” he said to himself. He began free-associating: Foundations. Grants. Fundraising. Suddenly, he remembered the name of a business firm that did political and nonprofit fundraising. They might be able to help him. He made an appointment with one of the partners, George Sommaripa.40
Sommaripa explained to Ansara that all foundations were required to file state and federal income tax returns; one portion detailed their grant awards and was open for public inspection. He advised Ansara to examine the foundations’ tax records.
Ansara’s first try was unsuccessful. At the Boston IRS office, he encountered a surly clerk who refused him access. Stymied, he returned to Sommaripa. A Democratic Party operative in Massachusetts, Sommaripa knew how to pull strings. On Ansara’s behalf, he contacted the regional IRS office and chewed out the clerk for withholding public documents. When Ansara made his second visit to the IRS office, the chastened clerk gave him access to public records, but inadvertently handed over the complete file for each foundation, including the portions that were strictly confidential.
Ansara had just hit the jackpot.
According to Ansara, the tax returns might as well have been a “neon sign, blinking Look, Look, Look.” From the confidential information, he could see that some of the money flowing into the foundation did not come from a family trust. The additional income matched dollar for dollar the amount of outgoing grants. Ansara asked the now-affable clerk for the 990 form, the public portion of the return that revealed nonfamily contributors to the foundations. When he saw the list of contributors, their significance “was as transparent as night and day.” Someone or some agency was using foundations as conduits.
In just two days, the nineteen-year-old Ansara, sent on the sketchiest of missions, had stumbled on the CIA’s covert funding network, though he did not yet fully grasp what he had discovered. While the large sums of money flowing into the Rabb Foundation led Ansara to suspect a government agency, he had no idea which one or why it was using the foundation. “Ramparts thought I was a brilliant researcher,” Ansara laughs. “It was blind, dumb luck.”
Although Sol Stern had never uttered the words “National Student Association,” when Ansara saw the NSA listed as a grantee, he knew instinctively he was on to something. Since these grants came from Massachusetts foundations, he went next to the state attorney general’s office to examine incorporation papers for the foundations he identified.
As Ansara began to visit Boston-area addresses a pattern emerged. More often than not, he found himself in a law firm. Secretaries and attorneys alike were tight-lipped. Trust fund. Managed for a client. Can’t divulge more. No public information. No brochure.
Ansara found a copy of Martindale-Hubbell, a nationwide directory of lawyers. It contained law firm profiles with short biographies of individual members. As he studied it, he asked himself, What do these firms have in common? Before long, he spotted the connection. All had at least one senior partner who had served in the OSS during World War II. The answer to which government agency was using the foundations became clearer. The CIA emerged as the logical candidate.
Stern had instructed Ansara not to make phone contact with him or Ramparts, but, staggered by his findings, Ansara went back to Sommaripa. He knew that Sommaripa’s partner, David Bird, had once worked for the CIA. Ansara laid out his findings for Bird. By now he had a list of forty to fifty funds and foundations. Like Coburn, he felt a tremor of fear. Still disbelieving, he asked Bird, “Could this be true?”
In response, Bird picked up the phone and made a call. Ansara heard him declare to the person on the other end, “I know someone who has an interesting study, and it’s about you.” Bird had just told someone at or connected to the CIA about Ansara’s findings. As Ramparts editor Warren Hinckle later wrote, “The CIA knew we were onto their game before we had time to discover what it really was.”41
But even as the Ramparts editors began to recognize the enormity of the story, they remained confused about its significance. When in January 1967 Hinckle eventually met Wood, he described him as a wreck, “fidgety and run-down, a psychological war refugee from himself after a year-long battle with his conscience.”42 Hinckle grasped that Wood was not just afraid of the CIA; he was also guilt-ridden over his betrayal of friends. But Hinckle was puzzled, “stumped by the confounding question of what the CIA would want with a bunch of left-wing longhairs.”43
As the story grew to encompass Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe, the reporters knew they needed help. Scheer and Stern hit an investigative jackpot when they found three seasoned researchers in New York City, Fred Goff, Michael (Mike) Locker, and John Frappier, who had just founded the North American Congress of Latin America. The three had become critical of U.S. foreign policy, based largely on their discovery of what American corporations and the CIA were doing behind the scenes in Latin America.
Goff, a Stanford University graduate, was in political transition. A close friend of former NSA president Allard Lowenstein, whom he met on campus when Lowenstein was dean of students, Goff had spent many hours on Lowenstein projects. In 1966, Goff had agreed to participate in the Committee on Free Elections in the Dominican Republic, whose leaders included Lowenstein and Norman Thomas, the grand old man of the Socialist Party. Lowenstein, Thomas, and Goff were among the electoral observers who went to the Dominican Republic. There Goff witnessed widespread corruption, yet when Lowenstein and Thomas arrived back in the United States, Lowenstein stepped onto the tarmac and declared the Dominican elections “free and fair.” Lowenstein’s public pronouncement preempted a more considered response and destroyed Goff’s trust in him.44
Goff had also become suspicious about Lowenstein’s role in Dominican politics. Lowenstein told Goff that his trusted contact in the Dominican Republic was Sacha Volman.45 At the time Goff knew nothing about Volman but thought something was off about him. Shortly after he returned to the United States, Goff read an article that fingered Volman as a CIA agent. Filled with questions about both Volman and his own experience, Goff decided he had to find out more about the author, Michael Locker, a sociology graduate student at the University of Michigan.46
Locker was interested in power structures and the military-industrial complex. After the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, he spent many hours at the business school library, “a great treasure trove of material,” where he educated himself on the connections between sugar interests and foreign policy.47
During his research, Locker stumbled on press reports about Congressman Wright Patman’s hearings and his inadvertent mention of the J.M. Kaplan Fund. (Kaplan was known as the Molasses King.) When he discovered the Kaplan Fund supported Volman, Locker pursued the connection. By the time he finished his research, he had concluded that “the CIA was an arm of a much larger establishment structure, a conscious arm, the most conscious arm, the most powerful arm, and that it really manipulated an enormous amount that went on in this country and abroad.”48 Locker sent his paper to the New Republic, which declined to publish it. But the mimeographed paper made the rounds of radical and peace conferences, where Goff happened to see it.49
With no advance warning, Locker received a call from Goff, who told him, “I’ve just come back from the Dominican Republic and I’d love to meet you in Ann Arbor.” Locker’s immediate response was fear: “I was suspicious. I was convinced that somebody’s coming to find out more about me.” His suspicions were not allayed when Goff, the son of missionary parents, arrived looking “straight as an arrow.” Locker cut to the chase, asking Goff: “I have just one question: Who is Sacha Volman, and who does he report to?”50
“Fred laughed,” reported Locker in an interview. “A real laugh. He knew exactly. And we became lifelong friends.” They decided to team up, along with Locker’s roommate, John Frappier, to pursue their commitment to investigatory research and Latin America.51
When the Ramparts editors drafted Goff, Locker, and Frappier for their investigation, they acquired experienced, politically aware researchers, who were fueled by outrage. “The whole objective,” explained Locker, today a New York labor lawyer, “I mean the Dominican Republic was classic, was to split the labor movement, create a pro-Western, anticommunist faction which would rival the communist, socialist factions, and weaken the labor movement as a consequence. Terribly weaken them.” For Locker and others, the lack of a unified and powerful labor movement meant increasing the power of the oligarchies—landowners, the Catholic Church, and the military—that ruled most Latin American countries, thus ensuring that social reform would not come to Latin America.52
Like Ansara in Boston, Goff and Locker spent hours poring over 990 tax forms at the Foundation Center in New York to identify donors. They focused on interlocking connections, tracked down addresses, and knocked on doors. Locker remembered, “They looked like legitimate operations, but the places reeked of being front operations. They wouldn’t give interviews. Some gave interviews, but you caught them up in all kinds of contradictions.”53 The two men decided to try the list of grantees instead.
Locker visited the American Institute for Free Labor Development. “I just walked right in, and said I’m doing an investigation and I want to interview some people about possible CIA money that’s come to this organization. Is there anybody here?”54 The staff all worked in cubicles, with walls too high to see over, but Locker remembered hearing a “tremendous crashing and banging behind them.” Thomas Kahn, the director, reacted as many others had: “He was furious. I mean absolutely livid that anybody would question his integrity.”55
Goff and Locker tried to work systematically. They sent periodic write-ups to Ansara in Boston or Coburn in Washington They learned how to organize data by punching holes in three by five cards, so that by using a knitting needle or pencil, they could pull up cards on the same subject. They had no photocopying machine. Every bit of data had to be retyped on carbon copies. Sometimes Ramparts paid them. Sometimes it didn’t. The Presbyterians in the New York–based Interchurch Center awarded them small grants, but not enough to finance travel.56
The Ramparts editors, by contrast, periodically blew into New York from San Francisco. They booked rooms at the Algonquin Hotel, ordered take-out from Sardi’s, and kept the liquor flowing, creating more mystique than support. Locker said later that he was both “fascinated and repelled” by all the “flashy hotels, alcohol, cigarettes, fast talk.”57 Both Locker and Goff were uncomfortable with the editors, who were full of bravado and a “certain machismo.”58 They disliked the phony security; they, like the other researchers, had been instructed to talk only on pay phones, which added to the disorganization. No one, noted Coburn, ever answered the designated pay phone at the appointed time.59
The sheer size of the story swamped any attempt by the editors to impose a division of labor. “We would all be crammed into one hotel room,” remembered Coburn, “fifteen to twenty people … everyone talking at once. People would say, ‘Well, now what have we got about Kaplan?’ And someone else would say, ‘Well, we talked to Patman … okay, now where’s the list of who they gave money to’ … and then someone would say, ‘oh, I don’t know. … it’s here somewhere.’ Boxes crammed full of documents and research notes were all over the place. Then someone would say, ‘Well, okay, do you want to talk about the civil rights movement now,’ or ‘let’s have some reports from people who are working on the labor movement. So in Africa’ …”60
At one point, according to Coburn, when everyone was talking at once, Locker started “jumping up and down on one of the beds saying, ‘OKAY, shut up everybody. We’ll take Latin America. You take Africa. You [Coburn] take the Congress for Cultural Freedom.’ We divided up every region, every institution. It was just mind-boggling.”61
At the same time, the bigger the story got, the more the investigative team feared for its safety. Even Coburn, who found the security measures silly, succumbed. “I remember thinking people were following us. I hated the pay phone thing, because I always felt that someone could just drive by, or that I could just disappear.” It was crazy, she said in hindsight, “all out of spy movies.”62
Lee Webb echoes Coburn’s fear. “I really thought I might be killed.” Every night he would photocopy the material he had found, then divide the copies into three envelopes, and mail one set to his mother, one to his brother, and one to his home in Andover.63 John Frappier sent a copy of his reports to a bartender in California.64
Webb and Coburn had another reason to feel anxious. One cold night they waited outside the NSA office on S Street for the staff to leave. Near midnight, they crept down the alley behind the office and crawled over garbage cans and trash bags to reach the back door. Finding it unlocked, they slipped in.65
As the hours ticked by, they rummaged through NSA files and photocopied documents, unsure which to fear most—a dwindling supply of toner or the D.C. police. According to Coburn, they focused on financial files, proof of building ownership, and other “money stuff.” (Years later, the original deeds to the S Street building turned up in the moldering Ramparts files.) “I remember being completely terrified,” Coburn confessed today. “That’s when I thought we would certainly be arrested.”66
ED SCHWARTZ BELIEVES that he was the first NSA officer to hear about the Ramparts investigation, sometime around Thanksgiving.67 He remembers immediately phoning President Eugene Groves. By this time, Groves had realized that a “no-strings deal” with the CIA was no deal at all. Once he allowed the CIA’s foot inside the NSA door, Groves had a difficult time keeping CIA case officers and agents away from the international staff, just as Sherburne had. At the time of the call, Groves had already realized that his strategy to oust the CIA had failed.68
Groves passed along the news to Philip Sherburne, then at Harvard Law School. When he heard that Ramparts knew about the NSA-CIA relationship, Sherburne said later, his heart sank. “The first thought that jumped into my mind was, Where is Mike Wood?” Still worried about his earlier security oath violations, Sherburne did not tell Groves that he had a prime suspect for the leak.69
Sherburne made further phone calls and located Wood in Detroit, where he was working for the New Politics coalition, an organizational attempt to strengthen the left-liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Sherburne asked Wood to come to Cambridge, and Wood agreed. The two men paced the streets while Sherburne raged at Wood. “I was pissed off at him. … really upset that he had violated our agreement. I had considered him … a friend, and [I] could not believe he was doing it.”70
Wood—who by then could hardly retract his actions—argued that Sherburne should cooperate with Ramparts. Sherburne refused. At an impasse, and after hours of argument, they parted. Sherburne’s roommate Steven Arons, a former NSA civil rights project director, had been an observer of the encounter, occasionally participating in the often-tense arguments. “You don’t see Phil Sherburne angry very often,” Arons said later, reflecting on the legendary Sherburne temperament. Part of the reason he was so upset, Arons speculates, was his concern that Ramparts might sensationalize the story.71
BY EARLY FEBRUARY 1967, the Ramparts staff had become extremely nervous about the story. The journalist Adam Hochschild, who later co-founded Mother Jones magazine, worked periodically at Ramparts, though rarely on the NSA story. One evening he joined the staff as they worked late into the night. Suddenly they heard a series of explosions. Diving for the floor, Hochschild remembered thinking “they had come to get us.” As it turned out, the explosions were not bombs set off by the CIA. The Ramparts office was located on the edge of Chinatown in San Francisco—revelers were celebrating the Chinese New Year.72
Had the staff at Ramparts known the extent of the CIA offensive against them, they might have been forgiven their paranoia. When Richard Helms succeeded Admiral Raborn as CIA director, he shifted the pursuit of Ramparts to a super-secret team and chose as its head Richard Ober, a counterintelligence veteran. Kiley describes Ober as “a bad guy.” Former CIA officer Tony Smith agrees, and adds that Ober was “paranoid.”73
Ober’s activities were so secret that Kiley, Smith, and others in Covert Action 5 did not know about them at the time, even though Ober’s first assignment was to squelch the NSA story.74 Ober pursued the question of whether Ramparts had foreign funds. He had already requested a full IRS audit as well as audits of individual Ramparts financial contributors. The assistant commissioner for compliance at IRS had assured Ober he could call up the tax returns “without causing any particular notice in the respective IRS districts.” Ober agreed not to make his requests formal, so that “the Commissioner will be in a position to deny our interest if questioned later by a member of congress or other competent authority.”75
But the full story of the CIA’s pursuit of Ramparts may never be known. Years later, Evan Thomas, former Newsweek Washington bureau chief, interviewed Edgar (Eddie) Applewhite, one of the agents charged with discrediting the magazine.76 Applewhite told Thomas, “I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off. … We were not the least inhibited by the fact that the CIA had no internal security role in the United States.”77 Applewhite went on to describe a scene with his boss, Desmond Fitzgerald, head of clandestine operations. Fitzgerald listened to him recount his activities, then commented, “Oh, Eddie, you have a spot of blood on your pinafore.” Despite Applewhite’s hints of illegal activities, he refused to divulge further details to Thomas.78
And so for several months Ramparts and the CIA pursued each other. One team relied on a group of budding journalists, slightly more seasoned editors, radical activists, and graduate student researchers. The other team had access to lavish government resources, including fulltime professionals, and a secret but extensive network of contacts in the United States and abroad. It also was not averse to using dirty tricks. The game of hide-and-seek would continue until the last hours before publication.