MH/CHAOS

Hersh further declared that we had “established intelligence files on at least 10,000 Americans,” that “were maintained by a CIA special unit reporting directly to Richard Helms, then the Director of Central Intelligence² and now Ambassador to Iran.” The Rockefeller Commission reported that for six years the operation compiled some 13,000 different files, including files on 7,200 American citizens.³ This last figure is incorrect and it appears that the Commission rounded off the total number of files.

Colby told the president that CI opened 9,944 files. In a report to the president dated December 24, 1974, he said that two-thirds were a by-product of our coverage of Americans or resulted from direct FBI information requests on the activities of Americans abroad. Colby’s number is correct. I remember that the FBI request for information on the activities of Americans abroad and our own FI or CI information collection on individuals of FBI interest resulted in our opening of two-thirds (6,629) of these files. The other one-third was opened to hold FBI reports on American Communists (including those fifty-six clandestine missions to the Soviet Union by CPUSA leader Gus Hall), which came to the CI staff office concerned with international Communism.

Whichever number you accept, it is a miniscule amount when compared to the total U.S. population at the time of 203 million people. To put it in context, we held files on 10,000 (I will use Hersh’s figure) people compared to the almost 250,000 protestors across the country, or 4 percent of all known protestors. With a high volume of information coming to us, we opened files on the major players and groups within the antiwar, New Left, and black militant movements that had foreign contacts with hostile governments, terrorist or revolutionary organizations, or intelligence services.

The majority of our information came quarterly from the FBI, which were wrap-ups of black militant and antiwar radical activities prepared by each FBI office. The most important FBI reporting, however, concerned responses to our information concerning these individuals traveling or living abroad. Also of interest were FBI reports providing heads-up travel or activities by these individuals abroad, which the FBI collected from its sources. To give some idea of the volume of FBI reporting: we received 10,486 reports in 1970; 10,110 in 1971; and 3,043 from January to May 1972. We obviously didn’t keep these reports in one big file. With people pulling documents or possibly misfiling a document out of chronological sequence, it would be almost impossible to retrieve it. We did not send any of these documents to CIA’s record section for filing; all documents were filed by our own secretaries or by each officer in the unit.

The fact that we had files on Americans shocked people, particularly the media, which made a huge ruckus over it. It made a great headline and sold papers. In fact, when papers on the “Family Jewels” were released to the public in June 2007, one reporter for USA Today likened CIA to the East German Stasi, the security arm of the East German state created to control its population. This is another example of a journalist using hyperbole rather than truth to tell the story. There can be no other purpose for the choice of words than to denigrate CIA. Unlike the Stasi, which recruited one in three East Germans to spy on their neighbors, we did not recruit any Americans to spy on their neighbors. Investigations found only three distinct occasions where CIA gathered domestic intelligence. In one other case, which was not an MHCHAOS operation, a CIA-recruited asset became involved in a U.S. congressional campaign and furnished a few reports on behind-the-scenes activities in the campaign.

Any serious student of counterintelligence knows that files are the back-bone of any CI agency. There has to be a place to hold detailed information by which CI can begin to discern patterns, associations, and connections. A file is opened on an individual when more than a single piece of information is reported on that individual, or when an individual becomes of active CI interest. Most important is the fact that just because a file was opened on an individual, it does not mean that the file should be equated to a type of police dossier, which law enforcement might use to monitor that person’s activities. DCI Helms summed it up best when he said the following:

In normal times few Americans would ever come within the purview of our foreign intelligence operations. That happened only when evidence appeared of their involvement with subversive elements abroad. Until the recent past, such involvements were rare occurrences. Then in the late 1950s and early 1960s came the sudden and quite dramatic upsurge of extreme radicalism in this country and abroad, an up-rush of violence against authority and institution, and the advocacy of violent change in our system of government. By and in itself, this violence, this dissent, this radicalism was of no direct concern to the Central Intelligence Agency. It became so only in the degree that the trouble was inspired by, or coordinated with, or funded by, anti-American subversion mechanisms abroad. In such event the CIA had a real, a clear and proper function to perform, but in collaboration with the FBI. The Agency did perform that function in response to the express concern of the President. And information was indeed developed, largely by the FBI and the Department of Justice, but also from foreign sources as well, that the agitation here did in fact have some overseas connections. As the workload grew, a very small group within the already small Counterintelligence Staff was formed to analyze the information developed here and to give guidance to our facilities abroad. As you can see from the material furnished by the Agency, the charter of this group was specifically restricted to the foreign field. How then, is it possible to distort this effort into a picture of massive domestic spying?⁴

To the congressional investigating committees and the Rockefeller Commission, however, this was horrible. The Rockefeller Commission specifically was disturbed by the domestic activities under MHCHAOS auspices, which, according to the Commission, “unlawfully exceeded the CIA’s statutory authority.” Three cases in five years where errors in judgment were made I would not call violating our statutory authority. People make mistakes because they are human.

I remember during a debriefing with one asset that he began to discuss some gossip that he heard about a major Hollywood entertainer. When I asked him why he was discussing this, as it had nothing to do with my interest in radical Americans and their contacts abroad, he just said he had heard it and wanted to tell someone. This information never made it into my report. I felt that this asset, like many other Americans, liked to hear or tell juicy stories about the rich and famous.

To accomplish our presidential tasking, we achieved the maximum feasible use of existing clandestine service assets who had a by-product capability or a concurrent capability to provide information in response to presidential and FBI requirements. This involved close, continuous liaison with Agency area division officers, particularly the Soviet Bloc Division. I provided the divisions with custom-tailored collection requirements and operational guidance. Occasional windfalls came from CIA assets in the form of independent encounters with black militants or New Left individuals. Some of these assets had unique, direct access, but none had the proper credentials to “get in with” the inner circle of these groups. In the case of the BPP abroad, I had no illusions about the difficulties implicit in recruiting a responsive agent to penetrate the core of the Panther movement in Algiers, or its support groups in Paris, because we recognized their fear of CIA provocations, their sense of security, and their poorly suppressed racism.

When it came to timely reporting—“advance” information on impending developments and hard facts as to who’s who among the Americans organizing, directing, promoting, and influencing the antiwar/antiestablishment protests overseas or black militant activities—we had to rely on recruiting a few agents to deploy against these groups. Without stepping on any division’s prerogatives, we had to recruit Americans with antiwar credentials and train them to infiltrate such groups overseas, or a black radical who would be accepted by the Black Panthers. The recruited assets would then be in a position to possibly discover covert support from a foreign intelligence service or foreign Communist party, or to be recruited by them. Only a few assets were especially recruited and run exclusively for the program.

The actual number of assets used at any one time varied as new ones were recruited and old ones were lost. Newsweek, quoting the Rockefeller report, said that more than one hundred agents fed the MHCHAOS operation, although fewer than thirty were actually on the MHCHAOS staff.⁵ I can state unequivocally that none of these agents were on our staff. The Newsweek writer’s slipshod quoting of the Rockefeller report illustrates how erroneous myths are created. The Rockefeller Report actually says, on pages 139–140, “The extent of MHCHAOS agent operations was limited to fewer than 30 agents.” It said nothing about them being on our staff. In fact, CIA does not employ any agents on its staff or in its divisions.

At any given time we had approximately 160 assets to use, of which 55 percent were unilateral CIA assets and 45 percent belonged to various liaison services. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ⁶ stated, “MHCHAOS had fewer than 30 active agents of its own and all but three of them carried out their intelligence gathering abroad.” I would like to correct the Journal on this point, as we had fewer than twenty active agents, and only about fifteen of these assets were either entirely or primarily targeted against individuals or groups of special concern to us. These fifteen were all unilateral CIA agents. The rest were only occasionally used against specific program targets.

These assets were also dispersed geographically. The highest concentration was in Europe, where we collected from sixty-nine assets. The next largest concentration was in the Western Hemisphere, excluding the United States, where we used thirty-four assets. Asia came next with thirty-one, while Africa had twenty assets. Four other assets were used elsewhere. We used them to target certain groups from a variety of access or vantage points. For example, I used fourteen assets against the BPP. Against the expatriates/extremists in Tanzania, which included the Black African Skills Group, Congress of African People, or the Center for Black Education, I used seven assets. Also receiving such attention were the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam and Puerto Rican extremists. The bulk of the agents were either multitargeted or used as special needs arose, when we determined that they could help.

During my tour I briefed and debriefed several of these agents, which included a total of ten meetings within the United States from March 1971 until February 1973. Three of these meetings were with an American source being run by another division. The source lived in Europe but came to the United States on business. All of my meetings occurred in New York City hotel rooms. Two meetings were held in July 1972; one was to brief the source on whom we wanted him to see, and the other meeting was to debrief him on his contacts. My purpose was to determine if any of these contacts could be used as sources, or if any of them had information regarding foreign contacts or monetary support to radicals or black extremists. The third meeting concerned his contacts with MHCHAOS targets overseas.

When Hersh and others claim we were some super-secret group sneaking around during the dead of night so no one would know about us, they are dead wrong. At one of my meetings with the previously mentioned source, there were six other CIA officers from different divisions and staffs present. The source had a wealth of contacts and everyone wanted to debrief him, so every officer sitting in that meeting knew why I was there, who my targets were, and what type of information I was trying to collect. This meeting in itself certainly conflicts with Hersh’s charge about our being a super-secret unit.

I held two meetings with a CIA career agent who resided in Europe. These meetings were about his contacts in the black militant support field abroad. In addition, I had two meetings with an FBI informant, a black American who wanted to live in Africa. One meeting was to assess him before I sought CIA approval to use him. Every asset or agent CIA used or recruited must go through an approval process in which checks are made to ensure that the person is not being used by another U.S. government agency, or that there is no derogatory or other information that would prohibit using him or her. Approval was given to use the FBI’s informant, and my next meeting with him was to debrief him upon his return to the United States.

Another officer, identified as Charles Marcules,⁷ had been brought into the unit to handle many of the meetings with potential sources and the debriefings of CIA agents when they were made available to us. Marcules and I once met with a retired foreign diplomat who was residing in New York. The purpose was to determine if he could be of any use in the Caribbean with the Black Power movement. He did not fit our needs and there were no follow-up meetings with him.

In July 1972 I met with a Black Panther member in Los Angeles. This meeting, held under FBI auspices, was to brief the Panther, an FBI informant, for his upcoming trip abroad. I was also to debrief him when he returned to the United States, but his trip never materialized. We met in a Los Angeles hotel, and following the meeting the FBI drove me to another hotel to stay. Although the Panther was providing information to the Bureau, he was not considered a trusted agent and care had to be taken.

In all, after studying where the antiwar and black militants maintained foreign contacts, we identified about twenty important areas of operational interest. In Europe, they were Paris; Stockholm; Brussels; [CIA CENSORED]. In Asia, we concentrated on [CIA CENSORED] and Hong Kong. In Latin America, we were interested in Mexico City; Santiago; and [CIA CENSORED]. In Africa and the Middle East we only concerned ourselves with Algiers; Dar Es Salaam; and Conakry. The only other area of some importance was Ottawa.

Because of our emphasis on exploiting existing assets to the extent feasible and on liaison service capabilities where appropriate, MHCHAOS was a low-cost collection program, particularly in relation to the total number of assets involved and the production produced. The operational expenses directly chargeable to the program were limited to eight approved operational projects totaling about $135,000. Our salaries and the computer-associated database maintenance costs consumed the major portion of SOG’s program funds. This meager operation dollar amount when compared to the total intelligence budget certainly also confounds Hersh’s notion of a massive operation.

Let me turn to the 300,000 names held in our computer data base. The impression given is that all these names were Americans targeted by CIA. This is complete fallacy. I do have doubts that we entered exactly 300,000 names, but I suspect that the number has been rounded up to sound better. We used a complex, highly sophisticated computer system mainly to protect MHCHAOS-COLLECTED information. An additional reason for such a system was the large volume of FBI reporting, which required detailed retrieval capability for pertinent names cited, which would not have been otherwise retrievable under existing Agency procedures. Helms approved our control and retrieval system, which was called Hydra. It was an online, remote-query, and remote-input capability and was linked to an IBM 360/67 computer of the OCS. The system was not linked in any way with the DDO. There certainly was no malignant intent in the growth of files. In only a few instances we maintained information from some of our agents on domestic activities in its files; most of this information was obtained during debriefing of these agents.

We did not have any officers with the technical skills to handle the computer system, which is why our support came from OCS, which provided the equivalent of five full man-years and two partial man-years of programming and system design support. Without this computer support, we would not have been able to run the program with the relatively small number of people available and with the short deadlines required to provide effective requirements and guidance for CIA stations.

For example, we received 2,593 cables in 1970; 2,190 cables in 1971; and 1,071 cables from January 1 to May 31, 1972, from our stations. In response, we wrote 2,114 cables in 1970; 2,217 cables in 1971; and 1,076 cables from January to May 1972. During these same timeframes, we received 1,016, 1,033, and 355 dispatches; we wrote 347, 315, and 99 dispatches, respectively, and we prepared and disseminated 746, 711, and 307 memoranda, mainly to the FBI on the activities of individuals of interest to them. Nor would we have been able, without our computer support, to respond effectively to special studies and estimate requirements levied upon us. We prepared fourteen in 1970, thirty-seven in 1971, and twenty-four in the January–May 1972 timeframe. We kept these data under very tight control. Ober did not allow any American names to be entered into CIA’s central file systems, but instead he established a procedure for them to be indexed in the computer records maintained within SOG. They were thus retrievable, but at the same time they were protected from unauthorized search by others in CIA. It also made it possible to completely and easily erase these records later.

The Rockefeller Commission expressed its concern, saying its members were mortified that MHCHAOS “became a repository for large quantities of information on domestic activities of American citizens . . . much of [which] was not directly related to the question of the existence of foreign connections.” The Commission stated, on page 24 of its report, that we “prepared 3,500 memoranda for internal use; 3000 memoranda for dissemination to the FBI; and 37 memoranda for distribution to the White House and other top officials in the government.”

While they concluded on page 25 that “it was probably necessary for the CIA to accumulate an information base on domestic dissident activities in order to assess fairly whether the activities had foreign connections,” they found that the “accumulation of domestic data in the Operation exceeded what was reasonably required to make such an assessment and was thus improper.” None of the Rockefeller Commission members, including its staff, had any in-depth experience in intelligence and none in counterintelligence; most were lawyers or politicians, and therefore these comments were made based on a layman’s understanding from interviews of CIA officials and their own legal views.

My first branch chief in the unit concerned with black militants was fanatical about indexing any individual connected, even remotely, to black militants or groups. If anyone threw a party or attended a party that raised funds for the Black Panthers or Angela Davis, they were indexed into the system. Although the index forms were filled in by hand and then sent to the office, where the forms were electronically entered, it was not that difficult a task to do. It did take time, but the forms were actually like carbon sheets on a pad. It was therefore easy to make several entries at one time.

Each person in the system had an index number, which was placed on the top of the sheet—if a person being indexed was new, we assigned an unused number from a list we had. We didn’t have to concern ourselves with repeating information such as birth date or location if it was already in the system. We added new items such as travel or if the person had contact with anyone. If the person being indexed had contacts with several people at the same time, all we had to do was fill in the appropriate data, which were copied to how many carbons we needed—usually we could not fill out more than ten sheets at one time—then go back and fill in the names of the contacts.

My branch chief constantly pushed us—myself and the other officer in the section—to index names into the system, and he kept notes on how well we were fulfilling this task. He prided himself on the number of index entries he made personally. He would sit at his desk with a short pile of Wintergreen Mints stacked up so that he could munch on them as he filled out the index forms. His favorite publications were Jet and Ebony. We stopped using this carbon system when our computer capability was improved. In the new system, only the names in messages were entered, and the document from which the name came. Thus, if we did a search and the name surfaced, we would have to pull the actual document before we could respond to the search request. Around this same time this branch chief left SOG for another assignment.

We actually used a multilayered system within the computer, in which each layer contained increasingly sensitive information and correspondingly more restricted access. Only MHCHAOS officers cleared for access to the more restricted streams of information could retrieve the items on an individual, which involved sensitive sources and methods or other tightly held intelligence. I should add that not all SOG officers were cleared for access to all levels. This system basically provided protection for the information. Any information coming from SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) was contained in safes in the office of the officer responsible for this information. The information was not allowed out of this room, so the officer would have to come to this room to read the report.

A fifth layer was added later, which had nothing to do with MHCHAOS but with foreign terrorism. The information came from the FBI at the time the unit was phasing out the MHCHAOS program and moving into the antiterror-ism field. Only Ober and I had access to this level. I had accompanied Ober to FBI headquarters, where the FBI let Ober borrow a magnetic tape with information on possible foreign (mainly Arab) terrorists and their U.S. supporters to download into our computer system. This would allow us to support the FBI in its counterterrorism role. Names or other identifying data that came to our attention could be checked against the FBI’s data to determine if there was a match.

This information was very closely held. A few days after the information was in the unit’s computer system, Jason H——called me into his office. He said he had been conducting an index search. Looking at the results of his query, he saw the entry, which was the code name for the FBI terrorist information. Unable to gain access to this level, he inquired what it was, to which I replied that he had to see Ober to get access—although I did control the system at the time, I was not authorized to grant access to it, even to the deputy chief. He did receive Ober’s clearance to access it.