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Colby Opens Pandora’s Box
The three catalysts for the congressional investigation into CIA activities were the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the Hersh article. Considerable sentiment for better oversight of CIA had previously surfaced in Congress, which became concerned that an unchecked CIA had been conducting various illegal activities. At that time, congressional suspicion focused principally on possible CIA participation in the White House’s Huston Plan, mounting intelligence operations against American citizens in the United States, conducting a secret war in Laos, Watergate, and the overthrow and death of Salvador Allende in Chile. For Colby it was crystal clear that the investigation could not be contained. Congress had changed as a result of Vietnam and Watergate. Trust no longer existed between CIA and Congress as it did in previous years, but Congress did not know how to exhibit its distrust until it discovered the investigative committee routine.
Hersh began to work on CIA involvement in domestic activities because he believed CIA was involved in the Watergate scandal. Hersh had informed the House Intelligence Subcommittee chairman, Lucian Nedzi, that he had information that CIA was engaged in extensive domestic operations. Hersh was obviously looking for confirmation as well as further information. This ploy is used by all journalists who have a piece of information. The journalist relates the information, including any erroneous tidbits, hoping that his interviewee will correct him or her and provide additional data. The reaction of the interviewee is to correct any misinformation and thereby unknowingly contribute to the journalist’s story. In this way, the journalist is able to gather further information for his exposé.
On December 16, 1973, former DDO Karamessines informed Colby that Hersh contacted him to say that he was doing a story based on information from his CIA and congressional sources that Helms and Angleton were engaged in running domestic surveillance operations in violation of the Fourth Amendment. It was obvious to Colby that Hersh had somehow discovered remnants of the review Colby did in 1973 at DCI Schlesinger’s behest. Schlesinger had only been DCI a short time when he was blindsided by the McCord letters. He was as mad as hell, according to some Agency officers, and told Colby that he wanted to know what other time bombs were lurking out there. He gave the job to Colby on the same day that it was announced that Colby would be the new DCI, replacing Schlesinger.
On May 9, 1973, Schlesinger issued a memorandum for all CIA employees. It read:
1. Recent press reports outline in detail certain alleged CIA activities with respect to Mr. Howard Hunt and other parties. The presently known facts behind these stories are those stated in the attached draft of a statement I will be making to the Senate Committee on Appropriations on 9 May. As can be seen, the Agency provided limited assistance in response to a request by senior officials. The Agency has cooperated with and made available to the appropriate law enforcement bodies information about these activities and will continue to do so.
2. All CIA employees should understand my attitude on this type of issue. I shall do everything in my power to confine CIA activities to those, which fall within a strict interpretation of its legislative charter. I take this position because I am determined that the law shall be respected and because this is the best way to foster the legitimate and necessary contributions we in CIA can make to the national security of the United States, I am taking several actions to implement this objective:
3. I have ordered all senior operating officials of this Agency to report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or that have gone on in the past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of this Agency.
4. I hereby direct every person presently employed by CIA to report to me on any such activities of which he has knowledge. I invite all ex-employees to do the same. Anyone who has such information should call my secretary (extension 6363) and say that he wishes to talk to me about “activities outside CIA’s charter.”
5. To ensure that Agency activities are proper in the future, I hereby promulgate the following standing order for all CIA employees: Any CIA employee, who believes that he has received instructions which in any way appear inconsistent with the CIA legislative charter, shall inform the Director of Central Intelligence immediately.
Colby actually wrote the memorandum, which upset many DDO officers who sensed that it could provoke a lot of bloodletting by officers who perceived that they were denied promotions or choice assignments because they had disagreed with a CIA operation. Colby saw it differently. He believed that with a new director, one who didn’t know about one of the important aspects of the Watergate scandal, it was the proper way to go—to find out what the activities were and correct them.
After he finished the report, Colby discussed it with Schlesinger who agreed that the report should be shown to the appropriate congressional committees overseeing the Agency. Schlesinger also suggested that Colby, who was just named to replace him as DCI, do the briefing. Although President Nixon appointed Schlesinger secretary of defense on May 10, 1973, Schlesinger did not resign as DCI until July 2. But for all intents and purposes he did not become involved in any further decisions regarding CIA.
Acting DCI Walters acted as a caretaker until Colby’s confirmation. Colby followed through on the 693-page compendium known as the “Family Jewels.” As the incoming DCI, Colby should have buried the report or destroyed it, in my opinion. None of the activities in the report were still ongoing operations, and there was no need to prostrate these CIA activities before the world.
Others, much closer to Colby in the Agency, advised him to keep the “Family Jewels” secret. However, Walter Pforzheimer said, “Whatever Bill had in mind it was going to come out. It didn’t matter how old it was or what the issue was, once he had it in his mind to release something, it was coming out. And he didn’t want to be bothered with the details. He just had a style that if I disagreed with him—if nine out of 10 people in the room disagreed with him—his response tended to be, ‘Fine, I’ll go with the tenth.’”
1 When Colby reviewed the “Family Jewels” his impression was that all of these things were small potatoes. In almost all cases CIA wiretaps and surveillances were on its own employees or ex-employees.
As to MHCHAOS, Colby is quoted as saying: “I think that the results of the investigation will rather clearly show . . . that the program that we undertook to identify foreign links with American dissident movements was not a massive one in the numbers involved, was not a domestic one because it was basically foreign, and it wasn’t illegal because it was under our charter and our National Security Act.”
2After he became director, Colby issued a series of directives, which read like the Ten Commandments—“Thou shall not do this; thou shall not do that.” It was Colby’s way of doing things. He reasoned that if an agency activity was controversial, it was best for the director to spell out in directives what he expected. He wanted to set the record straight on what his policies and positions were. His goal was to make it clear and concise.
Colby then shared the “Family Jewels” information with Sen. John Stennis, a Democrat from Mississippi.
3 He asked Colby to brief Sen. William Stuart Symington, a Democrat from Missouri, who belonged to the old-boys club of the Senate—the ones who were not really interested in hearing details about CIA activities. Colby did brief him in detail and Symington responded with a simple “Thank you.”
Colby and Schlesinger never thought to brief the White House. Although Schlesinger disliked the White House staff, including Henry Kissinger, neither he nor Colby considered whether the White House should even be briefed or not; they simply didn’t ask that question. If they briefed both houses of Congress, one would think they would have been smart enough to find someone in the White House they trusted and inform that person at least. They failed to do so.
Despite Colby’s laudable explanations of why he went public, he had an obligation to first discuss any such actions with President Gerald Ford. I find it reprehensible that Colby did not have enough common sense to even consider arranging a meeting with the president or his top advisors to inform them of his plans and seek their advice. All CIA officers are told periodically that if they are contacted by the press or by congressional staffs, they are not to say anything but to report such contact to senior CIA officials. Since Colby worked for the president, he committed the greatest sin by not advising the president about the coming firestorm and his planned response.
On the same day that Colby fired Angleton, December 20, 1973, he met with Hersh, who mentioned that CIA had conducted wiretaps, mail openings, surveillance, and breaking and entering. Colby had the mistaken idea that by talking with Hersh he would be able to tone down the exposé. Colby informed Hersh that there was no “massive” domestic operation, that what Hersh had gathered were bits and pieces of CIA activities covering twenty-five years. Colby further advised Hersh that he had merely collected insignificant incidents, but Hersh perceived Colby’s words as solid confirmation of his data.
Colby accomplished nothing by meeting with Hersh, as the article made the headlines on the front page of the New York Times. Jay Epstein suggested that Colby leaked the “Family Jewels” in an effort to get rid of Angleton, his long-time nemesis in the Agency. Epstein was also on the edge of calling Colby a big mole in CIA. For me, this was simply a meeting between the egomania of a reporter who saw his exposé as a means to a Pulitzer Prize and a naïve DCI who felt that honestly discussing the situation with such an individual would deflate or limit any damage.
Colby’s penchant for openness got him in trouble again in January 1975. He appeared before a closed session of the Senate Appropriation Committee’s Subcommittee on Intelligence. During this hearing, Colby used his Vail Report to brief the members. The subcommittee urged Colby to go public with the information to counteract Hersh’s charges. Rather than sidestepping the subcommittee’s recommendation, Colby readily agreed. In fact, Colby said he was “delighted” to go public; “ever since I prepared the Vail Report I had been hoping to get it out . . . believing it the most effective way to counter the misconceptions fostered by Hersh’s article.”
4Probably because of his legal background, Colby believed that his truth, his whole truth, and nothing but his truth would be firmly accepted by the press and put an end to the brewing nightmare, but it had the opposite effect. The press leaped on the story, writing that Colby had confirmed CIA’s misdeeds. Colby again misjudged the scandal-seeking muckrakers looking for a good story. CIA had become fair game, and journalists, as Colby put it, believed that what he had revealed about CIA’s past misdeeds was just the tip of the iceberg.
Colby indicated he intended to cooperate fully with the Rockefeller Commission and ordered each directorate to establish a task force, with its associate deputy director in charge, to deal with the demands of the investigation. The inspector general was assigned to coordinate their efforts, with assistance from the general counsel. The scope of the review was to include all questionable activities undertaken during the entire history of the Agency to that date. In mid-April Colby circulated an internal memo in which he noted that a former DCI had recently been shocked to learn that he had not been informed of certain CIA activities begun before his directorship but continued during it, and that the decision not to inform him had been a conscious one. (Colby was referring to John McCone and the withholding of information about CIA contacts with Mafia figures in connection with Project MONGOOSE .)
Colby wrote that such a situation was totally intolerable and cast grave doubts on the integrity of the Agency. To reinforce his point, he declared that he was establishing as Agency doctrine the requirement that there be “no surprises,” internally for the DCI or, by extension, for authorized supervisory bodies, including the NSC, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Activity Board (PFIAB), and the appropriate committees of Congress. Finally, in July 1975, Colby hired an outside attorney, civil rights lawyer Mitchell Rogovin, to defend the Agency and take on the workload that had become too much for CIA’s general counsel.
While Colby and the top management of CIA pushed forward with efforts to cooperate with the investigations, many employees and “old hands” made no secret of their disapproval. Helms, for example, later said that he considered the proceedings a travesty of what Agency people had been led to believe about espionage, operations, and the sanctity of files. Some said that Colby believed the Agency’s recovery from the assault of the media was in cooperating with the investigations, but others in the intelligence profession viewed intelligence secrets as sacred. Colby knew that many professionals said he should have stonewalled the whole thing because intelligence was too important, while a few others said he should have resigned. Colby rejected their comments because he did not believe that stonewalling was a valid option; President Nixon tried it with the Watergate scandal—it didn’t work then and Colby didn’t think it would work now.
Colby’s strategy was to confront the investigating committees head on. He recognized that each congressional committee would start out on a prosecuting mission, but he calculated that if he gave them an overall view of CIA’s intelligence work, the committees would quickly see that the activities they were investigating were insignificant compared to the larger picture. This was the basic point that Colby hammered home, beginning with the chairman of each committee. He arranged to see them immediately after they were named. He told them that he wanted to give them the big picture of the Agency’s activities in order for them to put the “Family Jewels” list in its proper proportion and context.
Additionally, Colby informed all CIA employees in late February 1975 that any employees contacted by the Rockefeller Commission could cooperate freely by disclosing any CIA perceived illegal domestic activities, or not cooperate if they felt that way. If any employees had any doubts or questions about reporting such an activity, they were told to raise the issue with the DCI, CIA’s inspector general, or with the Rockefeller Commission directly.
Colby’s fatal mistake was blindsiding the White House by not informing them of the oncoming tempest. After Nixon resigned, Colby, who was now DCI, never thought to inform the Ford White House, which was a major oversight, particularly because Colby knew the New York Times was going to print Hersh’s story. To correct this, Colby used the information gathered by CIA’s inspector general and written in a memorandum dated May 21, 1973, to rapidly complete a report during the Christmas holidays for Kissinger to take to President Ford, who was vacationing in Vail, Colorado—hence the name “Vail Report.”
The White House did not receive the “Family Jewels” list until January 3, 1975 despite the fact that Colby notified the congressional committees’ chairmen, with the oversight of CIA, about it three months after it was collected. Colby even told his senior managers, in a memo dated August 29, 1973, that he had used the inspector general’s report and other supplemental memoranda “in a detailed, page-by-page review of all such information with Senator Symington and Congressman Nedzi, as Chairman of the Senate and the House Armed Services Intelligence Subcommittees, respectively.”
The Vail Report did not help matters with administration officials. It appeared to them that Colby had whipped the report together in great haste because it consisted of file documents quickly pulled together and tacked on as appendixes to a hastily composed letter. The report also obfuscated the issue by not clarifying or pointing out Hersh’s errors, but simply restating a long list of past CIA misdeeds. In effect, administration officials felt the report tended to confirm Hersh’s allegation and caused further confusion by adding questionable CIA activities that Hersh did not include in his article.
Angleton’s defenders quickly counterattacked Colby by presenting a much darker interpretation of the Vail Report. For example, Epstein, an Angleton defender, wrote “that it was Colby himself who had energized the leak [and it] had also become clear in the meantime to members of CIA’s CI staff who had been forced to resign on account of it. Newton S. Miler, then Chief of Ops for CI, discovered that Colby’s report to the President had been prepared within a day of the story’s appearance in
The Times. Analyzing the research that had gone into the document, he concluded that Colby could not possibly have written it within such a brief period.”
5In his covering memo, Colby informed the president that he had written the report in such a way that it could be made public and recommended the president do so. The White House naturally rejected Colby’s recommendation. The Vail Report was only on the subject of the domestic allegations because Colby left several pages blank where the information on assassinations had been. He wanted to personally discuss this activity with President Ford. When he met the President on January 3, 1975, Colby informed him that he had not been briefed on the fact that CIA had some questionable activities outside of the domestic question and mentioned assassinations and drug testing. It was at this same time that the president informed Colby that he was considering pulling together a blue ribbon commission to conduct an investigation of CIA’s domestic activities to answer the
New York Times’ charges.
6After the story broke in December 1974, Kissinger and others in the administration urged President Ford to appoint a citizen’s commission to investigate Hersh’s charges. The
Washington Post, citing “Administration sources,” said Kissinger wanted to establish a forum to curb public controversy and provide for a review of CIA activities in a “rational, unemotional and careful manner.”
7 President Ford agreed, hoping to quickly stop all the allegations and rumors. In the end, all the Vail Report accomplished was to provoke concerns by the White House about what other skeletons CIA might have in its closet. President Ford stated that Colby’s report had “raised enough questions” about CIA activities to warrant an investigation.
8Colby’s opening of CIA’s Pandora’s box denied him a chance to put his ideas for CIA’s future into operation. His attempts to conduct intelligence business as usual and simultaneously to revamp CIA came to a near halt in late December 1974. From then on, he had to concentrate most of his efforts on coping with external investigations and other threats to the very existence of the Agency. Regular CIA business was constantly interrupted during 1975 by demands for the DCI to testify on the Hill about one matter or another. As Colby stated:
By mid-1975, appearances on the Hill became a pervasive aspect of my job as DCI, and I was going up there to report on every new step taken in the Angola, Kurdish, and other covert operations under way as well as testifying on practically everything the CIA had ever done during the last three decades to the Select Committees investigating intelligence. Sadly, the experience demonstrated that secrets, if they are to remain secret, cannot be given to more than a few Congressmen—
every new project subjected to this procedure during 1975 leaked and the “covert” part of CIA’s covert action seemed almost gone.
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