INTRODUCTION

One of my close friends, knowing of my involvement in CIA’s counterintelligence (CI) staff ’s Special Operations Group (SOG) that had responsibility for the MHCHAOS program (Comment: common usage by the CIA rendered the name of this operation as MHCHAOS), urged me to write this book. He said it was important because I was there and could provide a different perspective from historians writing on the same subject from the outside looking in. It would also serve as a counterpoint to the congressional committees and the Rockefeller Commission, which launched investigations into our activities. I had always been concerned that not one of these investigations gave the American people the entire story.

As a history major at Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, Maryland, I never contemplated a career in intelligence, although my roommate during junior and senior year, Dennis Votral, talked about being a “spy.” I don’t think he ever applied, but he went to work for Potomac Edison in their human resources department.

Prior to my service in SOG I had been exposed to radical America. Little did I know at the time that I would be heavily involved in a program to collect information on American leftists and black militants that had and/or maintained contact with foreign revolutionaries, intelligence services, and terrorist organizations.

My first encounter with anti-war resistance was when my college classmate Robert “Bob” Osborne and I traveled to Washington, D.C., to do some barhopping. We ended up at a crowded and boisterous bar on 14th Street. We were drinking beers when a young man in his mid-twenties approached our table. He asked if he could buy us a round—now what college student in his right mind refuses a free drink? He got the beers and sat at our table chatting for over thirty minutes. He did the talking, all of it forgettable. Obviously we were not the best company because he suddenly left us and the bar.

No sooner did he leave than another older man approached us. This fellow, while trying to be somewhat friendly, was all business. He identified himself as Army intelligence and wanted to know what our former companion talked about. He was particularly interested in any discussion of resistance to the military draft. Bob and I collectively told him to buzz off.

For Bob, it was an act of defiance since he was very liberal in his outlook. He was an American but lived in Brussels and was somewhat European in his manners, speech, and non-conventional mindset. I had no interest at the time in the war or antiwar movement. I am convinced that our beer-buying buddy was trying to lose his Army intelligence surveillant by transferring the focus to us.

My second encounter was in the fall of 1965 when I was attending graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. The most electrifying activity on campus was opposition to the Vietnam War by radical new left and young Communist Party activists. Each day at noon, members of these groups would take to the microphone on the steps of Sproul Hall to denounce the war, the president, and the U.S. military. Sproul Hall was opposite the King Student Union, which housed the Golden Bear Restaurant area, and many students sat along the retaining walls or at the outside tables, eating their lunch and watching the comic-tragic opera taking place on the steps.

The speakers appeared to be the same day in and day out because they listed themselves as members of the various radical groups and spoke under the banner of these groups as a way to bypass the university’s rule that did not allow any organization to dominate the noon rallies. Students were also given permission to set up tables near Sather Gate. I remember walking along the row of card tables with signs like: Bay Area Anti-War Coalition, Young Socialist Alliance, Marxist-Leninist Group, and other radical, left-wing groups, ad nauseam.

My next encounter was on a Friday, 16 October 1965 to be exact. I was sitting in the living room of the house where I was living when another graduate student, Niles Walton, came in and asked if I wanted to take a ride to see the confrontation between the antiwar protestors and the Oakland police. The anti–Vietnam War groups had organized the International Days of Protest, which included a half-day teach-in on the campus and a march from the university down Telegraph Avenue to the Oakland Army Terminal, which was the major port for supplies going to American troops in Vietnam. The protestors’ goal was to block the road leading into the terminal.

We hopped on Niles’ motorcycle and reached the dividing line between Berkeley and Oakland before the protestors. Needless to say, other people had the same idea and all of us were occupying the intersection. On the Oakland side stood the riot police decked out in riot gear with their body shields and batons ready to do battle. The city of Oakland had denied the marchers’ request for a parade permit, and it was incredibly obvious that the police were prepared to enforce the law and crack some heads.

They didn’t get the chance. As the front echelon of the estimated ten thousand protestors arrived, they soon discovered that spectators were standing between them and the police. There was no way the protestors could get near the police line without causing mass confusion and a disruption in the march. Each marcher had to face the prospect of nudging his or her way through the mass of humanity, and in so doing becoming a protest march of one versus thousands. Seeing the situation, the protest leaders held a quick get-together to decide their next step.

Any thought of trying to march through the crowd to confront the police was quickly ruled out, because the police would make quick work of any protestors reaching them in small contingents. I don’t think the leaders wanted to be the first victims of falling police batons. The leaders discussed making a detour to the next block to skirt the police and the spectators, but the thought of moving that large a crowd in an orderly manner was inconceivable. In the end, sanity prevailed and the protest leaders called the march off and rescheduled it for the next day at noon.

High noon on Saturday arrived, but fewer than one hundred protestors showed up. It was homecoming day for the university football team, and many of the students who were willing to take an evening stroll to the Oakland Army Terminal the night before abandoned the idea in favor of going to the game. The Oakland police had no trouble blocking the marchers, and the march itself became a small footnote in the antiwar movement.

The antiwar movement made the times exciting at Berkeley. One of my friends, Willard “Burke” Murray, lived in an apartment several blocks away, which he shared with a student involved in the antiwar movement. One day he dropped by for a visit to say he had to leave his apartment because he couldn’t stand listening any further to his roommate and his friends discuss an upcoming confrontation with the police. Burke said they had several boxes containing gas masks, which they were going to distribute before battling with the police. I remember Burke calling them “nut cases.”

The final incident occurred in the spring of 1966 when my wife and I moved to an apartment in Berkeley. One night I awoke because of a loud noise, which rattled the windows. California is noted for earthquakes and I had experienced a few. I thought perhaps another minor quake had struck somewhere. The next day I discovered that a bomb had exploded prematurely in an apartment around the corner from us. The radicals making the bomb were killed. It was never discovered what or who was the intended target.

These small, minor affairs were merely a continuation of the unrest in the United States. University and college campuses were scenes not only of mass protests but also violence. The University of California, Berkeley, saw the first student disorder in the fall of 1964. This was followed by disruptions at smaller and private universities, such as the University of Chicago in 1966. The next year these student protests and sit-ins became more widespread. In the spring of 1968 the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized a protest at Columbia University that succeeded in closing down university operations. Emboldened by their success, the next year SDS caused the shutdown of Harvard University. In the spring of 1970 there was a sharp escalation in the extent and severity of campus turmoil. This escalation of campus violence spread across the nation following President Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia and the killing of four Kent State University students by Ohio National Guardsmen. Arson and vandalism directed at ROTC and other military classrooms on campuses were commonplace.

President Nixon also had to deal with a wave of bombings across the nation. From 1 January 1968 to 9 July 1970 there were 4,568 bombings, 1,506 bombing attempts and incidents, and more than 35,000 bombing threats in the United States (see Appendix B). In about 36 percent of these cases law enforcement agencies were able to categorize the perpetrators of bombing incidents. They also discovered that about 56 percent could be attributed to campus disturbances, 19 percent to black extremists, 14 percent to white extremists, 2 percent to labor disputes, and 1 percent to attacks on religious institutions.

Over the years the social cohesiveness of the United States allowed its citizens to remain reasonably united in their support of government involvement in previous wars, but in the 1960s the situation was transformed. The Vietnam War fragmented and divided our society. The new, middle-class pro-testor locked arms and joined forces with the old-line militants to confront the Johnson and the Nixon administrations about American involvement in a civil war in a small Asian nation. But President Johnson continued his Vietnam policy, which only exacerbated the New Left and alienated the moderate middle class with its attempts to rein in the radicals. The challenge to time-honored authority and a lack of political deference to the nation’s leadership by these college “radicals” was viewed as foreign inspired.

Both presidents were convinced that the vast majority of these acts of terrorism were caused by internationally organized, conspiratorial intelligence or revolutionary organizations, not by individuals or by very small affinity groups who shared the revolutionary goals of organizations such as the Black Panther Party (BPP) or the SDS Weatherman faction. These individuals and groups acted on their own initiative without any extensive coordination. In saying this, I do not absolve any of the radical or black extremist groups espousing taking up arms or causing violence in the United States as part of their plans and goals.

The question becomes: Did Presidents Johnson and Nixon have the right to take action to protect the government and American citizens against these sources of revolutionary violence and destruction? Was it then and is it still justified for CIA to determine if American New Left and black extremist bombings, murders, and destruction were being directed by any foreign power?

An honest evaluation will show that we in SOG walked that fine line between protecting American civil liberties and protecting America’s security. It all boiled down to a congressional firestorm over nothing. The press also ranted and raved about it, but this was expected because the relationship between the liberal press and the liberals in Congress is synergistic. Each lives and feeds off the other so they naturally protect each other. You can easily see this synergism today in how the mainstream media have almost become propaganda outlets for liberal philosophy.

The New York Times’ articles, the Rockefeller Commission, and the congressional investigation also created a great number of urban myths and legends regarding MHCHAOS. The short seven-year span of CIA’s activities relevant to the American antiwar, New Left, and black radicalism movements remains to this day haunted by liberal neuroses and fantasies. Those who wrote, and continue to write, about the program have no intelligence experience and therefore have little understanding of how CIA operates, which has led them to conduct flawed analysis.

Unable to place their information into proper context, these “experts” pieced together extraneous fragments in an effort to fill in evitable gaps and inconsistencies in their research. From this effort, new urban legends about CIA spying against Americans are born and written with vindictive passions and energies, which become accepted as gospel. In fact, these myths have been reprinted so often that now they are journalistic “facts” that can be verified in multiple sources.

Since Angus MacKenzie’s book Secrets: The CIA’s War At Home, which is considered the Bible by CIA detesters, those in the media and other individuals writing about MHCHAOS have been guilty of using circular and conflicting allegations—all without confirmation or corroboration. Through a lack of knowledge or, in some cases, just putting forth their own biased beliefs, they continue to present these assertions as known facts.

Stuart H. Lorry¹ did a review of MacKenzie’s book and stated that MHCHAOS “began an inter-government drive to sign all government employees to a contract prohibiting first the disclosure of classified information and later ‘classifiable’ as well.” At no time did we engage in such a drive. Government officials who are granted access to classified intelligence reports do sign a secrecy agreement not to reveal any classified information not authorized for release. The secrecy agreement is meant to protect CIA sources and methods because any classified intelligence leaks cause our adversaries to change their systems to deny us future information, and in some cases they are able to identify CIA sources to arrest and execute them.

Verne Lynn, writing in Covert Action Information Bulletin (Summer 1990), picks up Seymour Hersh’s theme in the New York Times of a “massive” operation. Lynn states, “For over 15 years, the CIA with assistance from numerous government agencies, conducted a massive illegal domestic covert operation called Operation MHCHAOS.” He then further strains his credibility by adding that “the CIA went to great length to conceal this operation from the public, which every president from Eisenhower to Nixon exploited for his own political ends.” No historians who have studied Eisenhower or President John F. Kennedy have documented that either president had an “MHCHAOS Unit,” much less needed one during his time in office. The program began under President Johnson and ended under President Nixon.

To further illustrate these inaccuracies, Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, in their The Encyclopedia of Espionage, defined MHCHAOS as a “U.S. domestic surveillance operation conducted by the FBI during the Vietnam War to determine whether antiwar protest movements in the United States were communist-inspired.” They refer the reader to the section on the FBI, in which they then say, “From 1967 to 1972 COINTELPRO expanded to include an FBI-directed CIA operation, given the code name MHCHAOS.”² Since two investigative bodies—the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee —reported on SOG, in addition to the countless news articles written about the MHCHAOS program, one would think that researchers knew it was a purely CIA operation.

The problem is that people have succumbed to an existing mindset and regurgitate the same litany of sins when researching or writing about MHCHAOS. I am not optimistic that future researchers will honestly look at this period and draw their own conclusions without resorting to just rewriting these myths.

My pessimistic outlook is based on an example given by Peter Schwartz, an internationally respected futurist and business strategist, who once discussed an eighteenth-century map that he personally owns, showing California as an island. For 150 years mapmakers faithfully reproduced this erroneous map, despite missionaries and others who insisted that the map was incorrect. As a result, explorers would head west, hauling their boats over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, only to find “the longest beach they’d ever seen.” Schwartz’s point, applicable to MHCHAOS, is: If you get the facts wrong, you get the map wrong. If you get the map wrong, you do the wrong thing. And once you believe your map, it’s very hard to change.³

I know MHCHAOS is and will remain an emotionally charged subject, and it would be nearly impossible to convince those with closed minds who support the belief that the program abridged the constitutional rights of Americans otherwise. These people will never accept the fact that those of us who were involved in this endeavor were simply and purely motivated by the concern of a foreign threat to our nation. Our mission was to prevent subversion by making a determination if meetings between U.S. radicals or black extremists with hostile foreign intelligence officers or terrorist organizations were anything but benign. This we did with integrity.

I leave it to you, the reader, to make up your own mind.