8

PLUGGING THE DIKE

A disturbing episode in the CIA’s war on books concerned one of its own, Victor Marchetti, who resigned in frustration during 1969. A fifteen-year veteran, Marchetti had wide experience, including as a photo interpreter and as special assistant to the CIA director. In retirement he wrote a novel called The Rope Dancer, portraying CIA machinations in a harsh light. Then Marchetti teamed up with John D. Marks, a former State Department intelligence analyst, to offer publishers a nonfiction exposé of the agency’s roles and missions, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence.1 Meanwhile, in conjunction with the appearance of his novel, Marchetti had given a highly critical interview to the wire service United Press International, printed in the newsweekly U.S. News and World Report. That put him on Langley’s radar screen. In late 1971 the Marchetti interview became a point of contention among agency officials concerned the CIA had become excessively involved in domestic activities.

Director Helms ordered Marchetti placed under surveillance on March 23, 1972. Under Project Butane, Howard Osborn’s Office of Security kept the Marchetti watch up for a month. Hysteria increased another notch in early April when the former spook put an article in The Nation depicting the CIA as the loyal tool of presidents. Again, Langley saw national security damage where, just a couple of years hence, it would come under wide attack as the infamous “rogue elephant” careening out of control. More reflective officers must later have wished Marchetti’s arguments had survived CIA’s attempts to discredit him. Meanwhile, Langley soon learned the agency veteran and his coauthor Marks were planning a more ambitious manuscript.

Worried sick, the CIA acquired a copy of Marchetti’s book proposal. Helms secured the cooperation of Nixon’s White House, enlisting the Department of Justice for a Pentagon Papers–like effort at prior restraint. Agency lawyer John S. Warner went to U.S. District Court with an affidavit from deputy director Tom Karamessines, arguing the CIA’s special duty to protect “sources and methods” under the Central Intelligence Act of 1949. Warner obtained a court order compelling Marchetti to submit his manuscript to prepublication review. The filing was made without even notifying the defendant, and the temporary restraining order of April 18, 1972, would be the first Marchetti knew that his writing was at issue.

The authors, so far at work for only a few months, subsequently encountered numerous roadblocks. Marchetti had to clear each piece of his work with Langley, which slowed down John Marks as well. The agency called for deletion of roughly 20 percent of the entire text. Marchetti’s lawyers tried to quash the injunction and suppress the demands. The Justice Department argued it was enforcing the contract Marchetti had signed as a CIA employee, not abridging Marchetti’s First Amendment rights. A hearing took place on May 15. Karamessines appeared in a wheelchair, demanding his testimony be taken in secret, and the federal judge went along. Historian Angus Mackenzie obtained the trial transcript and reports Karamessines “insisted that Marchetti had to be censored so the other U.S. intelligence agencies’ foreign allies would continue to trust the CIA. At stake, he said, was the CIA’s reputation among the world community of spies.”2 Judge Albert V. Bryan, Jr., granted a permanent injunction. Bryan did provide for a review process, however. Forced to justify its national security claims, the CIA abandoned half its demands, compromising on 168 deletions that still subtracted vast amounts of material. Melvin Wulf, the authors’ lawyer, recalls as very painful the night they met to scissor out swaths of text. Among passages the CIA claimed would “damage” national security, but later relented upon, was one noting that Richard Nixon had mispronounced the name of a country at a meeting, the comment that Henry Kissinger was the most powerful figure on the unit that approved CIA covert operations, the remark that spy satellites were very expensive, plus notes on CIA activities in Tibet and Chile, including the fact that national intelligence estimates had cautioned against the kind of scheme mounted against Salvador Allende. Since the Marchetti-Marks book appeared in 1974, after Allende’s overthrow, these passages were of historical note but had no operational significance.

The authors had already appealed the court order, and their hearing before the Fourth Circuit took place on May 31, 1972. On the eve, presidential counselor John Ehrlichman forwarded to Mr. Nixon a letter from Richard Helms thanking the White House for its assistance. Ehrlichman reminded Nixon of their provision of “the necessary help to file an action against Marchetti” and observed that agency lawyers were confident of the outcome on appeal. The president scribbled “Good” in the margin.³ The Helms letter itself, sent a week earlier, expressed his pleasure at the help “in what I consider historic litigation on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency.”⁴

Judge Clement F. Haynsworth, whom Nixon had nominated for the Supreme Court several years earlier, and who had failed to obtain Senate confirmation, headed the circuit court panel. In mid-September Haynsworth issued the panel’s decision, which continued the permanent injunction, merely requiring the CIA to respond “promptly” to anything Marchetti might submit for approval, since the effect of its order was to impose a prior restraint on Victor Marchetti’s freedom of speech. Marchetti and Marks appealed again, now to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. The writing—and final negotiation of deletions—delayed the book for two years. Even though the American Civil Liberties Union provided its legal services for free, the case cost publisher Alfred A. Knopf more than $630,000 (in 2012 dollars).

Undoing the damage—not to national security but to citizens’ national interest—took many years and remains incomplete. A first edition of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence was published with graphic representation of the deletions. Litigation went on for years, and the courts finally judged legitimately secret only 27 of the 339 passages the CIA had originally excised. In the meantime officers who might have written about the agency were dissuaded. Langley looked pathetic anew when some of the things it had insisted seriously damaged national security appeared: the “secrets” were completely routine descriptions of CIA offices, functions, and activities. Similar descriptions had long been in print from authors like Harry Howe Ransom and David Wise. None of the material seemed especially sensitive with respect to the CIA’s alliances with foreign services. The Marchetti and Marks book contained notes on CIA operations too, but these went only a short way beyond what the public already knew. Apparently what was sensitive was an agency veteran speaking authoritatively on allegations previously made by authors or journalists. National security was an instrument wielded to inhibit public discussion, avoid inquiry, and evade accountability.

Richard Helms was right. The Marchetti case cannot be overemphasized as a milestone in the expansion of CIA dominance of discussion of its business, intelligence matters. Until United States v. Marchetti there was no requirement for formal review of public writings by CIA officers and no mechanism to accomplish that. Agency officials like Allen Dulles, George Carver, and Miles Copeland had put out books and articles with, at most, cursory once-over from a busy special assistant, a quick look by the Office of Security, and often with nothing but encouragement. The Marchetti case marked construction of the first pillar in what became an edifice of information ascendancy, restricting discussion by means of limiting the knowledge available from the most authoritative commentators—former intelligence officers.

If Langley wanted a truly dangerous adversary, it had not long to wait. The enemy would be one of its own, Philip Agee. In the CIA pantheon he became something close to the devil incarnate. In fact, Agee ultimately became the poster boy for the agency’s brand of suppressive maneuvers. What is not so well known is that Langley helped create this enemy and then exploited his existence for its own ends. The Agee case put in place the second pillar of the CIA’s fortress of secrecy. Its reverberations were heard once again even as the finishing touches were put to this manuscript, as will be seen later in the experience of John Kiriakou.

A Florida boy, product of Catholic schools straight through Notre Dame, and raised in comfortable circumstances, Phil Agee was considered prime CIA material. He turned down the agency when it first approached him, before graduation, but joined after all in 1957, when law school did not suit Agee and the alternative was the draft. Over a dozen years, Philip Agee served honorably in what was then the Western Hemisphere Division of the clandestine service, participating in almost every kind of operation, primarily in Ecuador and Uruguay, but with short stints in other nations as well. After a tour on the Mexican desk at Langley his last assignment was to Mexico City, slated to host the 1968 summer Olympics, with cover as the ambassador’s special assistant to the Olympic commission. Agee recollects that he began with idealistic hopes—reinforced by John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress—that Latin America would reform and the CIA could be part of that solution. He became disillusioned in the mid-’60s, realizing that agency efforts to neutralize the Latin American left played into the hands of oligarchs by reducing political pressures on them to reform. Agee writes that he did that last tour in Mexico already having the intention of leaving the agency. Marital problems exacerbated by his service, plus disaffection, were major concerns. A Mexican girlfriend who wanted no part of the CIA sharpened that intention—and when superiors insisted she be investigated before they marry, that sealed Agee’s determination to resign.

Beyond that origin story, nearly everything about Philip Burnett Franklin Agee is controversial. That is because he wrote a book highly critical of the CIA that revealed how it worked in Latin America and identified over 250 agency officers—the beginning of a long crusade against U.S. intelligence. Former colleagues dispute how good a spy Agee had been; whether he was a whistleblower or an agent for Cuban (or Soviet) intelligence, hence a traitor; whether he was a communist. Critic or villain? Forests of trees could probably be slaughtered in disputing the “truth” about Phil Agee. The more interesting—and more important—question is discovering the degree to which CIA suppressive maneuvers made Agee into the thorn he became, just as agency training had turned him into the spy he had been. There is an element of meanness in the CIA’s efforts to track Agee and then counter him that had to have had an effect. Agee died in 2008 and can no longer speak to his motives, but the record of suppressive maneuvers against him can be established. The CIA not only battled Philip Agee, it used him.

The Mexico City Olympics came and went. Philip Agee left the agency in 1969. According to later CIA director William E. Colby, Agee’s resignation letter was not negative at all, but a text expressing esteem for the agency and regret at leaving it. By Agee’s own account, he had political reasons for leaving—he opposed the Vietnam war and saw CIA actions there as cut from the same cloth as those in Latin America—but he had no intention of speaking out, writing a book, or anything else. He worked in a commercial firm for a year and attended the Autonomous University of Mexico City. It was there, exposed to Latino perspectives on the Americas, to fellow students who had suffered at the hands of CIA-backed military juntas, and to even more vociferous opposition to America in Vietnam, that Philip Agee began toying with writing a critique of U.S. policy in Latin America, expressed through CIA actions, framed in relation to the Vietnam war. The idea was vague and inchoate, and Agee recalls it took form slowly and without his ever making a concrete choice.

The difficulties were research and writing. At a certain point Agee exhausted the material available in Mexico City, still without having found much of the socioeconomic data he needed for background, as well as files of the Uruguayan and Ecuadoran newspapers from when he had been assigned to those places. And once Agee quit his job and turned to writing, he lost his salary and had to depend on savings. A writer friend counseled the former spook not to draft his anti-CIA book in Mexico, a country the agency had wired up tight. The friend put him in touch with the French publisher François Maspero, who advanced Agee some money and arranged to get him into Cuba. Phil Agee spent some time there, returned briefly to Mexico to wind up his affairs, and returned to Cuba for more research. Eventually he had gone through everything available in Havana and moved on to Paris, leaving behind requests for additional data that were going to take time to compile, plus a paper on CIA methods to be forwarded to Allende’s Chile and a letter to the editor of an Uruguayan leftist journal. The Cubans warned Agee not to publish those things, but he did not care.

These details are important because of what happened later. In Mexico, there had been a very active MH/Chaos branch at the CIA station, but Agee’s spiral into opposition never came to its attention. It was publication of Agee’s letter in the Uruguayan magazine Marcha that raised warning flags at Langley. Some time later in Paris a knock came at Agee’s door, and he opened it to find a CIA colleague, a man who had been with him in training and also in Latin America. The former colleague happened to be visiting London, he related, and thought to pop over and see how Phil was doing. Agee knew the man’s story of getting the address from his estranged wife was impossible. Once they were alone, the fellow admitted that he had, in fact, gotten the address from the agency’s Paris station. Langley knew of Agee’s letter in Marcha, the CIA man said, and added, “Helms sent me to ask what this is all about.”5

Philip Agee answered by criticizing CIA covert action, added he was writing a book, and, foolhardy or defiant, let drop that he had been to Cuba and was in touch with Maspero. No doubt Helms’s eyebrows rose when he heard that. François Maspero was the publisher of Che Guevara’s Bolivian diary, and CIA regarded Cuba as an archenemy in league with the Soviets. Director Helms initiated a full-scale operation to penetrate Agee’s activities. Not long after, at the café Agee frequented, he met a young American, a man with New Left journalistic credentials who had arrived in Paris in September 1971. Sal Ferrera had been groomed by the Project Chaos project and had infiltrated the antiwar movement (Chapter 3). Ferrera now ingratiated himself with Agee. He found the budding author a typewriter, and won his trust by spotting a CIA surveillance team and helping Agee evade it. Later Ferrera steered Agee to a bar where a pretty woman picked him up. She found common ground with Agee, waxed enthusiastic about his work, and, claiming to be from a monied family, began to supply him cash. Agee photocopied his draft manuscript for the woman, who wanted to read what he had written. Dollops of money, an offer to stay at her apartment, and the loan of another typewriter followed. At a certain point Agee discovered the typewriter had been bugged. No doubt the apartment was too.

Phil Agee eventually decided that both Ferrera and the woman were CIA plants. Other friends agreed. But Agee dallied with them at length, perhaps desperate for money, even making plans for them to help him in London during the final stage of his research. There were repeated instances of surveillance by CIA teams, including one, Agee recounts, when the watchers were caught right outside his apartment. Meanwhile, in the United States, Agee’s father was confronted by an agency lawyer who said he came on behalf of Director Helms. The lawyer, John Greaney of OGC, left behind copies of Agee’s signed secrecy agreement and the court decision in United States v. Marchetti. After that, the father’s tax returns were audited by the Internal Revenue Service. Greaney next saw Agee’s estranged wife, encouraging her to refuse him visits with their children.

Apart from the heavy-handed aspects of all this stands the fact that the agency, in effect, supported and financed the very book it feared so much. By these means Langley even obtained a copy of an early draft. Naturally, Philip Agee discovered the CIA’s maneuvers—and a decade later he obtained a modicum of proof in the form of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. To the degree that these antics outraged the former spook, the CIA helped create its own bogeyman.

That Langley actually had Agee’s book can be confirmed. In May 1972 the Western Hemisphere Division was taken over by Theodore Shackley, who had once led operations against Cuba and had more recently been a secret warrior in Laos and Vietnam. Shackley initiated a wholesale shakeout of the division, a program that had its own cryptonym and cost untold millions. The purpose was to realign operations and terminate anything that Philip Agee knew about. At the Mexico City station, officer Joseph B. Smith spent his final year pensioning off agents and shutting down projects as part of this effort. Smith objected to its enormous destructiveness and recounts actually using the Agee manuscript to check whether given CIA officers or spies were mentioned. His objections proved futile. Another who objected was Tom Gilligan, an officer assigned to Portugal, where spies were also being discharged. Gilligan took his concerns to his station chief, but protests were to no avail.

By the fall of 1972 Phil Agee had completed two-thirds of the manuscript and shortly made the connection with the British publisher Penguin, which would ultimately bring out his book. He completed the draft in January 1974. Richard Helms had left Langley, ultimately succeeded by Bill Colby. Despite Helms’s departure, the effort to counter Agee continued unabated. The FOIA documents released later revealed that CIA planned a dual-track strategy, one being propaganda to neutralize the book—as had been done with works on the Kennedy assassination, The Politics of Heroin, and The Invisible Government. The second track was to attempt to discredit Agee by painting him as a lousy spy and an enemy agent. The propaganda strategy would be mooted by the depth of Agee’s revelations, but the collusion charges were rather more successful.

Depicting Philip Agee as a turncoat and a Cuban or Soviet agent was an incendiary charge. Nothing could have been more calculated to redouble his determination to strike back. But the CIA might have been right. The importance of this demands some attention. By 1974 Agee had been in Cuba at least three times, had met with Cuban officials in London, and had left queries in Havana that apparently were subsequently investigated and answered for him. Agee’s account is vague enough on his research in various places to leave the door open for the Cuban agent charge. Yet the former spook had always been frank about his goal of exposing the bankruptcy of CIA methods and classist basis of American foreign policy. The Cubans were sophisticated enough to understand any connection with their service would taint Agee’s critique of the CIA.

On the other hand, former Soviet intelligence officer Oleg D. Kalugin has written and said that Agee was a Cuban agent, and that the KGB was chagrined because Agee had gone to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in 1973 to offer his services and had been turned down, only then going to the Cubans. In a 1974 interview with an American journalist, CIA Director Bill Colby offered that identical date and embassy visit to substantiate the same charge. These claims are problematic. First, Agee had been assigned to Mexico and saw the surveillance of the Soviet and Cuban embassies there. When he initially went to Havana, Agee had avoided both and instead got his Cuban visa in Montreal. Second, Agee was gone from Mexico by 1973. Third, there is no evidence of a Cuban effort—an operation—to support this alleged agent. Had Agee had Cuban support, he would not have needed CIA money to write his book. Most important, Agee’s crucial connections with the Cubans, his “research,” took place earlier. It is more likely the Cubans regarded Philip Agee as a friend working along parallel lines, not a Havana agent. Finally, Oleg Kalugin and Bill Colby became friends and, later, business associates, collaborating on the design of a computer game. It is entirely possible that Kalugin was simply rehashing what he had read in the British press, which was based on an interview Colby had given to plant this story. Once they knew each other, Colby would have repeated his original allegations.

As for whether the Cubans contributed identifications of CIA officers for Agee to use, that was possible no matter what his status was. But Cuban data were not crucial for Agee’s crusade to expose the CIA. Having been with the agency in Latin America for a decade, he knew hordes of these people. Moreover, there was a kind of secret code—for want of a better term—in those days, based on standard State Department publications that listed persons assigned to U.S. embassies and profiled the backgrounds of diplomatic personnel. Since most agency officers served in posts under diplomatic cover, their job titles fell within a narrow range, and their ranks were commensurate with their CIA standings. They were not hard to identify. Agency officers on post looked each other up all the time. My guess (and it is only a guess) is that if the Cubans were helpful, it was in discovering for Agee the office numbers and spaces within Latin American embassies (that the CIA man had never been in) that served as agency premises. The offices and diplomatic lists, taken together, would have permitted assembly of a profile of station chiefs, their deputies, and other senior officers with fair accuracy.

In any case there was precedent—on both sides—for exactly this kind of exposure. The Russians had assisted East German writer Julius Mader in assembling the book Who’s Who in the CIA. Mader, to judge from the job titles he gave American officers, utilized precisely the method Agee would rely upon. The CIA struck back with John Barron, mentioned earlier (Chapter 7). A former naval intelligence officer turned Reader’s Digest editor, Barron was given identities of KGB and GRU personnel for a fifty-page list of them included in his book KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents. Joseph Smith writes, “I am certain Barron’s book and Philip Agee’s are related. When Agee contacted the Cubans, it is a small wonder the abused Soviet intelligence service through their Cuban surrogates returned the compliment.”6

The CIA’s back-alley campaign against Philip Agee escalated in the summer of 1974, when articles began appearing in the U.S. press depicting him as a drunkard and womanizer who had hooked up with the KGB somewhere in South America to spill his guts. The stories were clearly based on CIA information, but they lacked crucial details that would have been required for a spin of “truthiness.” Agee looked at one story and saw that it corresponded exactly to one of his talks with CIA agent Sal Ferrera—right down to the date of the alleged exchange—except that the real conversation took place in Paris, and with a CIA operative. Ironically, one of the beneficiaries of this agency disinformation was John Crewdson, who then wrote for the New York Times and had previously been tabbed at Helms’s staff meetings as among the objectionable reporters. Langley now went to Crewdson to retail its allegations against Agee. Another story that enraged Agee came from the Manchester Guardian, which picked up a piece that Murray Seeger wrote for the Los Angeles Times. This actually never appeared in the newspaper to which it was attributed. Seeger later explained that his editor had killed the story—he was convinced, at the agency’s request. The height of the absurd came when an old comrade visited Victor Marchetti, in exactly the same “coincidental” way as the CIA had first approached Agee directly, and tried to induce Marchetti to steal a copy of Agee’s manuscript in its current form. Langley must have been desperate.

Philip Agee’s book finally appeared in the summer of 1975, published in the United Kingdom. Inside the Company: CIA Diary was an instant best seller, though not initially in the United States, where long-standing law precluded importing English-language books written by American authors. Bill Colby threatened lawsuits to prevent the book’s attracting an American publisher, but eventually lost out to the marketplace. The Agee FOIA documents reveal that in 1975 the CIA went to the Justice Department to ask for a criminal indictment against him. But when Justice looked into the matter it was stymied—by the CIA. Agee could not be indicted without disclosing Langley’s illegal actions against its former employee. The agency was not willing to expose its own crimes. The inquiry closed at the end of 1976. In fact, during 1977–1978, the Department of Justice considered whether to indict CIA officers for their actions. It was a Mexican standoff. The CIA stalemated itself.

Publication of Agee’s book marked the onset of a long period of much more open struggle. The former CIA man denounced agency actions and revealed more names. He worked closely with the journal Covert Action Information Bulletin (an intellectual successor to Counterspy), which became a bête noire to the spy community. Agee collaborated on two edited books that focused on CIA activities in Europe and Africa and revealed more names. The agency sued to enjoin his income from those projects and obtained a general decision that Agee’s writings were subject to CIA review, though the courts refused to award Langley any proceeds. Philip Agee began submitting his writings for review, but at the same time sued to obtain records of his case under the FOIA. In the new reality, Agee stopped writing much, but he traveled from country to country giving talks that exposed CIA agents and misdeeds.

Yet Langley was still not out of tricks. The 1975 murder of Athens CIA station chief Welch was laid at Agee’s door, as well as that of the Counterspy people. The next ploy was to challenge Agee’s domicile and agitate for revocation of his American passport. As the Ford administration gave way to that of Jimmy Carter, the United States pressured Great Britain to expel Philip Agee. The British issued such an order in January 1977, and Agee failed in all efforts to nullify it. He was then denied admission to France, and expelled from Holland after a brief stay. Agee’s name was on a list to be denied admission to Germany at the same time as his application for residence in Hamburg was in the hopper. A suspicious shooting at the home of the CIA station chief in Jamaica—which may actually have been a CIA provocation—was blamed on Agee. At the end of 1979 the United States went ahead and canceled his passport. No American had ever had a passport canceled over a political matter, even where attempts were made to punish citizens who visited North Vietnam at the height of the Southeast Asian war, and there were several strong legal precedents against revocation. Agee sued for restoration of his passport and won in both the district court and on appeal, but the Supreme Court went against precedent and found against him. Philip Agee ended up carrying a passport from the nation of Grenada.

In the meantime, Langley used the Agee case to argue that the simple naming of undercover officers endangered them, as well as national security. This position gained the support of the Carter administration. The CIA proposed legislation that would make it illegal to reveal the name of a clandestine services officer on mission. That bill ultimately passed early in the Reagan administration, resulting in the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. Despite the fact that the law specifies it is for protection of covert officers, Langley now uses that authority quite frequently to shield the identity of any CIA officer, including senior officials whose identities have always been a matter of public record, even ones subject to Senate confirmation. For example, during the second Bush administration, the identity of Jose Rodriguez as chief of the National Clandestine Service was kept secret for longer than the law provides. This pillar of secrecy has become a double-edged sword. While it performs a good function in protecting officers under cover, it can be used as a tool against whistleblowers.

A new exemplar became the key in laying the final pillar for the foundation of the agency’s fortress of secrecy. Agee’s erstwhile CIA colleague Frank Snepp was also used by the secrecy mavens, who built their edifice on the foundation of the Marchetti case. Having established a role for prepublication review, what happened to Snepp gave the agency leave to use breach of contract legal grounds to overcome First Amendment rights. Here, Langley zeroed in on CIA officers’ earnings from writing about their experiences. Frank Snepp was an agency analyst, one of the best and brightest on Vietnam, on his second tour at the Saigon station toward the end of the war. Snepp stayed on past the Paris ceasefire agreement and until the fall of Saigon in April 1975. During that time he became the leading analyst in situ. What Snepp saw during those last months and weeks of the Vietnam war scandalized him. Snepp’s targets centered not on the CIA—which would receive his deep attention nonetheless—but the American ambassador and his superior, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Phil Agee was no model for Frank Snepp. He regarded the Latin Americanist as a turncoat. Despite Langley’s efforts to lump them together, Snepp began in channels, filing reports through CIA from Bangkok, later speaking of his experiences to agency audiences and at the Foreign Service Institute. He agitated to obtain high-level review of his charges. Snepp determined to write about what had happened only after efforts to follow procedure failed to produce a meaningful post mortem or any reforms, and began by actually asking permission to write a book on the end in Vietnam. Superiors turned him down primarily to avoid having a strong critique of Kissinger and company emerge from the Central Intelligence Agency.

As it became clear to Snepp that he would never be permitted to tell his story inside the CIA, intermediaries began to approach publishers on his behalf, and a deal was soon made with Robert Loomis at Random House, the same editor who had handled The Invisible Government. Snepp resigned from the agency in January 1976 to write his book without interference, and he decided not to submit the manuscript to CIA review. Supplied with chapter and verse on how Langley had sought to interfere with the Wise and Ross project, Snepp handled the writing process much like a spy operation. There were telephone codes, secret meetings, cutouts to hand over portions of the material, and so on. By these means Frank Snepp successfully contrived to get his book, Decent Interval, into the bookstores without Langley learning its contents.

Snepp reached his goal in the face of CIA’s efforts to block him. As had happened with Agee, an active surveillance program was proposed, this time by Ted Shackley, now in the exalted position of head of CIA’s operations directorate. The Office of Security refused to go the whole way, but it allowed “volunteers” to keep track of Snepp’s comings and goings. This began within a month of the officer’s resignation. Moreover, watch officers and agency group chiefs were put on the lookout for Snepp, alerted that he was writing a book that would not be put up for review. People were warned not to talk to the former officer. One who did was Bill Colby, now retired, who had been a close friend of Frank’s father in law school. But Colby—who would have his own little problem with CIA publication review—saw Snepp to counsel him not to rock the boat. Former friend and Saigon station chief Tom Polgar, and CIA deputy director Hank Knoche, also met with Snepp to talk him down. Knoche informed agency director George H. W. Bush that Frank Snepp’s revelations had the potential to damage the CIA. By the fall of 1976, Snepp was being looked at as a counterintelligence problem, which, as Snepp writes, “meant I was to be treated as a hostile foreign spy.”7

At this point Joseph Smith’s Portrait of a Cold Warrior suddenly hit the bookstores, triggering a new flap. Smith too had evaded prepublication review, and in his case the CIA had been completely unaware of the book until it appeared. Security officers quickly found fault with it. Agency lawyer Anthony Lapham tried to get Smith’s publisher, Putnam, to pull the book for a CIA review, and while Putnam was amenable, so many copies had already shipped that no censor’s pen could prevent its contents becoming known. Langley then considered suing Smith for breach of contract à la Marchetti, but CIA lawyers decided that would merely draw attention and ensure even more people read the book. The net result was the agency abandoned any action against Joseph Smith. Then the CIA was further embarrassed by the revelations of former contract officer John Stockwell, whose article on shoddy covert work in Angola was scathing. Langley’s fury was white-hot. Snepp and Stockwell, their books yet to appear, became the targets.

In October 1976 OGC lawyer John Greaney—the same fellow involved in both the Marchetti and Agee affairs—sent Snepp a letter demanding access to his work. Greaney insisted the agency veteran was violating secrecy agreements and enclosed copies. By Snepp’s account, this was the first time he’d seen his 1968 contracts since signing them, and he had been assured when leaving the agency that a less-demanding end-of-service agreement was the only one that applied. Moreover, in the original contract a CIA employee was assured the agency’s Inspector General was ready to hear any complaint. In addition, five of Snepp’s six secrecy agreements constrained only classified writings, and he intended a popular account, one that was not secret. Snepp and his publisher considered that the CIA had nullified the original contract by failing to let him air his grievances, and none of the other contracts applied. The agency primed its own guns, enlisting Admiral Stansfield Turner, its new director, to seek legal action. In March 1977 that recommendation went to the Justice Department.

Decent Interval appeared in November 1977. By then Bill Colby’s memoir Honorable Men was in the hands of its publisher, and Colby, too, had violated CIA protocol by sending it in ahead of the agency review. Worse, Colby’s manuscript was being translated for a French edition, and pieces the CIA demanded be lopped off the English-language narrative survived in French. The agency took no action at all against its former director. Nor did authorities act against former Saigon ambassador Graham Martin, whose car, recovered after being stolen, was found with a trunk full of authentic secret documents. But the full weight of the law descended on Frank Snepp, who had used phony names to protect agency colleagues and taken other measures to safeguard secrets—though he had given an unvarnished account of the intelligence reporting flowing in and out of Saigon, embarrassing as it was, and going to his central point. Simultaneously with the first rush of media attention, the CIA issued statements misleading the public that the veteran had reneged on an express promise to submit for review. By the time Snepp appeared on the television program 60 Minutes, Langley had put it out that Director Turner was discussing prosecution with DOJ attorneys. The CIA also resorted to the now-standard tactic of cabling all stations instructions on how to handle Snepp’s revelations—in this case he should be painted as an embezzler, someone who had stolen information.

The government filed suit in February 1978. Allegations about avoiding CIA publication review or disclosing secrets were not even pursued—either avenue would have enabled the defendant to contrast the action against him with the government’s complete failure to act against Colby, Martin, or Joseph Smith. So the legal complaint against Snepp stipulated that it did not consider that Decent Interval contained any classified information. Instead, the Justice Department argued that Snepp had profited from CIA information—so that income from his book should be seized—and for the future he should be subject to a formal legal stricture to clear his writings. At base, the effort to cast this case as a contract violation shifted the ground. Although normally a showing of actual monetary damage is required by contract law, here the “national security” argument was employed to equate damage to the full amount of the author’s earnings, whatever they might be. In July 1978 a judgment was rendered against Snepp that accepted all the government’s arguments. Eight months later the federal Circuit Court for the District of Columbia affirmed the finding in every important respect. Snepp petitioned the Supreme Court to take his case on First Amendment grounds. In February 1980, without ever hearing arguments, the Supreme Court issued a summary judgment against him.

In the meantime, the CIA used Frank Snepp, as it had Philip Agee, this time in a campaign to further reinforce its ability to restrict information access on grounds of protecting intelligence sources and methods. One aspect was to seek new exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act. The other was to tighten secrecy agreements, even though Admiral Turner conceded that the Justice Department believed existing criminal statutes gave it all the authority necessary in this area. As Turner put it to Zbigniew Brzezinski in an October 23, 1979, memorandum, “It is imperative that some visible action be taken promptly in this area.”8

By the summer of 1980, the CIA had completely reworked the texts of existing agreements, creating an “APEX” family of contracts it believed airtight. The agreement that applied at the highest level, “sensitive compartmented information,” provided that even if the courts invalidated one or more provisions of the APEX, the others would remain in full force, and specified that once access was given to an employee, she or he was bound for life to agency review, regardless of whether the actual information was subsequently declassified. Agreements had text implying that anything employees saw was “damaging” to national security—regardless of whether it was, in fact, classified—and the CIA would later argue in courts that the contract language alone was a sufficient demonstration of damage to national security of whatever information was in an employee’s writings. The contract even had a provision assigning to the United States all income an individual might earn if the CIA had not approved his writings in advance.

By the time the Carter administration ended, the spooks had built their fortress of secrecy. A full set of cloaks was available to conceal the daggers. Basic relations with journalists were mediated by agency spin doctors, who paid specific attention to image. In combination, the Marchetti, Agee, and Snepp cases completed the lock box. Marchetti established prior restraint in the form of prepublication review. The Agee affair led to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and powerfully reinforced demands to curb FOIA provisions. Snepp established the “principle” that the CIA could seize the income of whistleblowers and added to the arguments against FOIA. All three cases set very unfortunate precedents—for American democracy, if not the wizards of Langley.

Despite Langley’s intense interest in scouring the writings of those who had held security clearances and therefore signed secrecy agreements—a group that ranged far beyond the agency itself—the CIA had never bothered to create a unit to review manuscripts. Until the mid-’70s, that had been done informally by the Office of Security. That mechanism was established in June 1976 and would be called the Publications Review Board (PRB). The Publications Review Board was actually a product of the selfsame series of embarrassing disclosures that bedeviled the CIA through the Year of Intelligence and after. The agency’s motives are apparent in its location of this staff in its public relations office, within the inner sanctum of the CIA director. The public relations chief headed the Board. The unit had barely gotten desk space when Stansfield Turner took up the reins, and the admiral brought with him what the professional spooks viewed with suspicion as a “mafia” of naval officers. One of them was Herbert Hetu, a retired navy captain who had been the PR guru for the United States Bicentennial Commission, and made his career before that as a navy spin doctor, doing public relations for the Pacific Fleet, two chiefs of naval operations, and the navy’s central public information office. Hetu was best known for his liaison with movie producers, having worked on the navy side of the productions of South Pacific, The Enemy Below, and In Harm’s Way. He had come to Admiral Turner’s attention when Turner headed the U.S. fleet in the Mediterranean—the post from which he was appointed to the CIA—and Hetu did PR for Commander, Naval Forces, Europe. As a Turner acolyte and a Johnny-come-lately at Langley, Hetu had little trust from the spooks and, lacking any background in intelligence, had no way to judge what was truly sensitive when line officers complained that manuscripts before the PRB contained flap potential. The Board under Hetu became a zealous guardian of secrets, many of them real, but an equally large number fanciful.

The Publications Review Board never overcame its origins. For a decade and a half, until relocated to the CIA’s administration directorate, it remained an artifact of Langley’s public relations machine. Wearing his PR hat, Hetu would tell the Washington Post in 1980 that the Board had cleared nearly two hundred manuscripts and had had to negotiate changes in only three. One of the three was, of course, William E. Colby’s book. The other former agency persons who published during the period were Vernon A. Walters, Peer de Silva, Cord Meyer, and Harry Rositzke. Walters mentioned the CIA almost exclusively in connection with Watergate, a subject too hot for the censors to touch. Meyer deliberately set out to craft an unrevealing account and without doubt had no difficulty with the Board. The remaining books were clearly affected by review. Put another way, the majority of major CIA memoirs of the era were combed out.

Wielding the clout of the Marchetti standard, sanctifying its authority to intervene, and the Snepp precedent, which permitted retaliation against those who went off the reservation, the Publications Review Board reigned supreme. It was regularized as an entity comprising a representative of each of the CIA’s directorates, a legal advisor from OGC, and detailees from units dealing with personnel security and clandestine cover. To avoid problems, CIA authors had preliminary conversations with the monitors to gain their trust, self-censored their manuscripts, and then suffered through Board review. The various court decisions had set a timeliness requirement, eventually interpreted as a thirty-day interval within which to scrub a manuscript. That rubric was honored in the breach, and delay emerged as a weapon in PRB’s bag of tricks.

Former director Stansfield Turner became an early victim. He made a start with opinion pieces for the newspapers. The Board held on to the urgent, timely ones and let pass those on general, nondescript organizational topics. When the admiral spoke up the agency came down on him. On March 8, 1985, for example, a car bombing took place in Beirut that aimed at a Muslim cleric and brought down an apartment building, killing eighty people. The incident was linked to the CIA by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward (it is now generally credited to Saudi intelligence, but the agency had dropped a similar project, which Bill Casey may have handed over to the Saudis). When Admiral Turner made a comment to Newsweek, CIA’s public relations chief, George V. Lauder (Hetu’s successor), insisted in a letter that “it’s a bum rap,” declaring Langley had no direct or indirect contact with the Lebanese officer who had masterminded the bombing, and cautioning Turner about what he said in public.9 The admiral shot back a letter referring Lauder to the “presidential finding” for a covert operation that seemed to sanction the initiative. Lauder stuck to his guns.

All this took place while Stansfield Turner was trying to finish and publish his CIA memoir, and the lesson was that the more vapid the prose, the better chance of agency approval. Turner’s efforts to squeeze his book through the PRB were lengthy and frustrating. The admiral’s book was even a subject at Lauder’s staff meetings. On March 16, 1984, the PRB assistant was reporting that the Board had cleared two “more” of the former director’s chapters subject to various deletions.¹⁰ Turner had been a key actor in establishing the publication review system—and he had the advice of Herb Hetu and former CIA lawyer Anthony Lapham, both of whom had had key roles in the Snepp case. Despite Turner’s self-censorship, the agency demanded over a hundred deletions. Admiral Turner appealed many, but received just three concessions. The CIA told him to proceed as he felt “appropriate,” but reserved the right to take any action it felt appropriate. The mailed fist inside the glove was evident.

Turner records that Board members were friendly, but preliminary review on each chapter consumed three weeks and adjudication another three or four. With many chapters being rewritten multiple times, and reviewed at each pass, the net impact felt both unreasonable and unnecessary.¹¹ Ten or 15 percent of his time evaporated in meeting PRB demands, and the former director said so in his book, which finally appeared in 1985. On April 26, 1985, the CIA issued a statement denying Turner’s charges. But his book was gutted. Subordinates calculate that Admiral Turner made his way through—and extensively marked up—five briefcase-loads of paper every day. That added up to more than two million shelf-feet worth of documents. Virtually none of that knowledge is reflected in the Turner memoirs.

The Fort Lauderdale News noted the Publications Review Board’s arbitrary standards for what had to remain secret. Public relations chief Lauder hit back hard: “The charges leveled by Admiral Stansfield Turner, suggesting that the CIA insisted that he remove unclassified material from his book, have no validity.”12 When the Miami Herald reviewed Turner’s book, it mentioned that the narrative had been “picked apart” by agency censors. Public relations chief Lauder sent the paper a letter that insisted “the review process . . . exists solely to identify and delete classified material.”¹³ The stalling of Admiral Turner continued. In the Beirut bombing affair, Turner complained of the PRB’s dilatory handling of his opinion pieces. Lauder passed Turner’s letter to the Board, but told the admiral the fault lay with National Security Council staff aides.

George Lauder’s missive to the Miami Herald also asserted baldly that “The CIA’s record in avoiding any kind of partisan stance in its review process is a matter of record.”¹⁴ That was a falsehood. In fact, there existed no public record at all of the Publications Review Board’s performance. If Lauder was referring to the Inspector General’s audit of PRB in 1981, that was not public; was produced in-house by a unit that aimed at efficiency, not oversight; and had been done during an era when the CIA became politicized on Bill Casey’s watch. A decade passed before the Inspector General returned to review the Board.

Stansfield Turner’s experience proved the norm, not the exception. Another example is Mole, an account of and reflection on an important CIA spy in Russia published in 1982 by William Hood.¹⁵ The retired clandestine services officer had had some involvement with the case and knew intimately those who had run the Russian agent. The case was publicly known. This was a feel-good situation for Langley, which had obtained some of its best intelligence on the Soviet military in the 1950s from this spy. Even the Russians got into the act, putting out their own account of trapping this CIA spy. Hood had no objection to the review system, was a respected officer, and cleared his idea of a book with a CIA deputy director even before starting. He adopted pseudonyms for his CIA characters except well-known persons or dead agency heroes. After twenty months writing, he entered the wilderness of mirrors of publication review—to discover the agency would have preferred this case remain buried. Hood was bewildered—spy tradecraft, like arithmetic, had been known for centuries. He had avoided sensitive matters and had been protective of identities. Hood met Board objections by lopping off offending passages and hiding dead men. In May 1981 his book was finally cleared to go.

Avoidance strategies became standard. Russell Jack Smith, actually a CIA deputy director, mentions hardly anyone below the level of publicly known officials, and referred to his own foreign assignment as a station chief by his State Department cover identity.16 Agency lawyer Scott Breckinridge avoided using names and where obliged to do so went with given ones only.¹⁷ Operations officer Tom Gilligan made up names for people and even for the countries where he had been assigned.¹⁸ In his account of the CIA in Vietnam, Orrin Deforest altered names, dates, places, and particulars to protect individuals.¹⁹ Shortly before Richard Bissell’s February 1994 death, his coauthors submitted chapters of his memoir concerning his time with the CIA—and only those materials—to the Review Board.²⁰ By way of contrast, CIA spy Miles Copeland, who published a gossipy memoir in 1989 and prided himself on not submitting his manuscripts, visited agency lawyers to tell them what he intended to include. Rather than sue him, Copeland recounts, the CIA said he would have to go out and get his own publicity.²¹

The Publications Review Board, empowered simply to protect classified information, has been wielded as a cudgel to regulate free expression. That is the meaning of interventions, and the effect of self-censorship. During the 1980s the agency worked to restrict discussion of its secret wars in Central America and Angola, and to minimize the research of an author investigating its activities in the Vietnam era. There was improvement, but also fresh evidence of CIA’s caution. Procedures became routinized, and the agency gradually moved to uncloak matters once shrouded in secrecy. But indications of self-interest remained. In the late 1980s, the CIA’s Family Jewels were, of course, the evidence of its involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. The Board had to restrain itself with the reports of the joint congressional committee and independent prosecutor who investigated the scandal, but it got a crack at the book by prosecutor Lawrence Walsh—naturally he had been given a security clearance. It also got a look at the memoir of President Ronald Reagan. When Iran-Contra CIA principal Duane R. (“Dewey”) Clarridge penned his own CIA book, the PRB initially sent him a nineteen-page, single-spaced letter of redactions it demanded. Then cooler heads prevailed. Board chairman John Hollister Hedley viewed himself as a broker, adjudicating between the demands of agency operating divisions and the larger public interest. In what amounted to a bid to take the high ground of history, PRB made special efforts to allow a maximum amount of material when Dewey Clarridge told his story in 1997.22

By the late 1990s, the volume of texts had risen to over eighteen thousand pages a year. The concessions to Dewey Clarridge were taken as precedent, and a more open approach became the hallmark. Notable works followed on the CIA in the Cuban Missile Crisis and in Berlin, and several on the wartime Office of Strategic Services. During the millennium year, several hundred texts crossed the PRB transom. Approaching retirement, John Hedley could write optimistically in Studies in Intelligence, the CIA journal, that PRB procedure was well established and improving, its “interpretation of damage is not absolute and unchanging,” and, despite change toward openness, the CIA was not headed down a slippery slope to “diminished capability to function as a secret organization.”23 Those were pious words, but the bright future Hedley described no longer exists and possibly was morphing even then.

In October 1997 the Board was finally moved to a newly created agency entity, the Office of Information Management, where it was retitled the “Publications Review Division,” though the name change never stuck. The new office was buried in the bureaucracy, far from the director’s office, and, with a different division, also in charge of CIA responses to the Freedom of Information Act. The effect was a recrudescence of the culture of secrecy. A brief on the PRB’s work issued in 2000 by its then-chairman, Scott Koch, noted that the Board relied upon “voluntary compliance” and specified that the “CIA can eliminate information from nonofficial publications only if the text is classified and the Agency can demonstrate the damage to national security that disclosure would cause.” This document, never classified, deletes passages supposedly “damaging” to the national security. The regs explicitly said that the Board could not deny permission simply because information was critical of or embarrassing to the CIA. But that was nullified by the stricture that agency directorates, as government employers, can prevent publication of even unclassified information if this would affect their ability to function or be detrimental to the foreign policy or security of the United States.²⁴

By 2004 the number of pages reviewed was up to thirty thousand, and requests for permission to write had quadrupled. Langley worried that Board review could be overinterpreted. The Publications Review Board countered with what has become a standard notation in CIA memoirs—that PRB sanction means neither approval of a work nor authentication of its contents. Richard L. Holm, an officer with key roles in the Congo, Laos, and Lebanon, used both pseudonyms and single initials for senior officers. Holm’s book contains such a statement.25 So does the Robert Baer memoir, which has names and short pieces of text, along with a few more extensive passages, deleted.²⁶ Ted Shackley’s posthumous account contained a similar notice in its acknowledgments.²⁷ Frank Holober’s book follows this model. Holober’s account of CIA covert missions along the China coast—by then dealing with events three decades in the past—was held up for months by the agency’s FOIA office and cover representatives on the Board, who demanded pseudonyms for long-departed persons.²⁸ It is worth noting that the Intelligence Identities Protection Act has the purpose of protecting the names of clandestine officers (only) serving in active operations within the last five years. Holober credits then–Board chairman John H. Hedley with helping him overcome these objections. Any Board representative can block a manuscript, and representatives do so from the parochial positions of their divisions. Floyd Paseman, a clandestine service division chief, thanked the Review Board for helping him navigate the obstacles posed by his own unit, the Directorate of Operations.²⁹

Stuart Methven, an agency operative prominent in the Southeast Asian wars, made up countries, people, languages, and more with such aplomb that his book hardly qualifies as a memoir, but fully justifies its title, Laughter in the Shadows.³⁰ Though treating his readers as fools, Methven nevertheless includes the standard CIA disclaimer. One who does not is former Congo station chief Larry Devlin, whose memoir protects colleagues by using only their given names (except for senior officials).³¹ Devlin notably uses the term “station.” Devlin’s former subordinate David Doyle refers to himself simply as a CIA representative, with self-censoring throughout.³² Milt Bearden, a general in the secret war in Afghanistan and chief of the Soviet Division at the triumphal moment the Berlin Wall fell, made deletions requested by Review Board chairman Scott Koch, but his coauthor James Risen, not a CIA person, did not submit his portion of the text to censorship.33

Among CIA directors, several of whom have told their stories, there has been strong support for the Publications Review Board. Stansfield Turner has been mentioned, and he affirms the appropriateness of review despite the trouble it caused him. Robert Gates thanks the Board’s Molly Tasker for cooperation and prompt action and pictures his review as “eminently fair and consistently reflect[ing] good common sense.”³⁴ Similarly, former director George Tenet has kind words for Hedley’s successor, Richard Puhl.³⁵ There are no deletions in Richard Helms’s memoir, and he equably notes that “in keeping with CIA regulations, some of which I instituted, this manuscript was submitted to the Agency for security clearance.”³⁶ Ironically, Helms’s editor at Random House was Bob Loomis, the man the CIA had threatened at the time of The Invisible Government, and who had shepherded Frank Snepp’s cri de coeur into print.

In the recent past the secrecy mavens have wavered. The CIA worked to inhibit public knowledge of its operations in the war on terror—from the Afghan campaign to secret prisons, to hostile interrogation—but also such historical subjects as the 1970s project to salvage a Soviet submarine using novel technology. In a book on the agency’s first training class following the September 11 attacks, author T. J. Waters falsified names, places, dates, times, activities, and sequences of events to satisfy secrecy preferences.³⁷ One who had a positive experience with the PRB was John F. Sullivan, a longtime polygrapher.³⁸ So did Melissa Mahle, whose account of her recent CIA experience was critical but evenhanded.39 Michael Scheuer, who gained fame as the anonymous author of a book on America’s hubris, told a reporter, “I think it is going to be very difficult to publish a book on anything except cooking or Civil War history.”⁴⁰

Other important books go directly to intelligence “sources and methods,” where the Board demonstrates considerable ambivalence. Not long after 9/11, CIA disguise experts Antonio and Jonna Mendez came out with a volume on their specialty and thanked the Board for helping them avoid the shoals of secret information.⁴¹ As CIA director in 2005, Porter Goss initiated a revision of Board regulations. Goss, of course, was the man who countenanced the destruction of videotape evidence in the CIA torture scandal. In 2006 a retired agency counterintelligence chief, James M. Olson, published a study that framed a variety of espionage dilemmas as moral questions, solicited the comments of a range of persons from inside and outside the agency, and elaborated on the commentaries.⁴² Olson noted the Review Board as cooperative, although several pages of his text would be blacked out.

At the time that tome was in press another book, on espionage tradecraft, was before the Board. By Robert Wallace, retired director of the CIA’s Office of Technical Services, and H. Keith Melton, a historian of espionage gadgetry, the work would cover the waterfront of technological wizardry and show how such devices had figured in the spy wars. The authors cleared their project with the Board and got sample chapters approved in July 2004. Wallace himself, on active service, had participated in PRB clearances, and he wrote with a view to protecting sensitive information. The manuscript crossed the Board’s transom in the fall of 2005. Wallace heard nothing for half a year. In March 2006 the authors were told that just the parts of their narrative that dealt with World War II were approved. The rest, including even the sample chapters, 95 percent of the work, was to stay secret. Wallace hired a lawyer and appealed, leading to another eight-month hiatus. Before taking the agency to court, the authors appealed to a senior official, and in February 2007 most of the manuscript was suddenly cleared, and much of the rest followed that summer. The resulting book lauded CIA technologists.43

A different experience awaited Ishmael Jones, a clandestine service officer who had labored for the CIA under deep cover starting in 1989 and became so frustrated he left the agency to encourage reform of what he saw as a Soviet-style bureaucracy. The pseudonymous Jones incorporated his views in a manuscript that noted many ways in which agency management had acted in counterproductive, even silly, ways to cover its ass or pursue careerist goals. Jones sent his text to the Review Board in April 2007. A month later he was told clearance had been denied. Jones, who had read dozens of CIA memoirs more revealing than his, and had taken pains to avoid including anything secret, was stunned. He asked PRB to identify any places where the text contained classified information and promised to remove it. Several exchanges took place on this matter, and court records from both sides indicate no secrets were actually involved. Rather, the Board apparently indicated that the manuscript might be acceptable if rewritten in the third person, but once Jones had done that, PRB approved the release of just a few paragraphs. In January 2008, when Jones protested the extent of the excisions, the CIA took that as an appeal of the Board’s decision, and said nothing further until the frustrated officer proceeded to publish. Jones’s highly critical account of hidebound and creaky methods appeared at midyear.⁴⁴

Langley filed suit against Jones for breaching the fiduciary trust implied by secrecy agreements, charging he failed to seek prepublication approval—because he had not waited for final agency action or sued the CIA himself—and therefore damaged the United States by “undermining of confidence and trust in the CIA and its prepublication review process.” Using the Snepp precedent, the agency demanded it be awarded Jones’s earnings.45 The court rejected the defendant’s efforts to change venue, request for a jury trial, and argument that Vietnam-era judgments of national security damage cannot be applied at this late date. Jones’s contention that the CIA had gone beyond its mandate and was acting as censor was also rejected. In November 2011, without court trial, the federal judge awarded the CIA everything it had sought. But Jones had arranged to donate all proceeds to a fund for disabled agency veterans, and there were no proceeds to seize.

Other recent illustrations concern the emerging literature of the war on terror. Writing a preemptive defense of his actions on renditions and torture tapes, and with former agency PR chief Bill Harlow at his side, Jose Rodriguez had pretty clear sailing. Not so the critics. Not even the initial U.S. invasion of Afghanistan—where the agency has a proud story to tell—escaped scrutiny. Henry A. Crumpton, the CIA’s top field commander, found the Board members courteous and timely, “although incorrect in some of their excisions.”⁴⁶ He did not dispute them. Gary C. Schroen, whose account of leading the first CIA operational group into Afghanistan is a testament to a heroic agency, had to fight over much of his account, including such silliness as identifying the type of Russian-built helicopter that conveyed his team into the country—readily apparent from photos that appear in the book. Like others before him, Schroen contrived aliases for everyone who accompanied him and obscured the identities of those at headquarters. He recalled the review as long and tedious, noting, “I had no idea . . . that so many of the details that I included in the first draft . . . would be considered sensitive and would be marked for exclusion.” But he decided the process, which ultimately cleared most of his text, had been fair. The Review Board told Schroen his book was the most detailed account of an agency covert operation ever approved for publication.47

One who took heart from Schroen’s experience was Gary Berntsen, his colleague and successor as the CIA’s Afghan team leader, whose bout with the censors was even less pleasant. Berntsen was an experienced officer, loyal to the agency, and had already self-censored his narrative. Yet the clearance, he recalled, “turned out to be the most surreal and frustrating experiences [sic] in my life.” After repeated delays he filed suit, and a federal judge ordered the CIA to liberate his manuscript, acceding to forty pages of deletions, including items such as the mileage between cities in Afghanistan—measurable on any map—and the name of William Buckley, a CIA officer murdered by extremists in Lebanon in the 1980s, whose case has figured in many writings. Berntsen had to file suit again and obtain an injunction before the CIA would respond to his appeal to restore some of the material, and adjudication of those deletions was yet to be completed when his book went to press.⁴⁸

Those CIA officers for whom national security became the God That Failed, who sought to write about their disillusion, have had their works parsed ruthlessly at the Publications Review Board. Their substantive reporting has been dealt with elsewhere, but the CIA reaction to their narratives has not. John Kiriakou is the newest poster boy. He survived prepublication review after not one but several appeals. The agency veteran credits PRB for permitting those appeals, and he accommodated Langley by changing names, disguising or eliminating some locales, and blurring certain true events.⁴⁹ But Kiriakou spoke to reporters, divulging the name of an agency colleague and commenting—inaccurately, as it turns out—on waterboarding. His wife, a fellow CIA officer, was forced to resign. John Kiriakou was indicted for breaching the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and for other transgressions. One of the four counts in the government’s bill of particulars charges Kiriakou with lying to the Publications Review Board. No one has ever been indicted for such a crime. The potential chilling effect is incalculable. If former CIA persons can be sent to prison for their dealings with the PRB, there is no end to the mischief this will cause. Defense lawyers in the Kiriakou case informed government attorneys that at court they would present evidence on, among other things, the arbitrary actions of the Publications Review Board, which had, in fact, approved Kiriakou’s manuscript. But the CIA’s interest in avoiding public testimony on PRB operations cannot yet be demonstrated. Intent on obtaining a result that would at least add weight to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, prosecutors offered a plea bargain. Kiriakou took the deal. In October 2012 he pled guilty to revealing the name of a covert operative. Several months later he was sentenced to thirty months in prison. John Kiriakou’s case may become a brick in the fortress of secrecy.

Glenn Carle became another casualty of the agency’s drive to minimize flap potential. Carle’s account of the CIA’s wayward path encountered fierce obstruction, with demands for redaction of 40 percent of his manuscript and the final excision of about a third. He “literally” rewrote the book a dozen times to meet the censors’ demands. Carle fought for months to be able to mention a urinal and had to scrap for passages that described the color of fog, indicated that agency officers disagreed, or commented that someone spoke authoritatively or another seemed a fool. Quotations from the poet T. S. Eliot were suppressed, as was his use of the word “kidnap” from a previous book the CIA itself had cleared. The agency prevented Carle’s using numerous details, leaving surviving pages laced with deletions.50

Valerie Plame, a clandestine service officer who worked to prevent nuclear proliferation, was victimized by Bush administration officials intent on evading accountability for their disastrous decision to attack Iraq. Plame’s undercover status as a CIA officer, supposed to be guarded under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act—ironically a product of the agency’s frantic appeals after the Phil Agee fiasco—was revealed by aides to Vice President Richard Cheney. Her husband, retired ambassador Joseph Wilson, had published an opinion piece revealing the lack of evidence for the administration’s charge that Iraq was buying uranium from the African nation of Niger. Cheney sought to retaliate. Cheney’s national security deputy, I. Lewis Libby, was prosecuted and convicted for Plame’s outing. Her cover blown, Plame felt obliged to leave. But when she attempted to write about her career, the CIA drained Plame’s memoir, refusing clearance for her to include numerous details that formed part of the Libby trial record or had been widely discussed in the press. Review Board chairman Richard Puhl even denied Plame’s mention of the dates of her service at CIA, which had been the subject of routine, unclassified correspondence with its retirement office that had been printed in the Congressional Record. Publisher Simon & Schuster sued in an attempt to compel the Publications Review Board to approve the material, but the courts succumbed to the CIA’s usual dark claims of national security “damage.” Simon & Schuster eventually commissioned reporter Laura Rozen to write an afterword with elements that had been cut from Valerie Plame Wilson’s manuscript.51

The CIA has even reached beyond Langley, applying its scissors to manuscripts from employees of other agencies, like State Department nation-builder Peter Van Buren, who participated in the Iraq war with the so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams. This diplomat, who had served in many posts in close cooperation with the military and other agencies, shepherded his manuscript through State’s clearance. Shortly before publication, the department’s censors informed him that the CIA was asking for changes to his text. Van Buren decided to go ahead anyway.52

Then there was FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, who had worked with the agency in questioning Al Qaeda captive Abu Zubaydah. He broke with CIA counterparts when it became a matter of torturing the man. Soufan’s manuscript survived FBI’s clearance process only to be stalled, just weeks from publication, by CIA demands for a host of cuts. Langley’s faxes ordering revisions totaled 181 pages, nearly a third of the length of the text itself. The CIA’s official spokesperson, questioned about these demands, termed it “ridiculous” that the agency’s basis for action was that it did not like the content of Soufan’s book, and reiterated the standard boilerplate that the Review Board only sought to protect classified information.⁵³

According to Soufan, the FBI had no obligation to clear the book with Langley, since he had no contractual relationship with the CIA and had never reported to it. When he demonstrated that the demanded cuts concerned information in the public domain, were FBI material, or consisted of previously declassified CIA data, the Publications Review Board withdrew its demands but came back with an even more extensive list. Committed to a certain date for publication, Soufan made the cuts. Among them were quotes from unclassified testimony presented in public before Congress and broadcast live on national television, material drawn from the 9/11 Commission reports, the words “I” and “me,” and use of the word “station” for the contingents of CIA personnel assigned to U.S. embassies abroad. Soufan believes that he was required to delete from his own book details appearing in Jose Rodriguez’s memoir. He asked the FBI to review the deletions. Not satisfied, he sued.⁵⁴ The Soufan suit is now in an early stage in the courts, and he intends to see it through.⁵⁵

Secrecy is compromised when everything is deemed secret—more so when what is deemed classified is manipulated, whether for political purposes or any others. It was inevitable that the record of the Publications Review Board would eventually come under scrutiny. In the late 1990s, when Board chairman John Hedley published the first real examination of the unit in the agency’s in-house magazine, the PRB had been moderating its approach, and Hedley could offer an optimistic view. In the war on terror, that is no longer possible. Members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wrote CIA Director General David Petraeus in the spring of 2012 to express concern at the Publications Review Board’s behavior. Press reports at this writing indicate the CIA has begun an internal investigation of the PRB. While such an inquiry may be a move forward, it could also represent a tactical maneuver. The Board’s actions and methods will be central to the Soufan civil suit. Langley needs to be in a position to offer some kind of substantive evidence, if only to avoid a deeper probe into its Publications Review Board. Substantial stakes ride on the outcome.

The CIA’s fight to avoid accountability has had the effect of producing a fractured history populated by books that resemble Victor Marchetti’s—pages littered with black ink that obscure known facts, embarrassing incidents, and outright illegalities, along with literally stupid deletions, all with a combination of real and fraudulent claims to secrecy, now to be enforced by criminal sanction. The net result will ultimately drain CIA history of any credibility, if not worse. Yet the agency behaviors that have moved former intelligence officers to write, even when excised from their books, do not disappear simply because censors succeed in suppressing their mention. And as often as not, the controversies leave a paper trail that will one day furnish guideposts to investigators. Rather than avoid flap potential, actions like these create time bombs that will one day explode with the greater force of pent-up pressure.

Meanwhile, in its own terms—and despite the pious affirmations of agency practitioners—the CIA publications review process has exceeded its mandate. In fact, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the Publications Review Board has run wild. Designed simply to ensure the secrecy of properly classified national security information, the system operates in knee-jerk fashion with the arrogance of a star chamber. The shadow warriors have profited from the reluctance of U.S. courts to interfere in matters of national security, but they risk putting the entire system into bankruptcy the moment its excesses become so blatant they can no longer be denied. When that happens the loser will be the Central Intelligence Agency. And even if the break never comes, the distortions in the record of U.S. intelligence induced by this approach will ultimately rebound to the detriment of the CIA.

Had it then existed, the CIA’s publications review apparatus would not have prevented the Year of Intelligence, because government actions, not the mention of them, are the key determinant. Secrecy can be counterproductive, as in the case of the Family Jewels, increasing pressures toward revelation and magnifying the public’s horror when transgressions are revealed. Secrecy did not contain the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s—and the resulting political crisis sapped the power of the Reagan administration. Secrecy did not prevent the revelation of the CIA’s cozy relationship with Central American torturers in the 1990s, with detrimental consequences to the agency even though it succeeded in avoiding a full-blown disaster. With the tip of another iceberg of malefaction already evident today, and Americans themselves in the role of kidnappers and torturers—and, with the drone war, executioners—the agency erred in resisting a full airing of these allegations in 2009, and President Barack Obama made a serious misstep in acceding to CIA demands. When it comes, the efforts of the Publications Review Board will not avert this flap. Better would have been to blow off the steam, take the public’s reprimand, and move on. As the secret warriors know better than anyone, there are always Family Jewels. When the next crisis arrives, the unanswered charges that have been so cleverly suppressed will arise anew and add their force to the flap of the moment, ensuring spooks’ misery.