Too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies, and too much information has been collected.
Senator Frank Church, April 1976
Norman Mailer’s fiftieth birthday party on 5 February 1973 had been the talk of smart New York salons for weeks beforehand, ever since purple-tinted invitations went out revealing that there would be an admission fee of $30 (or $50 per couple), to be donated to something called the Fifth Estate. Sticklers for correct form stayed away, appalled by this lapse of etiquette. ‘In Manhattan, nobody who’s anybody ever pays to go to a party,’ said a style columnist from the Washington Post. ‘I hear that a lot of stockbrokers are coming,’ a sulky refusenik told the New York Times. For many more, however, the bait was irresistible. Parties thrown by the pugilistic novelist were always memorable, tending as they did to end in fisticuffs and headbutting, and this promised something else too: Mailer, the invitation stated, would make an announcement on ‘a subject of national importance (major)’.
More than five hundred guests turned up at the Four Seasons restaurant on East 52nd Street to see what fresh surprise Norman had for them. There were novelists and jazz musicians, historians and Hollywood stars, professional boxers and senators – and, of course, Andy Warhol, whose role as the pallid spectre at every celebrity feast was acknowledged by Mailer in his biography of Marilyn Monroe, which he had just delivered to the publishers. ‘As the deaths and spiritual disasters of the decade of the sixties came one by one to American Kings and Queens, as Jack Kennedy was killed, and Bobby, and Martin Luther King,’ Mailer wrote, ‘so the decade that began with Hemingway as the monarch of the American arts ended with Andy Warhol as its regent.’ Wearing blue jeans, a maroon bow tie and a motley tweed jacket, Warhol spent the evening taking Polaroid photos of the incongruous gallimaufry of guests – Lily Tomlin and Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Senator Jacob Javits and Charlie Mingus. It was the apotheosis of the indiscriminate cult of celebrity which he promoted and glorified in his magazine, Andy Warhol’s Interview: politicians and pop stars alike now inhabited what the historian Daniel Boorstin had disapprovingly dubbed the culture of the image, an echo chamber of manufactured media stunts and ‘pseudo-events’. Many of the guests didn’t know one another – some didn’t even know their host – but they all recognised one another. ‘I am a big friend of Mailer,’ said Bernardo Bertolucci, the director of Last Tango in Paris, ‘though this is the first time that I met him.’
A buffet of goulash and quiche lorraine* was served, and a jazz harpist plucked her instrument inaudibly while the guests tried to guess what ‘subject of national importance (major)’ would soon be divulged. ‘He’s going to have a vasectomy,’ someone suggested; others wondered if the money was needed to subsidise Mailer’s alimony bill for his many ex-wives, most of whom were present – including Adele, wife number two, whom he had stabbed and nearly killed at a similar party in 1960.
At midnight, after many drinks, Mailer ascended the podium. ‘I want to say I’ve discovered tonight why Nixon is president,’ he began, punching a fist at the air while clutching a brimming glass of bourbon in the other hand. ‘Tonight I found myself photographed more times than I can count. You see green, you see red, and then you see your own mortality. Now I know why Richard Nixon is president. He has gristle behind the retina.’ The audience seemed more bemused than amused, so he decided to warm them up with an obscene joke. A man sees his ex-wife with her latest husband in a restaurant and asks her how the new man is enjoying her ‘fucked-out cunt’. ‘Just fine,’ she replies sweetly, ‘especially when he gets past the fucked-out part.’ Some guests walked out. ‘Oh sweet Jesus, here we go again,’ groaned Joe Flaherty, who had run Mailer’s election campaign for the mayoralty of New York in 1969 – a disastrous venture in which the candidate drunkenly denounced his own canvassers and supporters as ‘pigs’.
Undeterred by the rising hubbub of dismay, Mailer took a hefty swig of bourbon and revealed ‘the best single political idea of my life’ – the Fifth Estate, the mysterious beneficiary of his birthday beano. ‘I want a people’s CIA and a people’s FBI to investigate the CIA and the FBI. If we have a democratic secret police to keep tabs on Washington’s secret police, we will see how far paranoia is justified.’ He mentioned J. Edgar Hoover, electronic eavesdropping and the Kennedy assassination. ‘Is there one plot going on between the scenes in America? Are there many plots? Is there no plot?’ No one replied. He tried another question. ‘What one word best sums up the point of this party?’ ‘Love,’ one guest suggested. ‘Paranoia,’ yelled another. A third, near enough for the host to hear him, muttered: ‘Publicity.’ The almost universal verdict was that Mailer, the author of Advertisements for Myself, had made a crapulous fool of himself. ‘Norman’s party was a disaster,’ Shirley MacLaine informed reporters as she left. Jack Lemmon, her escort for the evening, pointed out that he’d never met Norman Mailer, as if hoping to clear himself of any guilt by association. The only satisfied reveller was Mailer’s doting mother, Fanny, who stayed on until three in the morning proclaiming her son’s genius and telling anyone who’d listen that this was an even better party than Norman’s bar mitzvah in 1936. ‘I think it’s all wonderful,’ she beamed.
The next day, after sweating off his shame and his hangover in a sparring session with the welterweight boxer Joe Shaw, Mailer held a press conference at the Algonquin Hotel. He announced that the Fifth Estate, to be run by the ‘best literary, scholarly, and detective minds’ in the nation, would conduct serious research into who killed President Kennedy and who sabotaged Senator Thomas Eagleton during the presidential campaign in 1972 by revealing his history of mental illness. ‘We have to face up to the possibility that the country may be sliding toward totalitarianism,’ he announced. ‘I have an absolute distrust of the American government.’
Drunk or sober, he was on the money – though he would never see the evidence that justified his own paranoia. It wasn’t until November 2008, a year after his death, that the US government released documents showing that the FBI had been spying on Mailer since the summer of 1962, on the orders of J. Edgar Hoover. One might think that the Bureau’s director had quite enough to worry about at the time – the Mob, the Cuban missile crisis, the civil rights protests. Nevertheless, one morning he noticed a reference in the New York Times to an Esquire article in which Mailer mockingly suggested that Jackie Kennedy was too softly-spoken for a First Lady. ‘Let me have memo on Norman Mailer,’ Hoover wrote to a subordinate. For the next fifteen years – even after Hoover’s death in 1972 – the G-men monitored the novelist’s every article, book and speech. They recorded how many letters were in his mailbox and obtained his Christmas-card list; sometimes they knocked at his door, posing as deliverymen, just to check if he was at home. Then they returned to the office to write more reports for the swelling file, all headed CLASSIFIED and SECRET and SUBV.CONTROL – a reference to Mailer’s status as a ‘suspected subversive’.
The first memo, dated 29 June 1962, told Hoover that Mailer was a ‘Leftist’ who had described the FBI as a ‘secret police organisation’ that ought to be disbanded. In 1953, it noted, he had been invited to a reception at the Polish Consulate in New York, and although the Bureau’s informant was unable to say whether or not Mailer had attended, this was enough to have him marked down as a ‘concealed Communist’. Agents chose not to approach him directly and ask about the allegation, the memo explained, because Mailer had been ‘critical of the FBI in public appearances and an interview might be embarrassing to the Bureau’. All they could do was watch and report – no doubt cringeing slightly when obliged to inform their director that Mailer accused the FBI of doing more damage to the United States than the Communist Party, or that he described Hoover as ‘the worst celebrity in America’. In 1969, again at Hoover’s command, an agent had to write a five-page review of Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Mailer’s brilliant account of the party conventions the previous year. The New York Times thought it reminiscent of Charles Dickens on top form; the Chicago Tribune praised his ‘masterful’ prose and advised that ‘to understand 1968, you must read Mailer’; but the FBI’s neophyte reviewer found himself alternately baffled and appalled. ‘Mailer vacillates greatly in his thinking, making this book difficult to read and impossible at times to comprehend,’ he complained, adding that the text was polluted by ‘his usual obscene and bitter style’ and contained ‘uncomplimentary statements of the type that might be expected from Mailer regarding the FBI and the director’. When the agent had completed his miserable assignment, he passed his copy of the book to the ‘Communist Infiltrated and New Left Groups Unit’ in the Internal Security Section of the Bureau’s Domestic Intelligence Division.
By the time of Mailer’s fiftieth birthday party, the Bureau’s main concern was his forthcoming life of Marilyn Monroe. An informant at Parade magazine said that it would accuse the FBI of destroying Monroe’s telephone records to conceal the fact that she rang Bobby Kennedy, the attorney general, shortly before her death. ‘The Bureau may desire to explore what avenues might possibly be utilised which would result in the allegation being removed from Mailer’s book,’ the head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office wrote. But his superiors concluded that any public denunciation of the book ‘would merely serve to feed the fires of publicity, which Mailer is attempting to stoke’. They seemed rather less bothered by the publicity ignited by Mailer for his Fifth Estate: the FBI removed him from its watch-list four years later.
America, an FBI agent once observed, is the only country that combines law enforcement and counter-espionage in a single agency. During the long reign of J. Edgar Hoover the distinction between crime and political dissent was blurred to invisibility. Hoover believed that both crime and Communism had the same source – over-indulgent parents. (One of his essays for Woman’s Home Companion in the 1950s was titled ‘Mothers … Our Only Hope’.) Permissiveness begat sensuality, which in turn begat decadence. ‘The true criminal,’ he wrote, ‘is nearer to the beast than others of us.’ The lifestyles of promiscuous hippies and unwashed radical activists proved their bestial nature, and therefore their essential criminality. When some of the more zealous Sixties activists went underground at the turn of the decade – robbing banks, kidnapping heiresses – his paranoid nightmares were confirmed.
Young radicals had long assumed that the FBI was up to no good, but for much of Hoover’s career their complaints were dismissed as either paranoid nonsense or proof of their own guilt. If the FBI was monitoring them, it could only be because they were law-breakers. As Time magazine noted, the bureau was ‘an untouchable symbol of righteousness to most Americans’, its crime-fighting exploits celebrated in books, films and television series. The chairman of the House Appropriations Sub-Committee often bragged that he would never dream of cutting Hoover’s budget applications. ‘The Bureau über alles spirit was everywhere,’ wrote G. Gordon Liddy, who joined the FBI in September 1957. ‘That was the heart and soul of our training. By the end of the thirteen-week training period, if not before, we were convinced that the FBI was the one protector saving the American people from all enemies, foreign and domestic, criminal and subversive; that the Bureau had never failed the American people and must never fail them; that because of this record and the fact that no breath of scandal had touched it since J. Edgar Hoover became director, it enjoyed the unparalleled confidence of the American people; that this confidence was the key to success and must, at all cost, be protected.’ Liddy, an admirer of the Nazis’ dedication and discipline, liked to think of the FBI as America’s Schutzstaffel – its elite corps, its protective echelon. ‘There were only a few of us, six thousand out of 180 million, to stand between our country and those who would destroy it.’ The G-men were beyond public or political scrutiny because everyone knew that their cause was righteous and their methods heroic – and their secrecy an essential prerequisite of the job.
It was in the spring of 1971 that saboteurs ripped this benign picture from the wall and disclosed the dry rot hidden behind it. On the evening of 8 March, while the rest of the nation and indeed much of the world was watching Joe Frazier beat Muhammad Ali – the fight that Kenneth Tynan interpreted as a belated epitaph for the Sixties – burglars jemmied open the door of the FBI’s small two-man office in the aptly named town of Media, Pennsylvania, ransacked the filing cabinets and scarpered with more than a thousand documents. The culprits have never been identified: despite investigating for six years and building up a thirty-three-thousand-page file on the case, the FBI still couldn’t solve it. Like the Watergate break-in, however, this smash-and-grab raid was a little local tremor with seismic national reverberations.
After going through their swag, the robbers sent the Washington Post a small sample, a fourteen-page file about the FBI’s recruitment of a switchboard operator at Swarthmore College to spy on left-wing students and black activists in the Philadelphia area. Although the Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, was warned by attorney general John Mitchell that publication could ‘endanger lives’, he ran the story on 24 March. This was a mere hors d’oeuvre. Over the next few months newspapers such as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times received dozens of anonymously sent manila envelopes packed with more revelations. A new word entered the lexicon of American political paranoia – Cointelpro, a secret counter-intelligence programme initiated by J. Edgar Hoover in 1956 to monitor and disrupt dissident groups in the United States. At first the only targets were Communist, but in the late 1960s he added ‘black nationalist hate groups’ and ‘the New Left’ to the list, as well as ‘white hate groups’ – though the dearth of files on the far Right (two, as against two hundred on Leftists) suggests that this was no more than a gesture towards political balance.
The scale of the operation was astounding, as was the fact that it had continued for fifteen years without anyone outside the Bureau ever hearing the word Cointelpro. Ordinary Americans probably imagined that G-men spent their days hunting down mobsters or murderers, but the Media files implied a quite different set of priorities. Why waste time on racketeers when there are revolutionaries on the loose? Agents broke into the offices of the Socialist Workers Party, a small Trotskyist group, no fewer than ninety-two times between 1962 and 1966, photographing ten thousand pages of correspondence, membership lists and other records. But Cointelpro went far beyond intelligence-gathering: its purpose was to ‘discredit, destabilise and demoralise’ any group or individual that the FBI’s director found threatening, whether it be the Student Non-Violent Organising Committee or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. ‘Neutralise them,’ his agents were ordered, ‘in the same manner they are trying to destroy and neutralise the US.’
One of the files revealed a grotesque attempt to ‘neutralise’ Martin Luther King Jr, who until his assassination was regarded by Hoover as ‘the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country’. Shortly before King collected his Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, FBI agents sent him a composite tape which showed that they had been bugging his hotel room while he entertained a mistress. ‘King, there is one thing left for you to do,’ the anonymous letter advised. ‘You know what it is.’ A similar technique was deployed against the actress Jean Seberg, who had given money to the Black Panther Party. The FBI planted a story in the Los Angeles Times that the child with which she was pregnant had been fathered by a Black Panther rather than her French husband, the writer Romain Gary. Not true – her stillborn baby was white – but it was enough to push her into a suicidal depression from which she never emerged. When Seberg eventually killed herself, in 1979, Gary held the FBI responsible.
Another memo, from 1970, suggested how the Black Panther Party could be neutralised:
Xerox copies of true documents, documents subtly incorporating false information, and entirely fabricated documents would be periodically anonymously mailed to the residence of a key Panther leader … An attempt would be made to give the Panther recipient the impression the documents were stolen from police files by a disgruntled police employee sympathetic to the Panthers … Alleged police or FBI documents could be prepared pinpointing Panthers as police or FBI informants … Effective implementation of this proposal logically could not help but disrupt and confuse Panther activities.
There was more, much more, and every new disclosure made it harder for even the most sober citizens to avert their eyes from the abhorrent truth: the paranoid rhetoric of the loony Lefties had been vindicated. The land of the free had its own secret police. It was like opening a wardrobe that has been locked for thirty years and being engulfed by an avalanche of dead hyenas. ‘The disillusioning documentation has come in such rapid quantity,’ wrote Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation, ‘that it has almost ceased to shock and has begun to overwhelm.’ Probably the most revealing document of all was the memo written in September 1970 by a special agent from Philadelphia, William Anderson, summarising the conclusions of an FBI pow-wow in Washington. There were ‘plenty of reasons’ to keep pulling in anti-war protesters for interrogation, it concluded, ‘chief of which are it will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox. In addition, some will be overcome by the overwhelming personalities of the contacting agent and volunteer to tell all – perhaps on a continuing basis.’
Criticism of J. Edgar Hoover by senior politicians had, for decades, been unthinkable, not least because they knew he kept a record of their private peccadillos and could exact a vicious revenge.* The taboo was finally broken by Hale Boggs, the House Democratic leader, a month after the Media break-in. ‘When the FBI adopts the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Gestapo,’ he told Congress in April 1971, ‘then it is time that the present director no longer be the director.’ He also alleged what his colleagues had long guessed but never dared say: that the FBI tapped the phones of senators and congressmen.
With the attorney general away on holiday it was his deputy, Richard Kleindienst, who led the counter-attack, with a thinly veiled reference to the congressman’s history of heavy drinking and mental instability. Boggs, he said, was ‘sick, or not in possession of his faculties’. There were strict procedures for authorising any wire-tap: Hoover submitted a request in writing, the attorney general reviewed it, and both their signatures were required before agents could cut into a phone line. It was unthinkable that the attorney general would allow the bugging of legislators, unless perhaps they were suspected of serious crime. Ergo, there were no wire-taps in Congress. The alternative theory – that the FBI merrily ignored the process, eavesdropping on politicians or private citizens as it saw fit – was beyond Kleindienst’s imagination: ‘I just can’t picture an FBI agent out splicing wires someplace at three o’clock in the morning, risking observation for an illegal wire-tap.’ Where was Boggs’s evidence?
Boggs admitted he had none, but echoed the famous memo about making people see an FBI agent behind every mailbox: whatever the facts, many of his colleagues assumed that Hoover was monitoring their calls, and ‘if everyone thinks his phone is tapped, it’s as bad as their being tapped. You’re sure not going to carry on any business.’ Kleindienst agreed, though for different reasons. ‘It’s destructive to the country for people to believe that it’s being done,’ he complained. ‘How can a congressman function if he feels his talks with his colleagues or his constituents are being overheard? We agree that it has a chilling effect, and we’d like to have a hearing to get rid of that feeling.’* He wanted hearings, and he would get them in abundance – though not until 1975, by which time Hoover was dead, Nixon had resigned and Kleindienst himself had been convicted of lying to Congress. Hundreds of mangy corpses cascaded from the cupboard as politicians and reporters started rummaging in the dark recesses of their democracy.
It was the journalist Seymour Hersh who instigated the search, with a story headlined ‘Huge CIA Operation Reported in US Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years’ which ran across the front page of the New York Times on Sunday, 22 December 1974. ‘The Central Intelligence Agency,’ he reported, ‘directly violating its charter, conducted a massive illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the anti-war movement and other dissident groups in the United States, according to well-placed government sources.’ One source was the new CIA director William Colby, who confirmed to Hersh that under his predecessors the agency had sometimes ‘overstepped the boundaries of its charter’ while nimbly exculpating himself by adding that he had conducted a thorough review as soon as he took over in 1973 and ‘issued a series of clear directives making plain that the agency henceforth must and would stay within the law’.
It was all history, in other words – but no less headline-grabbing for that. Hersh described a project codenamed Operation Chaos (or, more accurately, MHChaos) which the CIA had initiated in 1967 after being asked by President Johnson to find out if foreign governments were financing or directing the anti-war movement. Although the Agency soon concluded that the answer was no, the operation continued its surveillance of protesters until 1972, when the then director Richard Helms ordered that it should investigate international terrorism instead, thus creeping back within the CIA’s rules. By then, however, it was supplemented by Project Resistance, which spied on American dissenters until being terminated by Colby in June 1973. Even among the spies themselves there was some disquiet at all this activity on the home front by an agency that was officially restricted to external espionage. Their misgivings were recorded in the autumn of 1972 by the CIA’s inspector general, William Broe:
Though there is a general belief that CIA involvement is directed primarily at foreign manipulation and subversive exploitation of US citizens, we also encountered general concern over what appeared to constitute a monitoring of the political views and activities of Americans not known to be suspected of being involved in espionage.*
Occasionally, he continued, agents had been asked to report on ‘the whereabouts and activities of prominent persons’ whose comings and goings were not only in the public domain ‘but for whom allegations of subversion seemed sufficiently nebulous to raise renewed doubts as to the nature and legitimacy of the MHChaos project’.
Some officers were so disenchanted that the CIA now had to cope with a wholly new threat – whistleblowers. ‘The fact of the matter,’ Colby said, looking back at the mid-Seventies, ‘was that the crisis of confidence in government over Vietnam, which was sweeping the nation at large, was beginning to infect the faith of the intelligence community in itself. Just how serious the infection was soon became clear when a publisher passed along a copy of the outline of a book on the CIA being circulated by Victor Marchetti, a former CIA employee.’ With Nixon’s backing, the Agency pursued Marchetti through the courts, and by the time The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence appeared in 1974 he had been forced to remove 168 passages which would ‘endanger national security’. It was a pyrrhic victory. The publishers drew attention to this censorship by leaving blank spaces to indicate the deletions, and then exploited the Freedom of Information Act to have many of them restored over the next few years.† Readers of subsequent editions could therefore judge for themselves how the government defined national security. The very first excision, for instance, was a comment made by Henry Kissinger to a secret interdepartmental committee in June 1970, explaining why the CIA should sabotage Salvador Allende’s election campaign in Chile: ‘I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.’ Even readers who agreed with the sentiment might wonder how the publication of this remark four years later – after the death of Allende and the overthrow of his government – would jeopardise intelligence operations. If that could be suppressed, what else were the CIA and the White House concealing? Seymour Hersh’s exposé gave a first draft of the answer.
‘Overnight, CIA became a sinister shadow organisation in the minds of the American people,’ said David Atlee Phillips, a CIA veteran in charge of Cuban and Latin American operations. ‘Visions of a CIA payroll swollen with zealous and ubiquitous cloak-and-dagger villains impervious to good judgment and outside control arose throughout the country. CIA was seen as what the detractors had been so long claiming: unprincipled spooks threatening American society.’ Although this was not a CIA that Phillips recognised, he understood that ‘any image less sinister would never really be believed by Americans still stunned after Watergate’. Returning to the Agency’s HQ at Langley, Virginia, after the Christmas holiday in 1974, he found that the New York Times story ‘had produced massive cracks in what had been up to that time a fairly monolithic intelligence establishment’.
It had also ruined President Gerald Ford’s Christmas. He summoned William Colby to the Oval Office on 3 January 1975 and learned for the first time of the ‘family jewels’, a seven-hundred-page dossier compiled by Colby two years earlier which listed ‘unsavoury and illegal CIA practices’, including plots to assassinate foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro. ‘Although none of these assassinations had been carried out,’ Ford wrote in his memoirs, ‘the fact that government officials had considered them was distressing. In the aftermath of Watergate, it was important that we be totally above-board about these past abuses and avoid giving any substance to charges that we were engaging in a “cover-up”.’
One almost feels some sympathy for this amiable plodder, who had assured Americans only a few months earlier that ‘our long national nightmare is over’. To win the presidential election in 1976 he needed to put as much distance as possible between himself and the miserable sinner whose office he had inherited; a Nixon-style cover-up was therefore out of the question. But full disclosure had its own perils. Never mind that many of the misdeeds chronicled in the ‘family jewels’ had occurred under other presidents, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt: since Nixon was now synonymous with skulduggery all the CIA’s ‘unsavoury and illegal practices’ would somehow be associated in the public mind with his name, regardless of their age or parentage – and if the voters and the media didn’t have Tricky Dick to kick around any more, the likeliest butt was the man who had nominated him at the Republican convention in 1972 and pardoned him two years later. (Lest anyone had forgotten, Alan Pakula included news footage of Ford nominating Nixon in All the President’s Men.)
Ford’s most urgent imperative was to forestall any mischief on Capitol Hill: if congressional Democrats started poking their noses into the CIA’s malodorous closet, a Nixonian stench of scandal would hang over the entire election campaign. Or, as Ford put it: ‘Unnecessary disclosures would almost certainly result if I let Congress dominate the investigation. I decided to take the initiative.’ The day after meeting Colby, he established a ‘blue-ribbon commission’ of grandees to look into Hersh’s allegations, chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Not so much a cover-up, more a traditional whitewash giving the appearance of honest inquiry while minimising embarrassment: having sat on the Warren Commission, which did a similar job with the Kennedy assassination, Ford knew the form.
For William Colby, however, nothing less than a complete voluntary confession of past sins would now suffice to save the CIA from dissolution, even if that damaged the presidency by confirming that the executive branch had condoned or encouraged these lawless escapades. Taking his cue from the phrase inscribed in the front hall of the CIA building – ‘The truth shall make you free’ – he decided to tell all:
I discovered that I was being somewhat too open and candid for some people’s tastes. After my second or third appearance, the commission’s chairman, Vice-President Rockefeller, drew me aside into his office at the Executive Office Building and said in his most charming manner: ‘Bill do you really have to present all this material to us? We realise that there are secrets that you fellows need to keep and so nobody here is going to take it amiss if you feel that there are some questions you can’t answer quite as fully as you seem to feel you have to.’
The CIA director wouldn’t stop talking, and he soon found more receptive audiences. Unimpressed by Ford’s discreet panjandrums, both the Senate and the House established select committees to conduct a thoroughgoing review of what the intelligence agencies had really been up to over the previous couple of decades. Colby immediately rang the chairman of the Senate committee, Frank Church, to promise his full cooperation, adding that he hoped the investigation would be ‘comprehensive’.
The report from Rockefeller and his blue-ribbon boys, issued in June 1975, was a valiant attempt to smother the fires of controversy with blankets of blandness. Its conclusion: ‘A detailed analysis of the facts has convinced the commission that the great majority of the CIA’s domestic activities comply with its statutory authority.’ But little flames of excitement kept flickering despite their efforts. ‘Allegations that the CIA had been involved in plans to assassinate certain leaders of foreign countries came to the commission’s attention’ – a strange choice of words given that the allegations came from the CIA’s own director. ‘The commission’s staff began the required inquiry but time did not permit a full investigation.’ Even so, they couldn’t entirely omit all that Colby had told them. With excruciating reluctance, they confirmed that Hersh’s allegations were largely true. Between 1967 and 1973 Operation CHAOS ‘compiled some 13,000 different files, including files on 7,200 American citizens. The documents in these files and related materials included the names of more than 300,000 persons and organisations, which were entered into a computerised index.’
These sotto voce revelations were amplified, and given a full orchestral soundtrack, by the televised hearings of Senator Frank Church’s committee that summer. One day he obtained a file showing that the CIA had intercepted mail addressed to the Ford Foundation, Harvard University, Martin Luther King, Hubert Humphrey, Edward Kennedy and Arthur Burns (chairman of the Federal Reserve). To Church’s astonishment, the file also contained a letter from him to his mother.
Colby’s performance was the show-stopper. He admitted that the CIA kept stocks of shellfish toxin and cobra venom despite having been ordered by the President in 1970 to destroy all biological weapons. With a dramatic flourish, he then handed Senator Church a pistol that could fire darts tipped with these toxins silently and accurately from a distance of 250 feet. The dart was so tiny – the thickness of a human hair, and only a quarter of an inch long – as to be almost undetectable, and once the poison had dissolved in a victim’s body it left no trace. ‘A murder instrument that’s about as efficient as you can get,’ Church commented, fingering the gun rather warily. Colby described some of the other James Bond gadgets in the CIA’s secret armoury – dart-launchers disguised as fountain pens, canes or umbrellas, a car engine-head bolt that gave off a toxic substance when heated, a device hidden in a fluorescent bulb that released a biological poison when the light was switched on. To his knowledge, he said, none had ever been used, but it was hard to be sure: for security reasons, the Agency’s researchers kept few records.
William Colby’s trip to Capitol Hill in September 1975 was a kamikaze mission. ‘From the outset I had been, of course, aware that many in the administration did not approve of my cooperative approach to the investigation,’ he said. ‘But the impact of the toxin spectacular, and especially the fact that I had delivered the dart gun when Congress demanded it, blew the roof off.’ Gerald Ford sacked him a few weeks later, and then issued Executive Order 11905: ‘No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in political assassinations.’
He was the first President in American history to think it necessary to announce such a policy. ‘In itself,’ the CIA historian John Ranelagh points out, ‘the declaration represented no change from the position under any previous President. It was a political statement, made for political purposes: the President was publicly responding to Colby’s revelations and the recommendations of the Rockefeller Commission.’ The damage had been done, however, and it couldn’t be repaired by members of a governing class whose garb of imperial infallibility was now seen to be as imaginary and deceptive as the emperor’s new clothes. Ford hoped that by firing Colby and promising not to order political murders he could convince the voters that he was on their side, just as Colby assumed that his candour would restore public trust by showing that the CIA was now straight and sincere enough to atone for its previous transgressions, but the effect of all this ostentatious penitence on many Americans was quite the opposite: if presidents and intelligence agencies have been lying to us all these years, why should we believe them now?
Anyone who wants to hear the characteristic sound of the mid-Seventies should find a copy of Before the Flood, a live album released by Bob Dylan and the Band in June 1974, and listen to ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. When Dylan yells out the line ‘Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked’, the next few bars are almost inaudible beneath a deafening whoop of assent from the audience. After such knowledge, what innocence? Washington power-brokers couldn’t restore it, but perhaps a latter-day Cincinnatus would. Which is why, in November 1976, Americans elected as their new president a peanut farmer from Georgia, Jimmy Carter, who added a line from the same Dylan song to his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention that summer: ‘He not busy being born is busy dying.’ The leitmotif of Carter’s successful campaign was condemnation of what he called the three national disgraces – ‘Washington, Vietnam and the CIA’. It sounded remarkably like Norman Mailer’s birthday-party harangue.
Mailer, the squiffy heretic, now appeared to be the embodiment of mainstream opinion. ‘We tell ourselves we are a counterculture,’ Jon Landau had written in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971. ‘And yet are we really so different from the culture against which we rebel?’ Older Americans who raged against dope-smoking students, for example, gulped down alcohol, barbiturates and tranquillisers without a second thought. But Landau’s point could also be inverted. The counterculture was fast becoming the dominant culture, so much so that a truly rebellious nonconformist would be someone who shunned drugs and preferred Bach to the Beatles. Respectable broadsheet newspapers employed rock critics, presidential candidates quoted Bob Dylan – and sober, tweedy pundits now spoke of the FBI or CIA in language borrowed from the Yippies. The paranoid style had become a lingua franca.
Just as shocking as the illegal antics of the FBI and CIA which the Church committee discovered – mail-tampering, phone-tapping, house-breaking, slipping LSD to unsuspecting drinkers in bars, planning assassinations – was the fact that none of those involved ever wondered if they were doing anything wrong. William C. Sullivan, who was in charge of the FBI’s domestic intelligence division for ten years, told the committee that in all that time ‘never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: “Is this course of action … lawful, is it legal, is it ethical or moral? “We never gave any thought to this line of reasoning, because we were just naturally pragmatic.’
‘Pragmatic’ is not a word that can be found in the final 815-page report issued by Church’s committee in April 1976, which had a preference for the adjectives ‘illegal’, ‘improper’ and ‘excessive’. There were 500,000 files on US citizens and groups at FBI headquarters, and many more in branch offices. The CIA kept an index of 1.5 million names taken from the 250,000 letters it had illegally opened and photographed. Army intelligence had collected information on 100,000 people who were involved, however tangentially or peacefully, in ‘political protest activities’. As the committee concluded: ‘Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies, and too much information has been collected.’ During Nixon’s reign even the Internal Revenue Service had become a political intelligence agency because he found the FBI and CIA insufficiently biddable: hundreds of his enemies were hounded by revenue investigators and forced to justify every dollar and cent in their tax returns. The assumption was that almost anybody’s accounts, when scrutinised intensely enough, would have errors or omissions. If the numbers all added up, the hours spent recalculating and justifying them would at least give the victims a humungous headache and a fearful awareness that Big Brother was watching even their tiniest financial transaction. Between 1969 and 1973, the IRS’s ‘special services unit’ – set up at Nixon’s behest – opened files on three thousand organisations that he wished to harass, including Associated Catholic Charities and the New York Review of Books, and eight thousand individuals. Among them were the New York mayor John Lindsay, the columnist Stewart Alsop, Sammy Davis Jr and Norman Mailer.
Church also revealed that the FBI kept a catalogue of twenty-six thousand Americans who should be rounded up and interned in the event of a ‘national emergency’. One of them was Norman Mailer.
* This was long before the official edict that real men don’t eat quiche. In 1973 it was still thought rather exotic and sophisticated.
* The files weren’t limited to politicians. ‘Anyone with any kind of power or national celebrity was represented,’ Gordon Liddy wrote, ‘and the quality of detail was remarkable: in the tape I reviewed of the lovemaking between the late Sam “Mooney” Giancana and a well-known popular singer, even the squeak of the bedsprings was audible … As we said at the time, in a takeoff of an old joke about Hopalong Cassidy: “Nobody fucks with J. Edgar.”’
* One senior Senate aide began his first telephone conversation each week by bellowing, ‘Fuck J. Edgar Hoover!’ To the startled listener at the other end of the line, he explained, ‘Just clearing the lines.’
* Not all the objections were so high-minded. A CIA memo noted ‘the high degree of resentment’ among officers who had to grow long hair to pose as hippy radicals while infiltrating the peace movement.
† The US Freedom of Information Act came into force in 1967, but was greatly strengthened by the Privacy Act of 1974 which Congress passed after the Watergate scandal, overriding a veto by President Ford.