On February 13, 1967, Richard Helms was in Albuquerque, at the end of a long day touring the American nuclear-weapons labs, when a highly agitated CIA communications officer met him at his hotel room with a message from the White House: Return to Washington immediately.
A little leftist monthly called Ramparts was about to publish a story saying that the National Student Association, a well-respected worldwide group of American collegians, had for years received a generous stipend from the agency. CIA headquarters had just warned the White House that there would be a firestorm "over CIA involvement with private voluntary organizations and foundations. The CIA will probably be accused of improperly interfering in domestic affairs, and of manipulating and endangering innocent young people. The Administration will probably come under attack."
When the story broke, President Johnson immediately announced that Nick Katzenbach, the number-two man at the State Department, would lead a top-down review of the relationships the CIA had forged with private voluntary organizations in the United States. Since Helms was the only one who knew precisely what had gone on, "LBJ left me the responsibility of pulling the Agency's scorched chestnuts out of the fire."
James Reston of The New York Times knowingly observed that the CIA's links to certain unnamed radio stations, publications, and labor unions were now also in jeopardy. In short order, two decades of secret work by the CIA was laid bare.
Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom were revealed as the agency's creations. All the influential little magazines that had flourished under the banner of the anticommunist liberal left, all the eminently respectable groups that had served as conduits for the CIA's money and people, such as the Ford Foundation and the Asia Foundation--all were interwoven in a paper trail of dummy corporations and front organizations linked to the CIA. When one was blown, they all blew.
The radios were arguably the most influential political-warfare operations in the agency's history. The CIA had spent close to $400 million subsidizing them, and it had reason to believe that millions of listeners behind the iron curtain appreciated every word they broadcast. But their legitimacy was undercut when they were revealed as the CIA's frequencies.
The agency had built a house of cards, and Helms knew it. The CIA's support for the radios and the foundations were some of the biggest covert-action programs the agency had run. But there was nothing truly clandestine about them. Ten years before, Helms had talked to Wisner about phasing out the secret subsidies and letting the State Department handle the radios. They had agreed to try to convince President Eisenhower, but they never followed through. Since 1961, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had been warning that the millions of dollars flowing from the CIA to student groups and private foundations was "the subject of common gossip, or knowledge, both here and abroad." For a year, Ramparts had been on the agency's radar; Helms had sent a memo to Bill Moyers at the White House detailing the political and personal behavior of its editors and reporters.
But the CIA was not the only party guilty of negligence when it came to the control of covert action. For years, the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department had failed to keep an eye on the agency. More than three hundred major covert operations had been launched since the inauguration of President Kennedy--and, except for Helms, no one then in power knew about most of them. "We lack adequate detail on how certain programs are to be carried out and we lack continuing review of major ongoing programs," a State Department intelligence officer reported on February 15, 1967.
The mechanisms created to watch over the CIA and to invest its clandestine service with presidential authority were not working. They never had worked. There was a growing sense at the White House, the State Department, the Justice Department, and Congress that the agency had gone slightly out of control.
"WHAT THEY HAVE SPECIFICALLY IN MIND IS KILLING HIM"
On February 20, 1967, the president telephoned the acting attorney general of the United States, Ramsey Clark.
Five weeks before, LBJ and the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson had had an hour-long off-the-record conversation in the White House. Not for nothing was Pearson's column called Washington Merry-Go-Round. He had set the president's head spinning with a story about the Mafia's John Rosselli, the loyal friend of the CIA's Bill Harvey, who was the sworn enemy of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
"This story going around about the CIA...sendin' in the folks to get Castro," LBJ said to Ramsey Clark. "It's incredible." He told the tale as he had heard it: "They have a man that was involved, that was brought in to the CIA, with a number of others, and instructed by the CIA and the Attorney General to assassinate Castro after the Bay of Pigs.... They had these pills." Every word of that was true. But the story went on. It took Johnson to a terrifying if unfounded conclusion: Castro had captured the plotters and "he tortured 'em. And they told him all about it.... So he said, 'Okay. We'll just take care of that.' So then he called Oswald and a group in, and told them to...get the job done." The job was the assassination of the president of the United States.
Johnson told Ramsey Clark to find out what the FBI knew about the connections among the CIA, and the Mafia, and Bobby Kennedy.
On March 3, Pearson's column reported that "President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb--an unconfirmed report that Senator Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot which then backfired against his late brother." The item badly frightened Bobby Kennedy. He and Helms had lunch the next day, and the director brought the sole copy of the only CIA memo tying Kennedy to the Mafia plot against Castro.
Two days later, the FBI completed a report for the president with the pungent title "Central Intelligence Agency's Intentions to Send Hoodlums to Cuba to Assassinate Castro." It was clear and concise: the CIA had tried to kill Castro. The agency had hired members of the Mafia to do it. Robert Kennedy as attorney general knew about the CIA plot as it unfolded, and he knew the mob was involved.
President Johnson mulled the matter over for two weeks before he ordered Helms to undertake an official CIA investigation of the plots against Castro, Trujillo, and Diem. Helms had no choice. He told the CIA's inspector general, John Earman, to go to work. One by one, Earman called the handful of men who knew what had happened to his office; one by one, he pulled together the CIA's files, slowly assembling a detailed account.
Secretary of State Rusk ordered the chief of the State Department's intelligence bureau, Tom Hughes, to conduct his own independent review of the CIA's covert operations. On May 5, Hughes sat down with Rusk and Katzenbach in the secretary of state's chandeliered office. The three men weighed whether the president should sharply curtail the clandestine service. Hughes had come to believe that buying foreign politicians, supporting foreign coups, and running guns to foreign rebels could corrode American values. He proposed that the United States should cut covert action "to an irreducible minimum." They should go forward only when "the prospective results are essential to national security or national interests; are of such value as significantly to outweigh the risks; and cannot be effectively obtained in any other way." Rusk conveyed these thoughts to Richard Helms, who did not strongly disagree.
That same week, Helms read very carefully through the 133-page draft report of the CIA's inspector general. It said the killers of Diem and Trujillo had been "encouraged but not controlled by the U.S. government." But it dissected in grim detail the mechanics of the plots against Castro. "We cannot overemphasize the extent to which responsible Agency officers felt themselves subject to the Kennedy administration's severe pressures to do something about Castro," it said. "We find people speaking vaguely of 'doing something about Castro' when it is clear that what they have specifically in mind is killing him." Though the pressure had come from the highest levels of the government, the report was silent on the question of presidential authorization. The only man who could provide a definitive answer, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was busy at that moment co-sponsoring a bill raising federal penalties for the desecration of the American flag.
The report implicated every living CIA officer who had served as chief of the clandestine service--Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, and Desmond FitzGerald--in conspiracies to commit murder. It placed a particularly heavy burden on FitzGerald. It said he had personally promised high-powered rifles with telescopic scopes to the Cuban agent Rolando Cubela, who had vowed to kill Castro, the week President Kennedy was assassinated. FitzGerald fervently denied it, but the chances that he was lying were high.
On May 10, Helms put his handwritten notes on the inspector general's report in his briefcase and went to see the president. No record of what they said is known to exist. On May 23, Helms testified before Senator Richard Russell's CIA subcommittee. Russell knew more than any outsider about the agency's affairs. He was closer to President Johnson than any man in Washington. He put a very pointed question to Helms in the context of political assassination. He asked about the CIA's "ability to keep former employees quiet."
Helms went back to headquarters that day and made sure that every piece of paper created by the inspector general's investigation was destroyed. He kept the sole copy of the report securely locked in his safe, where it sat untouched for the next six years.
Helms was well aware that the CIA officer who knew the most damning facts about the Castro conspiracy was the dangerously unstable Bill Harvey, who had been dismissed as station chief in Rome for chronic drunkenness but remained on the payroll, lurching around the corridors at headquarters. "Bill would show up at some meeting just crocked," said Red White, the CIA's executive director. "He'd drink those bathtub Martinis." White recalled meeting in Helms's office with Des FitzGerald and Jim Angleton in the last week of May 1967. The subject was what to do with Harvey. They eased him out of the agency with the greatest care and tried to make sure that he had a quiet retirement. The CIA's security director, Howard Osborn, took the washed-up officer out to lunch and recorded "his extreme bitterness toward the Agency and the Director," and his willingness to blackmail both if backed into a corner. Harvey would return to haunt the CIA before his death.
"A MAN OBSESSED"
It was a time of great professional peril for Helms. Throughout the spring of 1967, he faced another crisis at headquarters as grave as the ticking time bomb of the assassination plots. Some of his best officers had started an internal rebellion against the conspiracy theories of Jim Angleton.
For more than a decade, ever since Angleton had obtained, with Israel's help, a copy of Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin, he had enjoyed an exalted status at the CIA. He still controlled the Israeli account and liaison with the FBI along with his crucial role as chief of counterintelligence, the man who guarded the agency against penetration from communist spies. But his vision of a "master plot" run by Moscow had started to poison the agency. A secret CIA history of Richard Helms as director of central intelligence, declassified in February 2007, reveals in detail the precise tone and tenor of Angleton's work at headquarters:
Angleton by the mid-1960s had come to hold a set of views that, if accurate, portended grave consequences for the United States. Angleton believed that the Soviet Union, guided by as skillful a group of leaders as ever served one government, was implacable in its hostility toward the West. International Communism remained monolithic, and reports of a rift between Moscow and Peking were only part of an elaborate "disinformation campaign." An "integrated and purposeful Socialist Bloc," Angleton wrote in 1966, sought to foster false stories of "splits, evolution, power struggles, economic disasters, [and] good and bad Communism" to present "a wilderness of mirrors" to the confused West. Once this program of strategic deception had succeeded in splintering Western solidarity, Moscow would find it an easy matter to pick off the Free World nations one by one. Only the Western intelligence services, in Angleton's view, could counter this challenge and stave off disaster. And because the Soviets had penetrated every one of these services, the fate of Western civilization rested, to a large extent, in the hands of the counterintelligence experts.
Angleton was unsound--"a man of loose and disjointed thinking whose theories, when applied to matters of public record, were patently unworthy of serious consideration," as an official CIA assessment later concluded. The consequences of believing in him were grave. In the spring of 1967, they included the continuing incarceration of Yuri Nosenko, the Soviet defector who was in his third year of illegal imprisonment under subhuman conditions in a CIA stockade; a cascade of false accusations against senior Soviet division officers wrongly suspected of spying for Moscow; and a refusal to accept the word of any and all Soviet defectors and recruited agents. "Loyal Agency employees had come under suspicion of treachery solely on the basis of coincidence and flimsy circumstantial evidence," says the secret CIA history of the Helms years. "Ongoing operations against Soviet targets had been shut down, new ones stifled, by the conviction that the Kremlin, tipped off by a mole within CIA, had doubled most Agency assets. Valuable information supplied by defectors and longtime sources was being ignored, for fear that it was somehow tainted."
A small but determined resistance to Angleton was growing within the clandestine service. "Rather than being disinformed by the enemy, we are deluding ourselves," a senior Soviet division officer named Leonard McCoy said in a memo that Helms first read in April 1967; he told Helms that the Angletonian mindset had created a complete "paralysis of our Soviet effort." In May, Howard Osborn, the director of the CIA's Office of Security, warned that the Nosenko case was a legal and moral abomination. Helms asked the deputy director of central intelligence, Admiral Rufus Taylor, to try to resolve the case. Taylor reported back that Nosenko was in no way a double agent, the CIA's Soviet division was being torn apart, and Helms had to set the prisoner free and make some major personnel changes to clear the air.
Angleton and his staff produced almost no intelligence reports for the rest of the agency; he considered himself the ultimate customer for his work and refused to circulate his conclusions in writing. He had sabotaged station chiefs throughout Europe, undermined allied intelligence services, and poisoned the well at headquarters--all without "one scrap of supportive evidence that there ever was or ever had been" a mole inside the Soviet division, as Rolfe Kingsley, the newly appointed chief of the division under Helms, protested without avail. Helms believed, in Admiral Taylor's words, that "Jim was a man obsessed.... Helms deplored that obsession but thought that Angleton was so valuable and so difficult to replace that his other attributes outweighed the disadvantages of that obsession."
Despite the blighted careers, the damaged lives, and the sheer chaos that Angleton created, Helms never broke faith with him. Why? First, as far as anyone knows, the CIA was never penetrated by a traitor or a Soviet spy during the twenty years that Angleton ran counterintelligence, and for this Helms was eternally grateful. Second, as the secret CIA history of the Helms years makes clear for the first time, Angleton was partly responsible for his greatest triumph as director of central intelligence: the CIA's accurate call of the Six-Day War.
On June 5, 1967, Israel launched an attack on Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The CIA saw it coming. The Israelis had been telling the White House and the State Department that they were in great peril. Helms told the president that this was a calculated gambit, a white lie told in the hope of winning direct American military support. To Lyndon Johnson's great relief, Helms said that Israel would strike at the time and place of its choosing, and was likely to win swiftly--in a matter of days. The ultimate source of the confidently stated forecast was Angleton, who had gotten it from his friends at the highest levels of Israeli intelligence, and reported it directly and exclusively to Helms. His word was good. "The subsequent accuracy of this prediction established Helms's reputation in the Johnson White House," the CIA history recorded. "The experience almost certainly constituted the high point of Helms's service as Director. It also further solidified Angleton's standing in the DCI's estimation."
LBJ was duly impressed by the rare bull's-eye. Helms proudly recounted for the CIA's historians that Johnson, for the first time in his presidency, realized that "intelligence had a role in his life, and an important one at that.... This was the first time that he was really sort of jarred by the fact that 'those intelligence fellows had some insight that these other fellows don't have.'"
He offered Helms a seat at the president's Tuesday lunch--the best table in town, the highest council of the government, what Helms called the magic inner circle--alongside the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Once a week, for the next eighteen months, the CIA had what it needed most of all: the attention of the president of the United States.
"AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF PLUMBING"
Helms wanted to keep the secrets of the CIA under control at home. To that end, he demanded no unpleasant surprises abroad. Under the prevailing political conditions, many of the agency's covert operations were potential H-bombs.
In June 1967, Helms told Desmond FitzGerald to evaluate every one of the CIA's overseas covert actions, ensure that the secrecy surrounding them was secure--and shut down every one that might blow. The agency could not withstand another public scandal or risk any more public scrutiny. The pressure on FitzGerald, on top of the onus placed upon him by the internal investigation of the Castro plots, proved too great. Five weeks later, a heart attack killed him as he played tennis with the British ambassador. Like Frank Wisner, he was fifty-six years old when he died.
After FitzGerald was buried, Helms selected a loyal old friend to lead the clandestine service: Thomas Hercules Karamessines, Tom K. to his friends, a charter member of the CIA and the former station chief in Athens, who lived in constant crippling pain from a twisted spine. Together, in the summer and fall of 1967, they continued the worldwide review of the CIA's covert operations. No nation on earth was neutral territory, and Helms aimed to give the agency a global reach.
In Saigon, the CIA had just started an excruciatingly sensitive operation, approved by President Johnson, code-named Buttercup. The agency was trying to put out peace feelers to North Vietnam by returning a politically astute Vietcong prisoner of war to Hanoi with a clandestine radio transmitter, seeking to open talks at the highest levels with the enemy. Nothing had come of it. The CIA had created and run the local Communist Party in several pro-American nations--among them Panama--hoping that the parties' leaders would be invited to Moscow and discover the secrets of Soviet doctrine firsthand. The lessons learned in the never-ending battle to penetrate the Kremlin were slim. Helms was trying to mobilize the CIA's first worldwide cadre of deep-cover officers: spies who worked without the protection of a diplomatic passport, posing as international lawyers or traveling salesmen for Fortune 500 companies. The program, code-named Globe, had been under way for five years, but barely more than a dozen such officers were wandering the planet.
Good operations took years to develop. "You have to get the infrastructure, get the people who have to work with you," Helms once explained. "There is an enormous amount of plumbing to be put into the structure if it is to have any chance of success."
But patience, persistence, money, and cunning alone were not enough to fight communism. Real weapons needed to be placed in the hands of friendly rulers and their CIA-trained secret police and paramilitaries. President Eisenhower had created a one-size-fits-all plan called the Overseas Internal Security Program, run by the CIA in concert with the Pentagon and the State Department. The man who wrote the manifesto for the mission--"a democratic, unselfish, often unconditional approach to helping other countries to help themselves"--was the agency's own Al Haney, the con artist of the Seoul station and the field commander of Operation Success in Guatemala.
Haney proposed to police the world by arming America's third-world allies. "There have been charges that it is morally wrong for the U.S. to aid undemocratic regimes to strengthen their security systems, thereby serving to entrench them in power," he argued. But "the U.S. cannot afford the moral luxury of helping only those regimes in the free world that meet our ideals of self-government. Eliminate all the absolute monarchies, dictatorships and juntas from the free world and count those that are left and it should be readily apparent that the U.S. would be well on its way to isolation."
The program trained 771,217 foreign military and police officers in twenty-five nations. It found the most fertile ground in nations where covert action by the CIA had prepared the soil. It had helped create the secret police of Cambodia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Peru, the Philippines, South Korea, South Vietnam, and Thailand. In each of these nations, the interior ministries and the national police worked in close liaison with the CIA station. The agency also established an international police academy in Panama and a "bomb school" in Los Fresnos, Texas, which trained officers from Central and South America. Graduates included the future leaders of death squads in El Salvador and Honduras.
It was sometimes a short step from the classroom to the torture chamber. The CIA was on "dangerous ground," said Robert Amory, chief of the CIA's intelligence directorate under Eisenhower and Kennedy. "You can get into Gestapo-type tactics."
In the 1960s, the scope of the CIA's work expanded dramatically in Latin America. "Castro was the catalyst," said Tom Polgar, the Berlin base veteran who served as chief of the foreign intelligence staff of the Latin American division from 1965 to 1967. "The CIA and the propertied classes of Latin America had that one thing in common--that fear."
"My mission was to use the Latin American stations as a means to collect intelligence on the Soviet Union and Cuba," Polgar said. "To do that, you have to have a relatively stable government that will cooperate with the United States."
The CIA was backing the leaders of eleven Latin American nations--Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, and Venezuela. Once a friendly government was in power, a CIA station chief had five paths to maintain American influence over foreign leaders. "You become their foreign intelligence service," Polgar said. "They don't know what's going on in the world. So you give them a weekly briefing--doctored to meet their sensibilities. Money, definitely--that's always welcome. Procurement--toys, games, weapons. Training. And you can always take a group of officers to Fort Bragg or to Washington--a wonderful holiday."
The agency held the position, duly stated in a formal estimate signed by Richard Helms, that Latin American military juntas were good for the United States. They were the only force capable of controlling political crises. Law and order were better than the messy struggle for democracy and freedom.
In LBJ's day, the counterinsurgency missions started by the Kennedys took root where Ike's internal-security programs had flourished and the CIA had installed military and political allies. In 1967, through the careful cultivation of dictators on two continents, the CIA scored one of its greatest cold-war victories: hunting down Che Guevara.
"REMEMBER, YOU ARE KILLING A MAN"
Che was a living emblem for the soldiers and the spies of the Cuban revolution. They served in outposts as far-flung as the Congo, where the power of the strongman Joseph Mobutu was threatened by a ragtag rebel force called the Simbas, whose warriors had kidnapped the CIA base chief in Stanleyville in 1964.
The Congo was a cockpit of the cold war, and Mobutu and the CIA worked in closest harmony. Gerry Gossens, the CIA's number-three man in the Congo, proposed that they create a new force to fight Soviet and Cuban influence in Africa. "Mobutu gave me a house, seven officers, and six Volkswagens, and I taught them how to conduct surveillance," Gossens said. "We set up a Congolese service reporting to the CIA. We directed them. We ran them. Eventually, with the President's blessing, we paid their operational expenses. I got the take, vetted it, edited it, and passed it on to Mobutu." Mobutu got whatever he wanted from the CIA--money and guns, planes and pilots, a personal physician, and the political security of close liaison with the American government--while the CIA built its bases and stations in the heart of Africa.
In a classic battle of the cold war, Che and his Cubans confronted the CIA and its Cubans on the western shores of Lake Tanganyika, in the heart of Africa. The agency's forces, equipped with recoilless rifles and warplanes, attacked several thousand Simbas and about a hundred of Che's Cuban soldiers. Under fire, Che sought new orders from Fidel. "Avoid annihilation," el jefe maximo advised.
Che made an inglorious retreat. On the run, he crossed the Atlantic, seeking to light the flames of revolution in Latin America. He wound up in the mountains of Bolivia, where the CIA tracked him down.
A right-wing general, Rene Barrientos, had seized power in that desperately poor nation, backed by more than $1 million from the CIA. The money served "to encourage," in the agency's words, "a stable government favorably inclined toward the United States," and "in support of the ruling Junta's plans to pacify the country." The general crushed his opponents with increasing force. Bill Broe, chief of the Latin American division of the clandestine service, wrote to Helms with satisfaction: "With the election of Rene Barrientos as President of Bolivia on July 3, 1966, this action was brought to a successful completion." The CIA sent its Barrientos file to the White House. National security adviser Walt Rostow handed it to the president and said: "This is to explain why General Barrientos may say thank you when you have lunch with him next Wednesday, the 20th."
In April 1967, Barrientos told the American ambassador, Douglas Henderson, that his officers were tracking Che in the mountains of Bolivia. Ambassador Henderson was headed for Washington that week and he had brought the news to Desmond FitzGerald. "This can't be Che Guevara," FitzGerald had said. "We think that Che Guevara was killed in the Dominican Republic and is buried in an unmarked grave." Nevertheless, the CIA sent two Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs down to join the hunt with a squad of American-trained Bolivian Rangers.
One of the CIA's Cubans was Feliz Rodriguez, and he sent a series of stirring bulletins from the battlefront. His messages, declassified in 2004, are the only contemporary eyewitness accounts of a confrontation long shrouded by myth. From the village of Higueras, Rodriguez radioed John Tilton, the station chief in La Paz, who relayed the news to Bill Broe and Tom Polgar at headquarters. Their reports went to Helms, who hand-carried them to the White House.
On October 8, 1967, Che was captured after a clash with the Bolivian Rangers. He had a wound in his leg but was otherwise in fair condition. His dreams of making a Vietnam in South America had evaporated in the thin air of the Bolivian highlands. His captors took him to a little schoolhouse. Rodriguez learned that the Bolivian high command in La Paz would decide Che's fate on the following day.
"I am managing to keep him alive," Rodriguez reported, "which is very hard."
At daybreak the following morning, Rodriguez tried to interrogate Che, who was sitting on the schoolhouse floor, his face in his hands, his wrists and ankles bound, the corpses of two Cuban companeros beside him. They talked about the clash in the Congo and the course of the Cuban revolution. Che said that Castro had killed no more than 1,500 of his political enemies, apart from armed conflicts such as the Bay of Pigs. "'The Cuban government, of course, executed all guerrilla leaders who invaded its territory,'" Che said, according to Rodriguez. "He stopped then with a quizzical look on his face and smiled as he recognized his own position on Bolivian soil." Rodriguez continued: "With his capture, the guerrilla movement had suffered an overwhelming setback.... Heinsisted that his ideals would win in the end.... He had not planned anexfiltration route from Bolivia in case of failure. He had definitely decided to fail or win."
The high command sent the order to kill Che at 11:50 a.m. "Guevara was executed with a burst of shots at 1:15 p.m.," Rodriguez radioed to Tilton. "Guevara's last words were: 'Tell my wife to remarry and tell Fidel Castro that the Revolution will rise again in the Americas.' To his executioner he said, 'Remember, you are killing a man.'"
Tom Polgar was the duty officer at headquarters when Tilton called in the news that Che was dead. "Can you send fingerprints?" Polgar asked.
"I can send fingers," Tilton replied. Che's executioners had cut off his hands.
"PARAMOUNT CONSIDERATIONS MUST BE
POLITICAL SENSITIVITY"
There were few such triumphs to trumpet for Helms and his officers. They were outnumbered by a multitude of mistakes. "Once again CIA operations have created a major problem," the State Department's Egypt desk informed Luke Battle, the new assistant secretary of state for the Near East. Egypt's ruler, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was complaining--not for the first time, and not without cause--that the agency was trying to overthrow his government. "CIA appears to hope that these incidents can be swept under the rug," said the message to Battle. "This should not be allowed to happen."
Battle knew what the CIA's work in Egypt entailed. He had been the American ambassador when a happy-go-lucky case officer carelessly exposed the agency's relationship with a prominent Cairo newspaper editor named Mustapha Amin. Amin had been close to Nasser; the CIA paid him for information and for publishing pro-American news reports. The Cairo station chief had lied to the ambassador about the agency's relationship with Amin. "He had been on the U.S. payroll," Battle said. "Bruce Odell [the CIA case officer] had been meeting regularly with Mustapha Amin. I had been assured that no funds had been exchanged in Egypt, but a photograph of such a transaction was made when Mustapha Amin was arrested." The case made headlines around the world, prominently featuring Odell, who had worked under diplomatic cover. Amin was tried as a spy, brutally tortured, and imprisoned for nine years.
Helms tried to build confidence in the CIA. He had hoped that President Johnson would come out to Langley, Virginia, to address the troops at headquarters in September 1967, during ceremonies marking the agency's twentieth anniversary. But LBJ never once visited the CIA. He sent Vice President Humphrey for the ceremony, and Humphrey delivered a characteristically thumbs-up speech. "You will be criticized," he said. "The only people who aren't criticized are those who do nothing, and I would hate to see the Agency get in that state."
The CIA could not survive sustained criticism from within the government, much less from the public. It depended on secrecy to survive. When blown operations wound up in the newspapers, it eroded what faith remained in the agency.
On September 30, 1967, Helms laid out strict new guidelines for covert action and sent them to every station. For the first time in the history of the CIA, station chiefs and their superiors were instructed to err on the side of caution. "Review all projects which are politically sensitive," the order said. Inform headquarters of the identities of "foreign politicians, both governmental and opposition, as well as certain military leaders, on the U.S. covert payroll." No sum of money spent on covert action was too small to report. "Our paramount considerations must be the political sensitivity of the activity and its consistency with U.S. foreign policy."
The flow of cash to burned-out foreign agents, third-rate newspapers, also-ran political parties, and other unproductive operations began to dry up. The number of major political-warfare operations in Western Europe began to dwindle. The CIA would stay focused on the hot war in Southeast Asia and the cold war in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.
But there was a war going on at home as well. The president had just told Helms to undertake the most politically sensitive operation of all--the job of spying on Americans.