PART
FOUR
"Get Rid of the Clowns"
In the spring of 1968, Richard Helms had good reason to fear that his next boss would be either Robert Kennedy or Richard Nixon. As attorney general, Kennedy had abused the powers of the agency. He had commandeered the CIA and treated Helms with cold disdain. As a candidate, or as a commander in chief, he would be threatened by the secrets in the agency's files. Helms was truly shocked when the senator was murdered on the campaign trail in June. But he was not truly saddened. For the rest of his life, Helms bore lasting scars from the lashings Kennedy had laid on him.
Richard Nixon was another problem altogether. Helms knew how deep his resentments ran. Nixon thought the agency was filled with eastern elitists, knee-jerk liberals, Georgetown gossips, Kennedy men. It was an open secret that Nixon held the CIA responsible for the greatest disaster in his life: his defeat in the 1960 election. He was convinced--wrongly--that secrets and lies leaked by Allen Dulles had helped John Kennedy score crucial points in the televised presidential debates. In his 1962 memoir, Six Crises, Nixon had written that if he had been elected president, he would have created a new organization outside the CIA for carrying out covert operations. It was an open threat to cut out the agency's heart.
On August 10, 1968, Nixon and Helms met for their first long talk. The president had invited the candidate down to the LBJ Ranch in Texas, fed him steak and corn on the cob, and drove him around the ranch in an open convertible. Then he turned to Helms for a tour of the world: the confrontation between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, Castro's continuing support for revolutionary movements, and finally the secret peace negotiations between the United States and North Vietnam.
Nixon turned directly to Helms with a pointed question.
"Do they still believe we have lost the war?" he asked.
"The North Vietnamese are convinced they won after Dien Bien Phu," Helms said. That was the last thing Nixon wanted to hear.
Three days after winning the election, Nixon placed a call to LBJ. "What do you think about Helms?" he asked. "Would you continue him?"
"Yes, I would," Johnson replied. "He's extremely competent. He's succinct. He tells you as it is, and he's loyal."
That was high praise. After a year and a half dining at the president's table, Helms had won LBJ's confidence and earned a reputation in Washington as a consummate professional. He believed that the CIA, after twenty years, had developed a cadre of analysts with unique expertise on the Soviet threat and a clandestine service capable of conducting espionage without getting caught. He saw himself as a loyal soldier in the service of his president.
Helms would soon find out the cost of that loyalty.
"INCURABLY COVERT"
"Richard Nixon never trusted anybody," Helms reflected twenty years later. "Here he had become President of the United States and therefore chief of the Executive branch, and yet he was constantly telling people that the Air Force in their bombings in Vietnam couldn't hit their ass with their hand, the State Department was just a bunch of pinstriped cocktail-drinking diplomats, that the Agency couldn't come up with a winning victory in Vietnam.... On and on and on.... 'They are dumb, they are stupid, they can't do this, and they can't do that.'"
At the White House in January 1969, a few days into the new administration, Helms sat in tense silence at lunch as Nixon picked at his cottage cheese and canned pineapple. The president ripped into the CIA while his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, listened attentively. "I haven't the slightest doubt," Helms recalled, "that Nixon's carping affected Kissinger."
The president-elect and the Harvard man had discovered they were kindred spirits. "Both were incurably covert, but Kissinger was charming about it," observed Thomas Hughes, the director of the State Department's intelligence bureau. "Both were inveterate manipulators, but Nixon was more transparent." They had reached an understanding: they alone would conceive, command, and control clandestine operations. Covert action and espionage could be tools fitted for their personal use. Nixon used them to build a political fortress at the White House, and Kissinger became, in the words of his aide Roger Morris, the acting chief of state for national security.
As a preemptive act of self-protection, Helms had created a committee of Wise Men called the Covert Operations Study Group to report to the president-elect on the value of the clandestine service--and to protect it from attack. The group was led by Franklin Lindsay, once Frank Wisner's right-hand man, housed at Harvard, and convened in secret; its foremost members were Richard Bissell and Lyman Kirkpatrick. It included half a dozen Harvard professors who had served the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA. Three of them were close enough to their colleague Henry Kissinger to know he would be the next president's national security adviser no matter who won the race, for Kissinger had simultaneously served both Nixon and Humphrey as a confidential consultant. Neither man ever considered anyone else for the job.
The Covert Operations Study Group's secret report was dated December 1, 1968. One of its recommendations particularly pleased Kissinger: it said the new president should give one senior White House official responsibility for watching over all covert operations. Kissinger would not merely watch them. He would run them.
The report urged the new president to "make it very clear to the Director of the CIA that he expects him to say 'No' when in the Director's judgment a proposed operation cannot be done." Nixon never heeded that advice.
"Covert operations can rarely achieve an important objective alone," the report continued. "At best, a covert operation can win time, forestall a coup, or otherwise create favorable conditions which will make it possible to use overt means to finally achieve an important objective." Nixon never understood this principle.
"An individual, a political party, or a government in office can be seriously injured or destroyed by exposure of covert assistance from CIA," the report said. "On balance, exposure of clandestine operations costs the United States in terms of world opinion. To some, exposure demonstrates the disregard of the United States for national rights and human rights; to others it demonstrates only our impotence and ineptness in getting caught.... The impression of many Americans, especially in the intellectual community and among the youth, that the United States is engaging in 'dirty tricks' tends to alienate them from their government," the report continued. "Disclosures in this atmosphere have created opportunities for the 'New Left' to affect a much wider spectrum of political opinion than otherwise would have been the case. The United States has been in the forefront of those nations concerned with expanding the rule of law in international affairs. Our credibility and our effectiveness in this role is necessarily damaged to the extent that it becomes known that we are secretly intervening in what may be (or appear to be) the internal affairs of others." Nixon and Kissinger willfully ignored all these ideas.
"It is our impression that CIA has become much too ingrown over the years," the report concluded. "Nearly all of the senior people have been in the organization on the order of 20 years.... There also is a strong tendency toward isolation and inwardness...a lack of innovativeness and perspective." This much Nixon believed. He set out to infiltrate that inner circle. He began by naming Marine Lieutenant General Robert Cushman, who had been his national security aide when he was vice president, as the deputy director of central intelligence under Helms. Cushman's mission was to spy on America's spies for the president.
Eager to curry favor with the president-elect, the CIA sent Nixon the same daily intelligence summaries that Lyndon Johnson had received. They piled up unread in a safe at Nixon's suite on the thirty-ninth floor at the Pierre Hotel in New York. The stack grew for a month, until Kissinger sent word in December that Nixon would never look at them. He made it clear that from now on anything the agency wanted to tell the president would have to be channeled through him. Neither Helms nor anyone else from the CIA would ever see Nixon alone.
From the start, Kissinger exerted an ever-tightening control over the CIA's operations. In 1967 and 1968, the CIA's overseers at the 303 Committee had lively debates over the course of covert action. Those days were gone. Kissinger dominated every other member of the committee--Helms, Attorney General John Mitchell, and the number-two officers of the State Department and the Pentagon. It became a one-man show. During a thirty-two-month stretch, the committee technically approved nearly forty covert actions but never once actually convened. In all, more than three quarters of the covert-action programs of the Nixon administration never were considered formally by the committee. The black operations of the United States were approved by Henry Kissinger.
In 1969, as is well known, the president wiretapped private citizens to stop news leaks and to control the flow of information inside the government. His national security adviser went beyond that: Kissinger also used the CIA to spy on Americans, a fact that heretofore has escaped the attention of history.
After the antiwar movement called for a monthly national moratorium, a one-day suspension of American business as usual, Helms received an order from Kissinger to spy on its leaders. Recorded in the office diary of Robert L. Bannerman, a senior staff member in the CIA's Office of Security, the memo was titled "Dr. Kissinger--Information Request."
"Dr. Kissinger levied a request as to what information we have on the leaders of the groups that conducted the moratorium on Vietnam," the CIA memo reads. "After consideration this request was relayed to [deleted] who agreed to be the focal point for this report and work on this report was conducted over the weekend." This was not merely a continuation of Chaos, the CIA's ongoing search for sources of foreign support for the antiwar movement. It was a specific request from the president's national security adviser for CIA files on American citizens.
The record reflects no hesitation on the part of Richard Helms. Since 1962, three successive presidents had ordered the director of central intelligence to spy on Americans, regardless of the CIA's charter. Nixon believed that all presidential action is legal in the realm of national security. If the president does it, he said, it is not illegal. Among his successors, only George W. Bush fully embraced this interpretation of presidential power, rooted in the divine right of kings. But it was one thing for a president to issue such an order, and quite another for an unelected official to do so in the president's name.
"HIT THE SOVIETS, AND HIT THEM HARD"
Nixon and Kissinger operated at a level of clandestinity beyond the CIA's. When they dealt with the enemies of the United States--negotiating in secret with the Soviets, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese--the CIA knew little or nothing about it. There was a reason for that: the White House disbelieved much of what the CIA's experts said about the forces of communism, especially the agency's estimates of the military might of the Soviet Union.
"I don't mean to say that they are lying about the intelligence or distorting it, but I want you fellows to be very careful to separate facts from opinions," Nixon told Helms at a June 18, 1969, National Security Council meeting.
"The fact is that the intelligence projections for 1965, 1966, 1967, and 1968--and I've seen them all--have been up to fifty percent off in what the Russians were going to have--and on the low side," Nixon said. "We have got to start with fact, and all the facts, and reach the conclusions on the basis of hard fact. Is that understood now?"
Nixon was outraged when the agency argued that the Soviets had neither the intention nor the technology to launch a knockout nuclear first strike. That conclusion came in a flurry of formal estimates on Soviet strategic forces, all of which Nixon rejected. "Useless," he wrote in the margins of a memo from Helms on Moscow's nuclear capabilities. "A superficial mindless recitation of what we know from the daily press." The CIA's analyses flew in the face of Nixon's plans to build an antiballistic missile system--the prelude to the Star Wars fantasies of the future. "Whose side is the Agency on?" was the way Helms remembered the White House argument. "In other words, 'Let's all get together and trim the evidence.'"
In the end, that is exactly what Helms did, erasing a key passage of the CIA's most important estimate on Soviet nuclear forces in 1969. Once again, the agency was tailoring its work to fit the pattern of White House policy. His decision to go along with the White House "did not sit well with the Agency analysts," Helms recorded. "In their view, I had compromised one of the Agency's fundamental responsibilities--the mandate to evaluate all available data and express conclusions irrespective of U.S. policies." But Helms would not risk this battle: "I was convinced we would have lost the argument with the Nixon administration, and that in the process the Agency would have been permanently damaged." His analysts complained about the suppression of dissent and the failure to learn from past mistakes. But no plan to improve the analysis of Soviet capabilities and intentions came forth.
The CIA had been studying spy-satellite reconnaissance photos of the Soviet Union for eight years now, looking down from space and putting together a jigsaw puzzle of the Soviet military. The agency was working on the next generation of spy satellites, to be equipped with television cameras. Helms always had believed that gadgets were no replacement for spies. Nevertheless, he assured Nixon that they would give the United States the power to make sure that Moscow complied with agreements reached in SALT, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty talks then under way in Helsinki.
But the more raw data the CIA obtained on the Soviet military, the less clear the big picture became. Nixon rightly criticized the agency for having underestimated Soviet nuclear firepower in the 1960s; he pounded the agency on that account throughout his presidency. The result of that pressure is now evident: for thirteen years, from Nixon's era to the dying days of the cold war, every estimate of Soviet strategic nuclear forces overstated the rate at which Moscow was modernizing its weaponry.
Nixon nonetheless relied on the CIA to subvert the Soviet Union at every turn--not just in Moscow, but in every nation on earth.
"The President called Henry Kissinger and me into the Oval Office after the NSC meeting today for what turned out to be a 25-minute discussion of a variety of subjects, including SALT, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, and black operations," Helms recorded in a March 25, 1970, memo. "With respect to black operations, the President enjoined me to hit the Soviets, and hit them hard, any place we can in the world. He said to 'just go ahead,' to keep Henry Kissinger informed, and to be as imaginative as we could. He was as emphatic on this as I have ever heard him on anything." Encouraged by this rare moment of presidential attention, Helms "took this moment to hit hard on the point that I felt strongly the United States should give up nothing which constituted a pressure on the Soviet Union or an irritation to them without exacting a specific price in return." He promised the president a new array of proposed covert actions against the Soviets.
Only one paragraph of the paper Helms sent to the White House the next week caught Nixon's eye.
Helms reviewed the work of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty--a twenty-year investment of more than $400 million--and the power of the radios to keep the fires of dissent alive behind the iron curtain. He detailed the work of Soviet dissidents such as the physicist Andrei Sakharov and the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose words had been played back to the Soviet Union by the CIA. Thirty million people in Eastern Europe heard Radio Free Europe, and Soviet citizens did their best to tune in Radio Liberty, though Moscow was spending $150 million a year jamming their signals. In addition, the Free Europe and Liberty organizations had distributed two and a half million books and periodicals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since the late 1950s. The hope was that words, on the air and in print, could promote intellectual and cultural freedom.
All that was good--but it was also old hat to Nixon. What captured his imagination was the CIA's ability to swing elections.
"There have been numerous instances when, facing the threat of a Communist Party or popular front election victory in the Free World, we have met the threat and turned it successfully," Helms reminded the president. "Guyana in 1963 and Chile in 1964 are good examples of what can be accomplished under difficult circumstances. Similar situations may soon face us in various parts of the world, and we are prepared for action with carefully planned covert election programs." That was more like it. Money and politics were subjects close to Nixon's heart.
"THE ONLY WAY TO GO WAS THE OLD WAY"
The agency had secretly supported politicians in Western Europe throughout the cold war. The list included Chancellor Willy Brandt of Germany, Prime Minister Guy Mollet of France, and every Christian Democrat who ever won a national election in Italy.
The CIA had spent twenty years and at least $65 million buying influence in Rome and Milan and Naples. In 1965, McGeorge Bundy had called the covert-action program in Italy "the annual shame." Yet it went on. Foreign powers had been meddling in Italian politics for centuries; Washington was following "in the tradition of what the fascists, the communists, the Nazis, the British, and the French had done before," said Thomas Fina, the American consul general in Milan under Nixon and a veteran of American intelligence and diplomacy in Italy. The CIA had been "subsidizing political parties, withdrawing money from political parties, giving money to individual politicians, not giving it to other politicians, subsidizing the publication of books, the content of radio programs, subsidizing newspapers, subsidizing journalists," Fina noted. It had "financial resources, political resources, friends, the ability to blackmail."
Nixon and Kissinger revived that tradition. Their instrument was the CIA's Rome station and the extraordinary ambassador Graham Martin.
Kissinger called Martin "that cold-eyed fellow," and he meant it as a compliment. "He obviously admired somebody who could be as ruthless in the exercise of power as he could be," said Martin's chief political officer in Rome, Robert Barbour. Other American diplomats found Martin shadowy and strange, "slippery as a cold basket of eels." Martin had converted Marshall Plan funds to CIA cash at the American Embassy in Paris twenty years before. He had worked closely with the CIA as ambassador in Thailand from 1965 to 1968. No American diplomat was more deeply enamored of covert operations.
Nixon thought he was terrific. "I have great personal confidence in Graham Martin," he told Kissinger on February 14, 1969, and with that, the machine was in motion.
Martin's appointment as ambassador in Italy was the handiwork of a wealthy right-wing American named Pier Talenti, who lived in Rome, where he had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the 1968 Nixon campaign among his friends and political allies. That opened the door to the White House. Talenti went to see Colonel Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Kissinger's military aide, to deliver a warning that the socialists were on the verge of taking power in Italy and a proposal that a new American ambassador was needed to counter the left. He named Martin, and his message went right to the top. Martin had persuaded Nixon and Kissinger that "he was just the man, because he was tough as nails, to bring about a shift in Italian politics," said Wells Stabler, his deputy chief of mission in Rome.
"Martin decided that the only way to go was the old way," said Stabler, who became a reluctant participant in the revival of American covert action in Italy. Beginning in 1970, after receiving formal approval from the Nixon White House, Martin oversaw the distribution of $25 million to both Christian Democrats and Italian neofascists, Stabler said. The money was divided "in the back room"--the CIA station inside the palatial American embassy--by "the Ambassador, myself, and the station chief," Stabler said. "Some was given to the parties, some to individuals. Sometimes the station chief or myself would recommend something, but it was the Ambassador who would give the approval." The station chief was Rocky Stone, the veteran of the Iran coup and the blown attempt to overthrow Syria, who had come to Rome after three years as chief of operations for the Soviet division.
Stone handed out about $6 million to the mainstream Christian Democrats. Millions more went to committees that pushed "ultraconservative policies" in the party, Stabler said. And millions more went to a far-right underground.
The money, as Martin had promised, transformed the political face of Italy. The man he backed, Giulio Andreotti, won an election infused with the CIA's cash. But the covert financing of the far right fueled a failed neofascist coup in 1970. The money helped finance right-wing covert operations--including terrorist bombings, which Italian intelligence blamed on the extreme left. It also led to the worst political scandal in post-war Italy. Parliamentary investigations found that General Vito Miceli, the chief of the Italian military intelligence service, had taken at least $800,000 of the CIA's cash. Miceli was jailed for trying to take over the country by force. Andreotti, the most durable Italian politician in decades, spent the last years of his life fighting criminal charges, including murder.
The CIA's days of buying political influence in Italy finally ended when Graham Martin left Rome to become the next--and the last--American ambassador to South Vietnam.
"WE ARE CONSCIOUS OF WHAT IS AT STAKE"
Throughout 1969 and 1970, Nixon and Kissinger focused the CIA on the secret expansion of the war in Southeast Asia. They ordered the agency to make $725,000 in political payoffs to President Thieu of South Vietnam, manipulate the media in Saigon, fix an election in Thailand, and step up covert commando raids in North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
In a bleak dispatch on the eve of a world tour that took Nixon across Southeast Asia, Helms told the president about the CIA's long war in Laos. The agency "maintained a covert irregular force of a total of 39,000 men which has borne a major share of the active fighting" against the communists, he reminded Nixon. They were the CIA's Hmong fighters, led since 1960 by General Vang Pao. "These irregular forces are tired from eight years of constant warfare, and Vang Pao...has been forced to use 13-and 14-year-old children to replace his casualties.... The limits have largely been reached on what this agency can do in a paramilitary sense to stop the North Vietnamese advance." Nixon responded by ordering Helms to create a new Thai paramilitary battalion in Laos to shore up the Hmong. Kissinger asked where it would be best to bomb Laos with B-52s.
While their clandestine war in Southeast Asia intensified, Nixon and Kissinger made plans for a secret rapprochement with Chairman Mao Tse-tung. To clear the way to China, they strangled the agency's operations against the communist regime.
Over the past decade, in the name of combating Chinese communism, the CIA had spent tens of millions of dollars parachuting tons of weapons to hundreds of Tibetan guerrillas who fought for their spiritual leader, His Holiness Tenzen Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama. When Allen Dulles and Desmond FitzGerald briefed Eisenhower on the operation in February 1960, "the President wondered whether the net result of these operations would not be more brutal repressive reprisals by the Chinese Communists."
Ike approved the program nonetheless. The agency set up a training camp for the Tibetan fighters in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. It had paid an annual subsidy of some $180,000 directly to the Dalai Lama, and it created Tibet Houses in New York and Geneva to serve as his unofficial embassies. The goal was to keep the dream of a free Tibet alive while harassing the Red Army in western China. The results to date had been dozens of dead resistance fighters, and one bloodstained satchel of invaluable Chinese military documents seized in a firefight.
In August 1969, the agency requested $2.5 million more to support Tibet's insurgents in the coming year, calling the 1,800-man paramilitary group "a force which could be employed in strength in the event of hostilities" against China. "Does this have any direct benefit to us?" Kissinger asked. He answered his own question. Though the CIA's subsidy to the Dalai Lama continued, the Tibetan resistance was abandoned.
Kissinger then scuttled the remains of the CIA's twenty-year mission to conduct clandestine operations against China.
The commando raids of the Korean War had dwindled down to desultory radio broadcasts from Taipei and Seoul, leaflets dropped on the mainland, fake news planted in Hong Kong and Tokyo, and what the agency described as "activities worldwide to denigrate and obstruct the People's Republic of China." The CIA kept working with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in his doomed effort to free Taiwan, unaware that Nixon and Kissinger had plans to sit down with Chairman Mao and Prime Minister Chou En-lai in Beijing.
When Kissinger finally sat down with Chou, the prime minister asked about the latest Free Taiwan campaign: "The CIA had no hand in it?"
Kissinger assured Chou that "he vastly overestimates the competence of the CIA."
"They have become the topic of discussion throughout the world," Chou said. "Whenever something happens in the world they are always thought of."
"That is true," Kissinger replied, "and it flatters them, but they don't deserve it."
Chou was fascinated to learn that Kissinger personally approved the CIA's covert operations. He voiced his suspicions that the agency was still subverting the People's Republic.
Kissinger replied that most CIA officers "write long, incomprehensible reports and don't make revolution."
"You use the word revolution," Chou said. "We say subversion."
"Or subversion," Kissinger conceded. "I understand. We are conscious of what is at stake in our relationship, and we will not let one organization carry out petty operations that could hinder this course."
That was the end of that. The CIA was out of business in China for years to come.
"DEMOCRACY DOESN'T WORK"
The CIA fought on every front to shore up the war in Vietnam. One of its bigger efforts came to fruition three weeks after President Nixon took office. In February 1969, covert action created the appearance of democracy in Thailand.
A military junta had ruled Thailand for eleven years, and tens of thousands of American troops readied for battle against Hanoi at Thai military bases. The dictatorship did little to support the notion that Americans were fighting for democracy in Southeast Asia.
The CIA's election operation, code-named Lotus, was a straight-cash campaign first conceived by Ambassador Graham Martin in 1965, approved by President Johnson, and reaffirmed by President Nixon. The CIA station in Bangkok coaxed the junta toward holding a ballot; the generals kept putting them off. Finally the agency pumped millions of dollars into the politics of Thailand in 1968 and 1969; the cash financed the apparent transformation of the uniformed military into a ruling party ready to stand for elections. The CIA's bagman was Pote Sarasin--Thailand's ambassador to the United States from 1952 to 1957, the head of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization from 1957 to 1964, and the leading civilian front man for the ruling junta.
The election came off and the ruling junta won handily. But the rulers grew impatient with the trappings of democracy. They soon ended the experiment, suspending the constitution and disbanding parliament. Pote Sarasin reassumed his position as the civilian face of martial law on the night of the bloodless coup, and he brought the generals to explain themselves to their friends at the American embassy in Bangkok that evening. They said they respected the principles of democracy and had tried to put them into action. But they said "it was clear that in Thailand today democracy doesn't work."
The CIA's covert action had been the thinnest veneer. "There should be no change in Thai relations with the U.S.," Kissinger told Nixon after the coup. "The leaders of the Revolutionary Council are in fact essentially the same ones with whom we have been dealing all along," he said. "We can anticipate that our programs in Thailand will continue without interruption."
"GET THE CIA JERKS WORKING"
In February 1970, the president urgently ordered the agency to get going in Cambodia. After a year of planning, his secret bombing campaign against suspected Vietcong targets in that technically neutral nation was set to begin on March 17. American B-52s would drop 108,823 tons of bombs on six suspected communist camps that the CIA and the Pentagon had identified--incorrectly--as North Vietnam's hidden command center.
Helms was trying to lay the foundations for a new CIA station in Cambodia when the nation's right-wing prime minister, Lon Nol, seized power. The overthrow came on the day that the secret bombings began. The coup shocked the CIA and the rest of the American government.
"What the hell do those clowns do out there in Langley?" Nixon thundered.
"Get the CIA jerks working on Cambodia," he commanded. He told Helms to ship thousands of AK-47 automatic rifles to Lon Nol, to print a million propaganda leaflets, and to spread the word throughout the world that the United States was ready to invade. Then he ordered the CIA to deliver $10 million to the new Cambodian leader. "Get the money to Lon Nol," he insisted.
Nixon had demanded an accurate tally of the arms and ammunition flowing to the enemy through the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. The agency had been working on the question for five years without success. Nixon suggested that the arms flow could be cut off if the CIA bribed the right Cambodian generals. Helms demurred on practical grounds--the generals were making millions off the arms trade and the agency did not have the funds to buy or rent their loyalties. The argument did not impress the president. At a July 18, 1970, meeting with his foreign intelligence advisory board, Nixon savaged the agency's performance.
"CIA had described the flow of materials through Sihanoukville as only a trickle," he said. In fact, the port was providing two thirds of the communist arms in Cambodia. "If such mistakes could be made on a fairly straightforward issue such as this one," he asked, "how should we judge CIA's assessments or more important developments?"
"The U.S. is spending $6 billion per year on intelligence and deserves to get a lot more than it is getting," Nixon said. The intelligence board's minutes record his growing rage. The president said "he could not put up with people lying to him about intelligence. If intelligence is inadequate or if the intelligence depicts a bad situation, he wants to know about it and he will not stand being served warped evaluations."
"He understands that the intelligence community has been bitten badly a few times and thus tends to make its reports as bland as possible so that it won't be bitten again," the minutes say. "He believes that those responsible for the deliberate distortion of an intelligence report should be fired. He suggested that the time may be coming when he would have to read the riot act to the entire intelligence community."
At this delicate moment, Nixon ordered the CIA to fix the next election in Chile.