The collapse of the CIA as a secret intelligence service began on the day Helms left and James Schlesinger arrived at headquarters.
Schlesinger spent seventeen weeks as director of central intelligence. In that time, he purged more than five hundred analysts and more than one thousand people from the clandestine service. Officers serving overseas received unsigned coded cables informing them that they were fired. In response, he received anonymous death threats, and he added armed guards to his security detail.
He named Bill Colby as the new chief of the clandestine service, and then he sat him down to explain that it was time "to change the concept of a 'secret service.'" The dawn of technocracy had arrived, and the day of the old boys who had been at the game for twenty-five years was done. "He was hyper-suspicious of the role and influence of the clandestine operators," Colby recounted. "He felt the Agency had become complacent and bloated under their domination, that indeed there were far too many of these 'old boys' around the place doing little more than looking after each other, playing spy games, and reliving the halcyon past."
The old boys argued that every aspect of the CIA's work overseas was part of the struggle against the Soviets and the Red Chinese. Whether you were in Cairo or Kathmandu, you were always fighting Moscow and Beijing. But when Nixon and Kissinger clinked glasses with the leaders of the communist world, what was the point? Peace was at hand. The president's policy of detente was sapping the cold-war elan of the clandestine service.
Colby quickly undertook a survey of the CIA's capabilities. A decade before, half the CIA's budget had gone to covert operations. Under Nixon, that figure now was falling below 10 percent. The recruitment of new talent was flagging, and the war in Vietnam was the cause. The political climate was not conducive to the hiring of bright young college graduates; an increasing number of campuses barred CIA recruiters by popular demand. The end of the military draft meant a halt to the processions of junior officers rotating into the CIA's ranks.
The Soviet Union remained close to terra incognita for American spies. North Korea and North Vietnam were blanks. The CIA bought its best information from allied foreign intelligence services and from third-world leaders whom it owned outright. It was most effective on the peripheries of power, but those were the cheap seats, with obstructed views of the global stage.
The Soviet division was still paralyzed by the conspiracy theories of Jim Angleton, who remained in charge of American counterintelligence. "Angleton devastated us," said the CIA's Haviland Smith, who ran operations against the Soviet target in the 1960s and 1970s. "He took us out of the Soviet business." One of Bill Colby's many unhappy duties was to figure out what to do with the alcoholic spycatcher, who now had arrived at the conclusion that Colby himself was a mole for Moscow. Colby tried to persuade Schlesinger to fire Angleton. The new director demurred after he got the Briefing.
In his dark and smoky office, Angleton took the new boss on a fifty-year trip, back to the beginnings of Soviet communism, into the elaborate sting operations and political manipulations that the Russians ran against the West in the 1920s and 1930s, through the communist double-agent operations and disinformation campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s, winding up with the surmise that the CIA itself had been penetrated at or near the highest levels by Moscow in the 1960s. In short, the enemy had breached the CIA's defense and burrowed deep within.
Schlesinger bought the Briefing, entranced by Angleton's guided tour of hell.
"OUTSIDE THE LEGISLATIVE CHARTER OF THIS AGENCY"
Schlesinger said he saw the CIA as "the central intelligence agency--small 'c,' small 'i,' small 'a.'" It had become nothing more than "some component of the NSC staff" under Kissinger. He intended to hand it over to Deputy Director Vernon Walters while he dealt with the spy satellites of the National Reconnaissance Office, the electronic-eavesdropping colossus of the National Security Agency, and the military reports of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He intended to serve in the role he had imagined in his report to the president--as the director of national intelligence.
But his grand ambitions were shattered by the high crimes and misdemeanors of the White House. "The Watergate affair began to take over almost everything else," Schlesinger said, "and the desires that I had at the outset gradually were inundated by simply the necessity of protecting, arranging for the salvation of the Agency."
He had an unusual sense of how to save it.
Schlesinger thought that he had been told everything that the agency knew about Watergate. He was shocked when Howard Hunt testified that he and his Plumbers had ransacked Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office with the technical assistance of the CIA. A review by the agency of its own files turned up a copy of the film it had developed for Hunt after he cased the office. Further review disclosed the letters to the CIA from Jim McCord, which could be read as a threat to blackmail the president of the United States.
Bill Colby had jumped behind enemy lines with the OSS. He had spent six years supervising the killing of communists in Vietnam. He was not easily impressed by merely verbal violence. But he found Schlesinger's rage awesome. Fire everyone if you have to, the director ordered, tear the place apart, rip out the floorboards, uncover everything. Then Schlesinger drafted a memo to every employee of the CIA. The note was one of the most dangerous decisions a director of central intelligence had ever made. It was the legacy he chose to leave:
I have ordered all senior operating officials of this Agency to report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or that have gone on in the past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of this Agency.
I hereby direct every person presently employed by CIA to report to me on any such activities of which he has knowledge. I invite all ex-employees to do the same. Anyone who has such information should call...and say that he wishes to tell me about "activities outside CIA's charter."
The CIA's exceedingly vague charter was clear on one point: the agency could not be the American secret police. Yet over the course of the cold war the CIA had been spying on citizens, tapping their telephones, opening first-class mail, and conspiring to commit murder on orders from the White House.
Schlesinger's order was dated May 9, 1973, and effective immediately. That same day, Watergate began to destroy Richard Nixon. He had been forced to fire his palace guard, and only General Alexander Haig, the new White House chief of staff, remained. Hours after the order was issued, Haig called Colby to inform him that the attorney general was resigning, the secretary of defense was taking his job, Schlesinger was leaving the CIA for the Pentagon, and the president wanted Colby to be the next director of central intelligence. The government was in such disarray that Colby was not sworn in until September. For four months, General Walters was the acting director and Colby the director-designate--an awkward state of affairs.
Colby was now fifty-three years old, with thirty years behind him in the OSS and the CIA. He had been an avatar of covert action all his adult life. Throughout the spring of 1973, he had been forced to serve as Schlesinger's hit man, summoning his fellow officers and handing them their walking papers. In the midst of all this, his eldest daughter, in her midtwenties, had wasted away and died from anorexia. On May 21, Colby sat down and began to read the initial compilation of the crimes of the CIA, which eventually ran to 693 potential violations. The Senate's public hearings on the Watergate case had opened that week. The news of Nixon and Kissinger's wiretapping of aides and reporters broke. The appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the crimes of Watergate was announced.
All his life, Colby had been a deeply devoted Roman Catholic, a man who believed in the consequences of mortal sin. He now learned for the first time that day of the plots against Fidel Castro and the central role of Robert F. Kennedy, the mind-control experiments and the secret prisons and the drug tests on unwitting human guinea pigs. The CIA's wiretapping and surveillance of citizens and reporters did not offend his conscience; clear orders from three presidents stood behind them. But he knew, given the tenor of the times, that if these secrets leaked the agency could be ruined. Colby locked them up and set about trying to run the CIA.
The White House was falling apart under the crushing weight of Watergate, and it sometimes seemed to Colby that the CIA was crumbling too. It was often a good thing that Nixon did not read the intelligence the agency provided him. When the holy days of Yom Kippur and Ramadan coincided in 1973, Egypt went to war against Israel and drove deep into Israeli-held territory. In striking contrast to its solid forecasts of the Six-Day War in 1967, the CIA had misread the gathering storm. "We did not cover ourselves with glory," Colby said. "We predicted the day before the war broke out that it was not going to break out."
The agency had assured the White House, a few hours before the war began: "Exercises are more realistic than usual. But there will be no war."