"Let me start by mentioning a problem we have concerning the use of classified material," President Gerald R. Ford said as he opened one of his first National Security Council meetings in the White House Cabinet Room on October 7, 1974.
The survivors of Watergate--Secretary of State Kissinger, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Walters, and the ambitious and influential White House staffer Donald Rumsfeld--were enraged by the latest leak. The United States was preparing to ship billions of dollars' worth of weapons to Israel and Egypt. The newspapers had printed the Israeli shopping list and the American response.
"This is intolerable," Ford said. "I have discussed several options for how to deal with it with Don Rumsfeld." The president wanted a plan within forty-eight hours on how to stop the press from printing what it knew. "We don't have the tools we need," Schlesinger warned him. "We need an Official Secrets Act," he said, but "the present climate is bad for this sort of thing."
The power of secrecy had been undone by the lies of presidents, told in the name of national security of the United States. The U-2 was a weather plane. America would not invade Cuba. Our ships were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Vietnam War was a just cause. The fall of Richard Nixon showed that these noble lies would no longer serve in a democracy.
Bill Colby leaped at the chance to renew the CIA's standing with the White House, for he knew that the assault on secrecy threatened the agency's survival. He had cultivated Ford from the moment he became vice president, delivering a copy of the president's daily brief by messenger, and keeping him posted on the CIA's secret $400 million project to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean (the salvage operation failed when the sub broke in two). He wanted Ford to know "everything the President knew," he said. "We didn't want another situation like when Truman was unaware of the Manhattan Project."
But President Ford never telephoned him or sought his private counsel. Ford restored the National Security Council as it was under Eisenhower, and Colby attended, but he was never admitted to the Oval Office alone. Colby tried to become a player on the great issues of the day, but he remained an outsider. With Kissinger and Haig as gatekeepers and guardians, Colby never penetrated the inner circle at the Ford White House. And whatever chance he might have had to repair the CIA's reputation died in December 1974.
A New York Times reporter, Seymour Hersh, had uncovered the secret of the agency's spying on Americans. He had gotten the gist of the story from months of reporting, and on Friday, December 20, 1974, he received a long-sought interview with Colby at headquarters. Colby, who secretly taped the conversation, tried to convince Hersh that the illegal surveillance was of no great importance, a small affair, best left unspoken. "I think family skeletons are best left where they are--in the closet," he said to Hersh. But, he conceded, it had happened. Hersh wrote all night and into Saturday morning.
The story ran December 22, 1974, on page one of the Sunday paper. The banner headline read: HUGE C.I.A. OPERATION REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTI-WAR FORCES.
Colby tried to protect the agency by laying the issue of illegal domestic surveillance at the doorstep of Jim Angleton, who had been opening first-class mail in partnership with the FBI for twenty years. He called Angleton up to the seventh floor and fired him. Out in the cold, Angleton spent the rest of his life spinning myths about his work. He summed it up when he was asked to explain why the CIA had not fulfilled an order from the White House to destroy the agency's stockpile of poisons. "It is inconceivable," he said, "that a secret arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government."
"DEAD CATS WILL COME OUT"
On Christmas Eve, Colby sent a long note to Kissinger summarizing the secrets compiled at Schlesinger's command. In the wake of Watergate, their release could wreck the agency. Kissinger boiled them down in a five-page, single-spaced memo to President Ford on Christmas Day. It took Congress a year of investigation, all of 1975, to dig out some of the facts in this memo.
Kissinger informed the president that the CIA had indeed spied on the left, wiretapped newspaper reporters and placed them under surveillance, conducted illegal searches, and opened uncounted sacks of mail. But there was much more, and far worse. Kissinger did not dare put in writing what he had learned from what he called "the horrors book." Some of the CIA's actions "clearly were illegal," he warned Ford. Others "raise profound moral questions." Though he had served a decade on the small CIA subcommittee in the House of Representatives, President Ford had never heard a whisper of these secrets--domestic spying, mind control, assassination attempts. The conspiracies to commit murder had started in the White House under Eisenhower, the most revered Republican president of the twentieth century.
Then on Friday, January 3, 1975, Ford received another bulletin, this one from the acting attorney general of the United States, Laurence Silberman.
Silberman learned that day about the thick file that held the secrets of the CIA's wrongdoing. It lay in Colby's office safe, and Silberman surmised that it held evidence of federal crimes. The nation's highest law enforcement officer mousetrapped the director of central intelligence. He would have to hand over the files, or he might face a charge of obstruction of justice. It was no longer a question of whether Colby wanted to spill the secrets. It was a question of going to prison to protect them.
Silberman--later in life a federal appeals court judge and the leader of a devastating investigation of the CIA in 2005--came perilously close to becoming the director of central intelligence himself at this dangerous moment. "Ford asked me to come into the White House to run intelligence, but I declined," Silberman said in an oral history. "I was seriously considered at that point to be CIA director. I did not wish to do that for a whole host of reasons." He knew that the agency was about to face a howling storm.
In his January 3 memo to the president, Silberman raised two issues. One: "Plans to assassinate certain foreign leaders--which, to say the least, present unique questions." Two: "Mr. Helms may have committed perjury during the confirmation hearings on his appointment as Ambassador to Iran." Helms had been asked, under oath, about the overthrow of President Allende of Chile. Did the CIA have anything to do with that? No, sir, Helms had answered. Sworn to secrecy but sworn to tell the truth, Helms eventually had to stand before a federal judge and face a charge of lying--a misdeameanor count of failing to tell Congress the whole truth.
On the evening of January 3, Ford told Kissinger, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and Donald Rumsfeld that "the CIA would be destroyed" if the secrets leaked. At noon on Saturday, January 4, Helms came to the Oval Office. "Frankly, we are in a mess," Ford told him. The president said that Rockefeller would run a commission to investigate the domestic activities of the CIA, but only the domestic activities. Ford hoped it could hew to that narrow charter. "It would be tragic if it went beyond it," he told Helms. "It would be a shame if the public uproar forced us to go beyond and to damage the integrity of the CIA. I automatically assume what you did was right, unless it's proven otherwise."
Helms saw what lay ahead.
"A lot of dead cats will come out," he warned the president. "I don't know everything which went on in the Agency. Maybe no one does. But I know enough to say that if the dead cats come out, I will participate."
Helms tossed one over the White House fence that day, telling Kissinger that Bobby Kennedy had personally managed the assassination plots against Castro. Kissinger passed the news to the president. The horror deepened. Ford had first come to national prominence through his service on the Warren Commission. Now he understood that there were aspects to the Kennedy assassination he had never known, and the missing pieces of the puzzle haunted him. Near the end of his life, he called the agency's withholding of evidence from the Warren Commission "unconscionable." The CIA "made a mistake in not giving us all of the data they had available," Ford said. "Their judgment was not good in not giving us the full story."
The White House now faced eight separate congressional investigations and hearings on the CIA. Rumsfeld explained how the White House was going to head them all off at the pass with the Rockefeller Commission, whose members would be "Republican and right." One was already listed in his files: "Ronald Reagan, political commentator, former President of the Screen Actors' Guild, and former Governor of California."
"What should the final report be?" the president asked. All present agreed in principle that damage control was of the utmost importance. "Colby must be brought under control," Kissinger said. If he did not stay silent, "this stuff will be all over town soon."
On January 16, 1975, President Ford hosted a luncheon at the White House for senior editors and the publisher of The New York Times. The president said that it was decidedly not in the national interest to discuss the CIA's past. He said the reputation of every president since Harry Truman could be ruined if the deepest secrets spilled. Like what? an editor asked. Like assassinations! Ford said. Hard to say which was stranger--what the president had said, or that the editors managed to keep the statement off the record.
The new Congress, elected three months after Nixon's resignation, was the most liberal in memory. "The question is how to plan to meet the investigation of the CIA," President Ford told Rumsfeld on February 21; Rumsfeld pledged to mount "a damage-limiting operation for the President." He took charge of determining how many--if any--of the CIA's secrets Ford and Rockefeller would share with Capitol Hill.
On March 28, Schlesinger told the president that it was imperative to cut back on "the prominence of CIA operations" around the world. "Within the CIA there is bitter dissension," said Schlesinger, who had helped to sow it. The clandestine service was "full of tired-out old agents," men who might spill secrets. Colby was being "too damned cooperative with the Congress." The danger of disclosure was growing by the day.