NOTES

PRIMARY SOURCES

--Central Intelligence Agency records obtained from the CIA Records Search Technology at the National Archives and Records Administration (CIA/CREST)

--CIA records released or reprinted by the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (CIA/CSI)

--CIA records obtained from the Declassified Documents Records System (CIA/DDRS)

--National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

--The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS). CIA records in the FRUS volume "Emergency of the Intelligence Establishment, 1945-1950," are hereinafter "FRUS Intelligence."

--Foreign Affairs Oral History (FAOH)

--Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY (FDRL)

--Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, MO (HSTL)

--Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, KS (DDEL)

--John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, MA (JFKL)

--Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Tx (LBJL)

--Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library. Yorba Linda, CA (RMNL)

--Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Grand Rapids, MI (GRFL)

--Jimmy Carter Library, Atlanta, GA (JCL)

--George H.W. Bush Library, College Station, TX (GHWBL)

--Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

--The records of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (hereinafter "Church Committee")

CIA clandestine service histories were obtained through declassification and through unofficial sources. The CIA has reneged on pledges made by three consecutive directors of central intelligence--Gates, Woolsey, and Deutch--to declassify records on nine major covert actions: France and Italy in the 1940s and 1950s; North Korea in the 1950s; Iran in 1953; Indonesia in 1958; Tibet in the 1950s and 1960s; and the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and Laos in the 1960s. The Guatemala documents were finally released in 2003, most of the Bay of Pigs documents are out, and the Iran history was leaked. The rest remain under official seal. While I was gathering and obtaining declassification authorizations for some of the CIA records used in this book at the National Archives, the agency was engaging in a secret effort to reclassify many of those same records, dating back to the 1940s, flouting the law and breaking its word. Nevertheless, the work of historians, archivists, and journalists has created a foundation of documents on which a book can be built.

PART ONE

Chapter One

"When I took over": Truman to David M. Noyes, December 1, 1963, David M. Noyes papers, HSTL.

"In a global and totalitarian war": Donovan to Joint Psychological Warfare Committee, October 24, 1942, NARA.

"capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign nations"..."subversive operations abroad": Donovan to Roosevelt, "Substantive Authority Necessary in Establishment of a Central Intelligence Service," November 18, 1944, reprinted in Thomas F. Troy, CIA/CSI, republished as Donovan and the CIA (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1981), pp. 445-447.

"lay the keel": Donovan to Roosevelt, OSS folder, President's Secretary's file, FDRL. Roosevelt once said, not without malice, that Donovan could have been president had he not been an Irishman, a Catholic, and a Republican.

"His imagination was unlimited": Bruce cited in Dulles speech, "William J. Donovan and the National Security," undated but probably 1959, CIA/CSI.

"an extremely dangerous thing in a democracy": Bissell cited in Troy, Donovan and the CIA, p. 243. This was a widely held view. Yet the army had done worse during the war. The chief of army intelligence, Major General George Strong, had cast a gimlet eye at Donovan's new and independent OSS and decided to set up his own intelligence shop. He instructed the chief of the War Department's Military Intelligence Service, Brigadier General Hayes Kroner, to create this organization in October 1942. Kroner, in turn, plucked a renegade U.S. Army captain named John"Frenchy" Grombach out of Donovan's organization and handed him some extraordinary marching orders: to focus on spying and subversion against the United States by its wartime allies, the British and the Soviets. Grombach called his intelligence outfit The Pond. It was uncontrolled by higher authority and undermined by the utter unreliability of its reporting. By Grombach's own account, 80 percent of his work wound up in the trash. The Pond succeeded mainly at keeping itself secret. "Its existence was not known," General Kroner said; only a handful of men, including "the President himself, who had to know by virtue of his approving certain operations, knew it existed." Grombach's ambitious orders were, however, a milestone: "He would not only institute a secret intelligence service, looking to the current war effort, but he would lay the foundation for a perpetual, a far-seeing, a far-distant, continuing secret intelligence service," Kroner said. "That was the birth of high-level intelligence, secret intelligence operations in our government." National Security Act of 1947, Hearing Before the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, June 27, 1947. See Mark Stout, "The Pond: Running Agents for State, War, and the CIA," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 48, No. 3, CIA/CSI, available online at https://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol48no3/ article07.html.

a short row of wooden filing cabinets at the State Department: In October 1941, Captain Dean Rusk, the future secretary of state, was ordered to organize a new army intelligence section covering a great swath of the world, from Afghanistan through India to Australia. "The need for information," Rusk said, "cannot be exaggerated. We were running into this factor of ignorance." He asked to see what files the United States had on hand: "I was shown one file drawer by an old lady named Mrs. North. In that file drawer was one copy of 'Murphy's Tourist Handbook' to India and Ceylon which had been stamped Confidential because it was the only copy in town, and they wanted to keep track of it; one 1925 military attache report from London on the British Army in India, and then a considerable number of clippings from The New York Times that this old lady, Mrs. North, had been clipping since World War One, and that was it." In World War II, when American pilots crossed the Himalayas from India to China and back, they were flying blind, Rusk remembered: "I didn't even have maps that would show us the scale of one to one million in the terrain in which we were operating." When Rusk tried to organize a Burmese-language unit for the army, "we looked around the United States for a native Burman.... We finally found one and we looked him up and he was in an insane asylum. Well, we fished him out of the insane asylum and made a Burmese language instructor out of him." Rusk testimony, President's Commission on CIA Activities (Rockefeller Commission), April 21, 1975, pp. 2191-2193, Top Secret, declassified 1995, GRFL.

half the night: Troy, Donovan and the CIA, p. 265.

"What do you think it means...?": Casey cited in Joseph E. Persico, Casey: The Lives and Secrets of William J. Casey: From the OSS to the CIA (New York: Viking), p. 81.

"serious harm to the citizens": Park report, Rose A. Conway files, OSS/ Donovan folder, HSTL.

"The defects and the dangers": Donovan to Truman, "Statement of Principles," FRUS Intelligence, pp. 17-21.

Chapter Two

"What you have to remember": Helms interview with author.

"most inadvisable": Stimson to Donovan, May 1, 1945, CIA Historical Intelligence Collection, CIA/CSI.

"the continuing operations of OSS must be performed in order to preserve them": McCloy to Magruder, September 26, 1945, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 235-236. The records detailing the survival of Central Intelligence after Truman's abolition of the OSS are in FRUS Intelligence, pp. 74-315; see especially Magruder's essay on clandestine intelligence operations and the Lovett report.

"the holy cause of central intelligence": Magruder cited in Michael Warner, "Salvage and Liquidation: The Creation of the Central Intelligence Group," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 39, No. 5, 1996, CIA/CSI.

"it was very clear our primary target was going to be what the Russians were up to": Polgar interview with author.

"we were seeing the total takeover by the Russians of the East German system": Sichel interview with author.

a successful liaison: Wisner to Chief/SI, March 27, 1945, CIA/DDRS.

"Clandestine intelligence operations": Magruder to Lovett, "Intelligence Matters," undated but likely late October 1945, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 77-81.

"The intelligence collection effort more or less came to a standstill": William W. Quinn, Buffalo Bill Remembers: Truth and Courage (Fowlerville, MI: Wilderness Adventure Books, 1991), p. 240.

"transparently jerry-built": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 72.

Colonel Quinn had been the chief intelligence officer for the Seventh Army in North Africa, France, and Germany, working in direct liaison with OSS. He faced fierce opposition to the new intelligence service in Washington. He brought a package of inside information on the Soviet Baltic Fleet to an admiral at the Office of Naval Intelligence. "Your organization is infiltrated with communists," replied the admiral. "I couldn't possibly accept anything that you might want to give me." There were several such rejections. So Quinn decided he needed a clean bill of health from the only man in Washington who could grant it: J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. He went to Hoover, stated his case, and watched as Hoover smiled and fairly licked his lips as he considered the problem. "You know, this is quite a relief," Hoover said. "Colonel, I fought that Bill Donovan tooth-and-nail, particularly regarding operations in South and Central America." The FBI had been ordered out of every nation south of the Rio Grande after the war; Hoover's G-men burned their intelligence files rather than turn them over to Central Intelligence, the beginning of a never-ending battle. Now, for the moment, Quinn's coming to the FBI hat in hand took some of the heat out of Hoover's hatred. "I admired Donovan, but I was certainly not fond of him," Hoover continued. "So here we are at the end of that road. What do you want me to do?"

"Mr. Hoover," Quinn replied, "the simple answer to your question is to find out if I have any commies in my organization."

"Well, we can do that," said Hoover. "We can run a national check."
"While you're doing it subversively, would you please check them criminally as well?"
"All right."
"Before we decide on how to do it, for posterity, and for ultimate cooperation, I would like to ask that you send me a representative to be your liaison with my organization."
At this, Hoover almost fell out of his seat. "I knew what was going on in his mind," Quinn recalled. "He was probably thinking, my God, this guy is asking for a direct penetration in his agency." Quinn had just invited the FBI to spy on his spies. He needed the anticommunist inoculation from Hoover for the outfit to survive at the beginning of the great red scare that gripped Washington for nearly a decade. His decision temporarily increased the standing and reputation of Central Intelligence at home.

Colonel Quinn was placed in charge of the Office of Special Operations, in charge of espionage and covert action overseas, by Director of Central Intelligence Vandenberg in July 1946. He found his new assignment "contrary to any principles of organization, command and control that I had ever experienced." In search of cash, he went to Capitol Hill and sought $15 million for espionage from a few members of Congress. "I just knew that these people didn't know what we did," he said. So Quinn asked for a secret executive session, and he told the members a stirring tale about a cleaning woman in Berlin who had been recruited as
a spy, photographing Soviet documents at night. The congressmen were rapt. Quinn got his money, under the table, and it helped to keep American intelligence alive.
He also tried to re-enlist OSS veterans like Bill Casey, who would take over as director of central intelligence thirty-five years later. But in 1946, Casey wanted to make money on Wall Street more than he wanted to continue serving his country. He and his OSS friends feared that intelligence would remain a cross-eyed stepchild of the military services, run by generals and admirals in thrall to transient tactics rather than skilled civilians focused on the big strategic picture. The future of American intelligence was threatened, Casey wrote to Donovan, by "today's moral and political climate, which I attribute to a considerable degree to our late Commander in Chief," President Roosevelt. Casey's list of recommendations to Quinn included Hans Tofte, who later tried to run covert operations against China during the Korean War, and Mike Burke, who tried to run operations across the iron curtain in the early 1950s. Quinn, Buffalo Bill Remembers, pp. 234-267. J. Russell Forgan letter to Quinn, May 8, 1946; Casey letter to Forgan, January 25, 1966; Casey letter to Donovan, August 20, 1946; all three letters in J. Russell Forgan papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

"I don't suppose there had ever been or could ever be sadder or more tormented period of my life": Sherman Kent, Reminiscences of a Varied Life, n.d., privately printed, pp. 225-231. Kent wrote in 1946: "From the very beginning, there was administrative trouble of a high order, much of it avoidable; personnel actions--new appointments, replacements, and overdue promotions--moved with the ponderous slowness of the glacier or not at all. Life outside the government [became] more and more attractive to irreplaceable professionals. They began to leave in the order of their importance to the organization; and as replacements did not appear, morale declined." "Prospects for the National Intelligence Service," Yale Review, Vol. 36, No. 1, Autumn 1946, p. 116. William Colby, the future director of central intelligence, wrote that the separation of the scholars of the research and analysis division from the spies of the clandestine service created two cultures within the intelligence profession, separate, unequal, and contemptuous of each other. That critique remained true throughout the CIA's first sixty years.

Smith warned the president: The warning, declassified by the White House in 2004, was titled "Intelligence and Security Activities of the Government" and dated September 20, 1945, the day the president ordered the OSS abolished.

"royally bitched up": Harold D. Smith papers, "Diaries--Conferences with the President," 1945, FDRL.

"a disgraceful way": Leahy cited in Smith memo, "White House Conference on Intelligence Activities," January 9, 1946, FRUS Intelligence, pp.

"At lunch today in the White House": Diary of William D. Leahy, January 24, 1946, Library of Congress; Warner, "Salvage and Liquidation," CIA/CSI.

Truman said he only needed a daily intelligence digest: Russell Jack Smith, later the CIA's deputy director for intelligence, remembered that when the Central Intelligence Group was first established in January 1946, "Truman began asking daily, 'Where's my newspaper?' It seemed almost that the only CIG activity President Truman deemed important was the daily summary." His predecessor, Sherman Kent, wrote in 1949 that the CIA should strive to resemble "great metropolitan newspapers," with "small forces of decorous and highly intelligent salesmen" to "push the product"--the product being, as it turned out, the president's newspaper. The newspaper became known as the President's Daily Brief. Delivered by courier to the president for nearly six decades, it was the CIA's one constant source of power. But the last thing a spy engaged in the business of espionage wants (or needs) is the daily demands of newspaper deadlines. Spying does not produce a steady flow of news to meet a daily deadline. It is a slow search to find ground truths, to know the mind of the enemy by silently stealing secrets of state. There was, and remains, "a conflict between the real demands of espionage and the reportorial needs of current intelligence," wrote William R. Johnson, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the CIA's clandestine service. Was the job of American intelligence to beg or borrow or purvey information and sell it, repackaged, to the president? Or was it to steal state secrets abroad? This conflict was not resolved in favor of espionage. Johnson concluded, and he spoke for much of the clandestine service after three decades of toil, that the business of current intelligence lay outside the CIA. And for good measure, he wrote: "As for the political action people, the media planters and the grey radio broadcasters, and the corrupters of venal politicians, let them make their accommodation wherever it suits. Their work is not clandestine.... Let the Security Council find a place for them somewhere removed from the conduct of espionage." William R. Johnson, "Clandestinity and Current Intelligence," Studies in Intelligence, Fall 1976, CIA/CSI, reprinted in H. Bradford Westerfield (ed.), Inside CIA's Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency's Internal Journal 1955-1992 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 118-184.

"There is an urgent need": Souers, "Development of Intelligence on USSR," April 29, 1946, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 345-347.

"We had accustomed ourselves": Kennan interview for the CNN Cold War series, 1996, National Security Archive transcript, available online at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/-espisode-1/kennan1.html.

"the best possible tutor": Walter Bedell Smith, My Three Years in Moscow (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1950), p. 86.

On a cold, starry night in April 1946: Ibid., pp. 46-54

"an apprentice juggler": Helms, A Look over My Shoulder, p. 67.

"throwing money at a problem": Ibid., pp. 92-95. Berlin base chief Dana Durand confessed that the intelligence he and his men had produced was shot through with "rumors, high level gossip, political chitchat." Durand to Helms, "Report on Berlin Operations Base," April 8, 1948, declassified 1999, CIA. In one of many such intelligence swindles, Karl-Heinz Kramer, "the Stockholm Abwehr," sold the Americans highly detailed reports on the Russian airframe industry, which he claimed came from his extensive network of agents inside the Soviet Union. In reality, his source was a set of aircraft manuals bought from a Stockholm bookstore. James V. Milano and Patrick Brogan, Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line: America's Undeclared War against the Soviets(Washington, DC: Brassey's, 1995), pp. 149-150. In another scam, Central Intelligence bought a chunk of "radioactive uranium" advertised as having been swiped from a shipment in East Germany bound for Moscow. The hot potato was a hunk of lead wrapped in aluminum foil. This kind of fiasco led General Leslie Groves, the man who ran the Manhattan Project, the secret program that created the atomic bomb, to set up his own intelligence unit, dedicated to determining every possible source of uranium in the world and tracking the development of atomic weapons in the Soviet Union. General Groves, judging Helms's men "unable to function satisfactorily" and thus incapable of keeping an eye on Stalin's plans to build a Soviet atomic bomb, kept the existence of this unit and its mission secret from Vandenberg and his men at Central Intelligence. That contributed to the failure of the CIA to accurately predict when America's monopoly on weapons of mass destruction might end. "Minutes of the Sixth Meeting of the National Intelligence Authority," August 21, 1946, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 395-400; Groves memo to the Atomic Energy Commission, November 21, 1946,FRUS Intelligence, pp. 458-460.

an "operating agency": Elsey memorandum for the record, July 17, 1946, CIA/CSI.

"intelligence agents all over the world": "Minutes of the Fourth Meeting of the National Intelligence Authority," July 17, 1946, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 526-533. For the context of the war scare of 1946, see Eduard Mark, "The War Scare of 1946 and Its Consequences," Diplomatic History, Vol. 21, No. 3, Summer 1997.

"conspiracy, intrigue, nastiness": Hostler interview with author. Hostler spent the closing months of the war on an interim assignment in Italy, working at a 1,200-room royal palace outside Naples, helping James J. Angleton of the OSS in "strengthening his control over the various Italian intelligence and security networks." For the background of the Romanian fiasco, see Charles W. Hostler, Soldier to Ambassador: From the D-Day Normandy Landing to the Persian Gulf War, A Memoir Odyssey (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1993), pp. 51-85; and Elizabeth W. Hazard, Cold War Crucible (Boulder, CO: Eastern European Monographs, 1996). Hazard is the daughter of Frank Wisner.

Chapter Three

"extraordinarily important events": Wisner quoted in C. David Heymann, The Georgetown Ladies' Social Club (New York: Atria, 2003), pp. 36-37.

the ideas of this obscure diplomat: Kennan would in time disavow his intellectual constructs for the Truman Doctrine and the CIA. The Truman Doctrine, Kennan wrote two decades later, built "the framework of a universal policy" out of a unique problem: "All another country had to do, in order to qualify for American aid, was to demonstrate the existence of a Communist threat. Since almost no country was without a Communist minority, this assumption carried very far." But the doctrine was read by almost all Americans in 1947 as a ringing proclamation for the forces of freedom. The American intelligence officer James McCargar was working in Budapest on the day of Truman's speech. For months on end, spirits at the American Legation there had been "going down and down, because we saw that the Russians were getting away with what they wanted to do, which was to take over Hungary entirely." The story was the same across the Balkans and perhaps--who knew?--all of Europe: "There was no question whatsoever that this was going to be a contest, a real confrontation" between the United States and the Soviet Union. "We became more and more depressed"--until the day the Truman Doctrine was proclaimed. "We all went out into the streets that morning with our heads held high," McCargar said. "We were going to back up democratic forces as much as we could anywhere around the world." George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925-50 (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 322; McCargar oral history, FAOH; McCargar interview with author; Vandenberg memo, "Subject: Special Consultant to the Director of Central Intelligence," June 27, 1946, CIA/CSI.

The origins of the Truman Doctrine trace back to the war scare of 1946. Late in the afternoon on Friday, July 12, 1946, as the first covert operation and the first war plans against the Soviets began to take shape, Harry Truman had a bourbon or two in the White House with his counsel, Clark Clifford. He asked him to pull together something on the mystery of the Soviets, something his Central Intelligence news service seemed unable to do to his satisfaction. Clifford, already a little addled by his proximity to power, decided to take on the job himself. No one as close to Truman was less qualified. "I had no real background" in foreign policy or national security, Clifford said. "I had to learn as I went; it was catch as catch can." Truman was not the first president to set up his own amateur intelligence shop at the White House. He would not be the last. Clifford's work, written with Truman's aide George Elsey, was delivered in early September 1946. It borrowed and built on Kennan's words, and then took a long leap into the unknown. Clifford oral history, HSTL. "The Joint Intelligence Committee," CIA/CSI, 2000.

The United States had to assume that the Soviets could attack anywhere at any time, and so the president had to be ready to wage "atomic and biological warfare" against the Soviet Union, for "the language of military power is the only language" the Soviets understood, it said. The only true alternative would be a worldwide effort by the United States to "support and assist all democratic countries which are in any way menaced or endangered by the U.S.S.R." To do that, the nation had to build a new and unified set of foreign policies, military plans, economic aid programs, and intelligence operations to blunt the Soviets. The United States had to lead the rest of Western civilization "in an attempt to build up a world of our own."

Director of Central Intelligence Vandenberg caught wind of Clifford's endeavor. Not to be outdone, a week after Truman commissioned Clifford's report Vandenberg told Ludwell Lee Montague, his chief reports officer, to deliver a blockbuster on the military and foreign policies of the Soviet Union, and to have it on his desk by Tuesday. Montague, without any competent staff, did it all by himself. Sleeping very little over the next hundred hours, he delivered on deadline the first analysis of the Soviets ever published by Central Intelligence. Montague concluded that while Moscow anticipated a clash with the capitalist world and would strive to solidify control of all the lands behind the iron curtain, it would not provoke the next war and could not afford a direct conflict with the United States in the foreseeable future. It was as good a guess as any. This report was the first Soviet estimate, the first of hundreds, one of the most difficult and least satisfying jobs the CIA undertook. Like those that followed, it was based on few hard facts, proof of the wisdom put forth by Sherman Kent that "estimating is what you do when you do not know." The report sank like a stone. It painted shades of gray when what was wanted at the White House was black-and-white. And it suffered one fundamental weakness: the army, the navy, and the State Department still would not share their thinking, much less their secrets, with the upstarts at Central Intelligence. Sherman Kent, "Estimates and Influence," Foreign Service Journal, April 1969. See also Ludwell L. Montague, General Walter Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1992), pp. 120-123 [hereinafter CIA/LLM]. This is a CIA history, declassified in part. Ludwell Lee Montague, "Production of a 'World Situation Estimate,'" CIA, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 804-806.

This was a crippling blow. Over the next four years, Montague later wrote, Central Intelligence consistently failed to deliver what Truman wanted: knowledge from all known sources. The one insurmountable obstacle was the military. They wanted to do their own thinking and predicting and threat analysis, as they still do. Montague's work was the last big think piece on the Soviet Union that Central Intelligence would submit to the president for nearly two years. The bitter lesson would deepen with time: the CIA would wield power in Washington only when it had gathered its own unique secrets.
Clifford, by contrast, had the clout that Central Intelligence lacked. He had the finest office in the West Wing of the White House and he met with the president a half-dozen times a day. He had the president's ear. He demanded and received the secrets of the State, War, and Navy Departments in the president's name. The report he and Elsey delivered in September lifted liberally from the work of the Joint Chiefs' own intelligence staff. Yet it, too, had a fatal flaw: no one in the U.S. government had any way of accurately reading Moscow's military capabilities and intentions. The best information on the Soviets available to the U.S. government back then, Richard Helms reflected fifty years later, was sitting in the stacks of the Library of Congress. But Clifford, working off the cuff, had done precisely what Central Intelligence was supposed to do. He gathered the government's thoughts. Clifford-Elsey memo, draft copy, September 1946, CIA/DDRS. See also James Chace, Acheson (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), p. 157; and Clark M. Clifford with Richard Holbrooke, Counsel to the President (New York: Anchor, 1992) pp. 109-129.

"Mr. President": Chace, Acheson, pp. 162-165; Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 219.

"The oceans have shrunk": Statement of Lieutenant General Hoyt S. Vandenberg on S. 758, National Security Act of 1947, NARA. "It takes time," Vandenberg said, "to start something that we are 400 years behind the times on today."

"and probably never should have been": CIA/LLM, p. 4. Souers, Vandenberg, and Hillenkoetter were among a dozen of the nineteen directors of central intelligence who were unprepared or unsuited for office. "This assignment was definitely unsought," Hillenkoetter wrote to Wild Bill Donovan on May 21, 1947. "As you are the past master in this art, I am presuming to ask you if you will give me some advice as well as your ideas on the subject." Hilly would need all the help he could get. Letter to Donovan, Forgan papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Room 1501 of the Longworth Office Building: Dulles's testimony is recorded in Hearing Before the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, June 27, 1947. In 1982, Representative Jack Brooks, chair of the House Committee on Government Operations, and Representative Edward Boland, chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, had their staffs unearth the transcript and printed it with an introduction on its unusual history. Representative Clare E. Hoffman of Michigan, the Republican chair of the House Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, led the session in 1947. The witnesses testified under code names (Mr. A, Mr. B, Mr. C). Hoffman had kept the only transcript of the hearing; in October 1947, he loaned it to the legislative counsel of the CIA, Walter Pforzheimer, who made a copy, stored it in a safe, and returned the original. Hoffman destroyed the original in 1950. The sole surviving copy was unearthed from CIA archives thirty-two years later.
The other major witnesses at the hearing were Director of Central Intelligence Vandenberg and John "Frenchy" Grombach, leader of The Pond, the spy service created by army intelligence back in 1942. "We are not playing with marbles," Grombach told the committee. "We are playing with our national security, and our lives" by letting Central Intelligence run clandestine operations. Let the army spy for the United States, he argued, and let Central Intelligence write reports. Any other way would be "wrong and dangerous.
" Vandenberg struck back. The real danger, he testified, was The Pond--"a gravy train," a "commercial concern," filled with mercenary amateurs who babbled secrets in barrooms. The clandestine collection of secret intelligence was a difficult business that had to be conducted by tightly controlled professionals.
Vandenberg went on to explain how to build a proper intelligence network. "The clandestine field, sir, is a very complicated one," he testified. "The way it works is that you have an expert in the clandestine field, or as near an expert as the United States has, and who we can hire for the money that we can pay.... He then builds a chain of people that he knows. Then, we have to have another man picked, in whom we have full confidence, who builds a chain alongside, who is just watching...to make sure that this man is not giving you information and receiving pay from a foreign government.... The man who originally set up the netostensibly has no connection with any person or any department of the Government." He cautioned: "The chances of the U.S. Government in peacetime getting into tremendous difficulties behooves us to keep it right under our thumb; and you cannot keep it under your thumb if you are contracting for it [by hiring] some chap who comes into the office and tells you he would be very glad if you would give him $500,000 a year.... It might very well be that that man is paid by another government and is feeding you the information that that government would like for you to have."
That was an accurate outline of the challenges the CIA faced at its creation--more so than what followed from Allen Dulles: "I do not believe in a big agency," he said. "You ought to keep it small. If this thing gets to be a great big octopus, it should not function well. Abroad, you will need a certain number of people, but it ought not to be a great number. It ought to be scores rather than hundreds." He inherited nearly ten thousand people when he took over in 1953 and built from there past fifteen thousand, toward twenty thousand, and most of them were charged with running covert operations abroad. Covert operations were a task Dulles never got around to mentioning.

"the greatest cemetery for dead cats": Walter Millis (ed.) with E. S. Duffield, The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1951), p. 299.

"I had the gravest forebodings": Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 214.

hundreds of major covert actions--eighty-one of them during Truman's second term: a number published in "Coordination and Policy Approval of Covert Actions," a coordinated NSC/CIA document dated February 23, 1967, and declassified after along struggle in 2002.

The CIA's counsel, Lawrence Houston: Houston told Hillenkoetter that the act gave the CIA no legal authority for anything resembling covert action. Nor was there any implied intent of Congress to be read between the lines of the law. If the NSC gave orders for that kind of mission, and if the CIA went back to Congress and specifically requested and received the authority and the money for a covert operation, that might be another matter. Thirty years passed before his advice was heeded. Houston to Hillenkoetter, "CIA Authority to Perform Propaganda and Commando Type Functions," September 25, 1947, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 622-623.

25-26 "guerrilla warfare".... "fight fire with fire": Kennan to Forrestal, September 26, 1947, Record Group 165, ABC files, 352:1, NARA.

26 In a bitter memo: Penrose to Forrestal, January 2, 1948, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 830-834.

"covert psychological operation": NSC 4/A, December 14, 1947.
What was psychological warfare? The first CIA officers wondered. A war of words? If words were weapons, should they be true or false? Was the CIA supposed to sell democracy on the open market or smuggle it into the Soviet Union? Was this about beaming radio broadcasts or dropping leaflets behind the iron curtain? Or was it a command to mount clandestine operations designed to break enemy morale? The dark arts of strategic deception had fallen into disuse since D-Day. No one had developed a new doctrine of conducting warfare without weapons. From his command post in Europe, General Eisenhower urged fellow officers "to keep alive the arts of psychological warfare." Eisenhower memo, June 19, 1947, RG 310, Army Operations, P & O 091.412, NARA; Memo from Director of Central Intelligence, "Psychological Warfare," October 22, 1947, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 626-627.
But Brigadier General Robert A. McClure, the future father of American special-operations forces, found that American "ignorance...about psychological warfare...is astounding." McClure to Propaganda Branch, MID War Department, Record Group 319, Box 263, NARA; Colonel Alfred H. Paddock, Jr., "Psychological and Unconventional Warfare, 1941-1952," U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA, November 1979.
Hillenkoetter searched for a chief of a new "Special Procedures Branch" who could cut through the murk. Kennan and Forrestal wanted Allen Dulles for the job. They got Thomas G. Cassady, an old OSS man, a broker and banker from Chicago. Cassady was a disaster. He tried to set up a radio station for transmissions behind the iron curtain, and a printing press for propaganda in Germany, but nobody could come up with the right words to win the hearts and minds of the oppressed. His big idea was Project Ultimate: sending high-level balloons into the Soviet Union with leaflets bearing messages of brotherly love. Why not an airlift of Mickey Mouse watches? asked a skeptic at the State Department.

"the most ancient seat of Western Culture": "Consequences of Communist Accession to Power in Italy by Legal Means," CIA, Office of Research and Estimates, March 5, 1948.

"We were going beyond our charter": Wyatt interview with author. See also his interview for the CNN Cold War series, 1998 National Security Archive transcript available online at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ coldwar/interview/episode-3/wyatt1.html.
The Italian operation became one of the most expensive, longest-running, and richly rewarding political-action operations in the agency's first twenty-five years. In November 1947, at the start of the operation, James J. Angleton returned from his post as station chief in Rome to organize a Soviet division inside Galloway's struggling Office of Special Operations. Angleton had built a substantial stable of agents in Italy, in part by offering some very tough customers immunity from war crimes prosecutions, and he had been thinking about the coming elections and laying plans for many months. Angleton's executive officer in Rome, Ray Rocca, an Italian American from San Francisco, was left in charge of the first phases of the operation. In retrospect, William Colby felt there was no magic to the operation; it was a straight-cash proposition. It would remain straight cash for a quarter century. The miracle of 1948 was that the center held and that the CIA could claim credit for the victory. In the run-up to that election, the center-right Christian Democrats, allied with the Vatican and led by Alcide De Gasperi, were neck and neck with the Communist Party, whose leaders looked to Moscow and claimed a rank-and-file membership of two million loyalists. "They were the big parties," said the CIA's Mark Wyatt. "The neo-fascists were out of the picture. The monarchists were dead." Three minor parties remained: Republicans, Liberals, and Social Democrats. The CIA decided in March to split its own vote, as it were, by supporting minor-party candidates as well as the Christian Democrats. Overviews of the operation are in Ray S. Cline, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA (Washington, DC: Acropolis, 1976), pp. 99-103, and Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 114-117. Cline was deputy director of intelligence at the CIA from 1962 to 1966; Grose unearthed telling congressional testimony describing the uses of the Treasury Department's Exchange Stabilization Fund.
There are no records of what the Italian operation cost, though estimates run from $10 million to $30 million. The black bags of money were filled, in part, with bonds of friendship and trust. Treasury Secretary Snyder had a close friend in A. P. Giannini, the Italian American financier who ran Transamerica Corporation, a holding company that controlled the Bank of America and some two hundred smaller banks. Giannini, in turn, was put in touch with Wyatt, a fellow San Franciscan. "I had many contacts with prominent Italian-Americans in this country: bankers, industrialists, that were full of ideas, and some of them were very aberrant ideas," such as a coup d'etat if the covert plan failed, Wyatt said. Giannini was among his contacts, as were "powerful political leaders in this country, not just Tammany Hall and Cook County, Illinois, but outstanding ones that knew how to win elections." Muscle as well as money was involved. An apocryphal story about the 1948 Italian operation holds that three CIA contract agents went to Palermo to do something about the situation on the docks, where they turned to members of the local Mafia to address the problem. They succeeded in getting American arms shipmentspast communist longshoremen, but headquarters was not happy with their methodology. Assessing precisely how crucial the CIA was to the American cause in the 1948 elections is like unscrambling an egg. The flood of American weapons and armor to Italy, the American ships that delivered tons of food, and waves of international news amplified by the shock of the fall of Czechoslovakia all contributed to the victory and to the cementing of the long relationship between the CIA and the increasingly corrupt Italian political elite. Joe Greene, who divided his time between the State Department and the Office of Policy Coordination, recalled that the Italians "announced they wanted to give the U.S. a token of their appreciation for all the Americans had done from the end of the war, when they changed sides, up to the early '50s. They offered enormous bronze equestrian statues that are on the northwest end of the Memorial Bridge in Washington. De Gasperi came over for that and Truman attended the dedication ceremony. It was a great show." The horses are still there. Greene oral history, FAOH.

The CIA station chief in Prague, Charles Katek: The exfiltration of Katek's Czech agents was described in interviews by Tom Polgar and Steve Tanner, both CIA officers in Germany in 1948. But the CIA performed less nobly when called upon to save the life of Michael Shipkov, a Bulgarian who served as chief translator for the American Legation in that newly Stalinist state. The legation asked the army for help in getting Shipkov out of the country, said Raymond Courtney, the American vice consul: "They came back with a really childish, impossible scheme: have him set out on the road by night and make his way, not by road but cross country over the mountains with five or six feet of snow, down to the Greek border and try to make a clandestine meeting in a graveyard there. I put Shipkov out on the road about 3 o'clock in the morning and sent the poor guy on his way. Well, he made the first safe house all right and the second safe house, but then the couriers didn't turn up and he didn't want to compromise his hosts any further so he tried to set out on his own without any guidance or assistance. The militia picked him up. We learned later that the reason the couriers had not shown was that they had both gone down with flu and had laid over 24 hours in a haystack. Shipkov's capture was announced over the State radio with a great blare of publicity. Shipkov was given a very, very bad time. After 15 years of that he was released from prison." Courtney oral history, FAOH.

the Marshall Plan: the CIA's use of Marshall Plan funds is described in "A Short History of the PSB," December 21, 1951, NSC Staff Papers, White House Office Files, DDEL. The diversion of Marshall Plan funds for covert action was detailed in an October 17, 1949, memo for Frank Wisner, chief of the Office of Policy Coordination: "CIA Responsibility and Accountability for ECA Counterpart Funds Expended by OPC," classified Secret, reprinted in Michael Warner (ed.), CIA Cold War Records: The CIA Under Harry Truman (Washington, DC: CIA History Staff, 1994). This was a rare accounting: under "general and specific agreements" made in secret among a handful of men in the know, "the 5% counterpart funds of ECA are made available to CIA" for covert operations, according to the CIA document. The ECA, or Economic Cooperation Administration, administered the Marshall Plan.
There was always plenty of cash. "Of course, we had money," said Melbourne L. Spector, a Marshall Plan administrator in Paris. "We had counterpart funds just coming out of our ears." Spector oral history, FAOH.

"Tell them to stick their hand in our pocket": Griffin oral history, HSTL.

"the inauguration of organized political warfare": Kennan unsigned memo, May 4, 1948, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 668-672.

NSC Directive 10/2 called for covert operations: the fighting words in full were as follows:
Kennan was indisputably the directive's chief intellectual author. A generation later he rued it all, saying that the push for political warfare was his greatest mistake, that covert operations clashed with American traditions, that "excessive secrecy, duplicity and clandestine skullduggery are simply not our dish." Few in power said so at the time. The conventional wisdom among the cognoscenti was clear. If America was to stopthe Soviets, it was going to need an army of secret soldiers. Kennan managed to write more than a thousand pages of memoirs without any mention of his role as the progenitor of covert action. His justly acclaimed work was thus a small masterpiece of duplicity as well as a magnificent diplomatic history. See also Kennan's "Mortality and Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs, Winter 1985-1986; and his statement that the political warfare initiative was "the greatest mistake I ever made" in his testimony to the Church Committee, October 28, 1975, quoted in the committee's final report, Vol. 4, p. 31.
Director of Central Intelligence Hillenkoetter was aghast at the very idea of the new clandestine service. He made plain his belief that the United States should never engage in covert-action in peacetime. Nor was he the only one to wonder about the costs of secret subversion. Sherman Kent, the greatest of the CIA's cold-war analysts, had committed the following thought to paper: To send "clandestine operatives into a foreign country against which the United States is not at war and instruct these agents to carry out 'black' operations," he wrote, "not only runs counter to the principles upon which our country was founded but also those for which we recently fought a war." Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 451.

The National Security Council, taking cognizance of the vicious covert activities of the USSR, its satellite countries and Communist groups to discredit and defeat the aims and activities of the United States and other Western powers, has determined that, in the interests of world peace and US national security, the overt foreign activities of the US Government must be supplemented by covert operations...so planned and executed that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. Specifically, such operations shall include any covert activities related to: propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.

"rumor-spreading, bribery, the organization of non-communist fronts": Edward P. Lilly, "The Development of American Psychological Operations, 1945-1951," National Security Council, Top Secret, DDEL, c. 1953.

The CIA's Berlin base: Sichel and Polgar interviews with author; "Subject: Targets of German Mission, January 10, 1947," CIA/CREST. For a reliable overview of the CIA's Berlin Operations Base, see David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). Murphy later served as base chief.

"a zeal and intensity": Helms's eulogy at a memorial service for Wisner at CIA headquarters, January 29, 1971. Helms summoned up some lines from Robert Frost's "Once by the Pacific" when he remembered the cold warrior in Wisner:
Wisner was described as "a singular choice to create a covert organization from scratch" in "Office of Policy Coordination, 1948-1952," unsigned, undated, declassified with redactions in March 1997, CIA/CREST. The author was Gerald Miller, Wisner's Western Europe operations chief.

It looked as if a night of dark intent

Was coming, and not only a night, an age.

Someone had better be prepared for rage....

Chapter Four

battle plans for the next five years: Wisner's ambitions are detailed in his memo "Subject: OPC Projects," October 29, 1948, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 730-731; author's interviews with Wisner's contemporaries, including Richard Helms, Franklin Lindsay, Sam Halpern, Al Ulmer, and Walter Pforzheimer; and "Office of Policy Coordination, 1948-1952," CIA/CREST.

LeMay told Wisner's right-hand man Franklin Lindsay: Lindsay interview with author. Lindsay fought as an OSS guerrilla alongside Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia. After the war, alongside Allen Dulles, he served on the staff of the congressional committee that authorized the Marshall Plan. In September 1947, he had led a group of members of Congress on that committee, including Richard Nixon, to the occupied city of Trieste, where they witnessed a tense confrontation between a Yugoslav tank column and American forces on the eve of Trieste's transition to a free territory. Yugoslavia was still in the Soviet orbit; Tito would not break with Stalin for another nine months. It was a hair-trigger moment. The Allied commander in Trieste, General Terence Airey, warned the American and British governments: "If this matter is not handled very carefully a third World War might start here." Upon returning to Washington, Lindsay and his predecessor as the chief of the wartime military mission to Tito's forces, Charles Thayer, proposed a guerrilla warfare corps to battle the Soviets--"fighting fire with fire"--an idea that caught Kennan's eye just as Lindsay caught Wisner's.

"the most secret thing": James McCargar oral history, FAOH. McCargar had worked in secret for The Pond in Hungary, serving both the State Department and the army's covert intelligence network from April 1946 to December 1947.

"We were in charge": Ulmer interview with author.

First in Athens: The CIA's Thomas Hercules Karamessines, a Greek American from Staten Island, started out in Athens in 1947 and befriended up-and-coming officers. After the Greek military took over the country twenty years later, they had a friend in Karamessines, who had risen to become the chief of covert action.

"Individuals, groups, and intelligence services quickly came to see": "Office of Policy Coordination, 1948-1952," CIA/CREST.

Wisner flew to Paris...to talk...with Averell Harriman: Franklin Lindsay was working for Harriman in the Paris headquarters of the Marshall Plan in the fall of 1948, witnessed the conversation, and then immediately went to work as an operations chief for Wisner. "Harriman knew all about OPC," Lindsay said. Wisner fully briefed Harriman on November 16, 1948. After that, money was never an object: "I had a budget of as many millions as I could spend, and I couldn't spend it all," McCargar recounted. For Harriman's knowledge of Wisner's plans, see Wisner's memorandum for the file, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 732-733. Wisner's visit to Dick Bissell came shortly thereafter. Richard M. Bissell, Jr., with Jonathan E. Lewis and Frances T. Pudlo, Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 68-69.
The connections among the diplomats, the money men, and the spies were cozy. The ECA chief in Paris was David K. E. Bruce, late of the OSS. Harriman's chief deputy was Milton Katz, head of the secret intelligence division of the OSS in London under William Casey, the future director of central intelligence.
The Marshall Plan, in addition to money and cover, chipped in with personnel on covert propaganda and anticommunist actions aimed at labor unions in France and Italy. Some Marshall Plan officials ran covert operations for Wisner for three years after he sealed the deal with Averell Harriman. Wisner also briefed John McCloy, then the senior American civilian in Germany (and the War Department chieftain who helped preserve American intelligence in the face of Truman's death sentence back in September 1945). Wisner recorded that he "explained to Mr. McCloy the general significance and origin of OPC" and detailed "certain aspects of our present and prospective operations in Germany." He noted that McCloy "seemed to be impressed by my statement that the original architects of the whole deal included Messrs. Lovett, Harriman, Forrestal, Kennan, Marshall, et al." FRUS Intelligence, pp. 735-736.

the well-greased palms of Corsican gangsters: Gerald Miller's OPC history records that Wisner "initially concentrated its efforts within the circumference of the trade union movement." The earliest of these efforts, Operations Pikestaff and Largo, are documented in declassified CIA records, complete with Kennan's authorizing signature, dated October 1948. "In the early days of the Marshall Plan," said Victor Reuther, the Congress of Industrial Organizations' representative in Europe in those days, "when there were some political strikes called by communist trade union forces and perhaps communist political elements to try to defeat the Marshall Plan and to try to block foreign aid from being unloaded, it became a matter of breaking these strikes. And the U.S. government, through Central Intelligence, called upon Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone to try to organize a countermove. And of course, if you want to break a strike, you go to boys who have big bare knuckles and who know how to wield cudgels. And they turned to what can best be described as the Corsican Mafia." A CIA officer who later handled that account, Paul Sakwa, said he cut off the payments to the chief of the Corsican mob, Pierre Ferri-Pisani, in 1953, when the Marshall Plan's run was over. "There was nothing for Ferri-Pisani to do at the time," Sakwa said, "and probably he was involved in smuggling heroin going through Marseille, and he did not need our money." Reuther and Sakwa interviews, "Inside the CIA: On Company Business," a 1980 documentary directed by Allan Francovich, transcript courtesy of John Bernhart. The present author interviewed Mr. Sakwa in 1995. The relationship of Wisner, Lovestone, and Brown is detailed in the Free Trade Union Committee's files and Lovestone's own records at the AFL-CIO International Affairs Department Collections, George Meany Memorial Archives, Silver Spring, MD, and in the Lovestone Collection at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. See also Anthony Carew, "The Origins of CIA Financing of AFL Programs," Labor History, Vol. 39, No. 1, 1999.
Lovestone served the CIA for a quarter of a century, earning a reputation as a brilliant manipulator. His first case officer was Wisner's aide, Carmel Offie, who oversaw labor and emigre affairs as well as the National Committee for Free Europe, and created the first big security scare inside the CIA. Offie was a flamboyant homosexual in an age when deviance was deemed politically dangerous. The CIA's security officers found a police report showing that Offie had been arrested for soliciting sex in a men's room a block from the White House. They handed it to J. Edgar Hoover. He hounded Offie, who was quietly dismissed from the CIA and went on the American Federation of Labor's payroll. FBI agents tapped Lovestone's phone and recorded him railing to Wild Bill Donovan that the CIA was filled with "Park Avenue socialites and incompetents and degenerates.... That whole organization is thoroughly mismanaged, thoroughly inefficient, thoroughly irresponsible." This was the purest catnip for Hoover.

"a vast project targeted on the intellectuals": Braden in Granada Television documentary, "World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA," June 1975. Among the budding authors who wrote books while working with the CIA in Paris was Peter Mathiessen, one of the greatest writers of his generation and a noted liberal.

The report, which remained classified for fifty years: "The Central Intelligence Agency and National Organization for Intelligence: A Report to the National Security Council," also known as the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report, January 1, 1949, CIA/CREST.

"the heat of confusion": Roosevelt to Acheson, February 1, 1949, HSTL.

"The greatest weakness of CIA": Ohly to Forrestal, February 23, 1949, HSTL.

After fifty haunted nights: Forrestal's suicide followed months of "a severe and progressive fatigue," Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal (New York: Vintage, 1993), pp.448-475. Dr. Menninger said he suffered from "an extreme impulsive drive to self-destruction." Menninger letter to Captain George Raines, Chief of Neuropsychiatry, U.S. Naval Hospital, Bethesda, MD, in "Report of Board of Investigation in the Case of James V. Forrestal," National Naval Medical Center, 1949. President Truman replaced Forrestal with Louis Johnson, a wealthy campaign contributor who had been clamoring for the job for months. Johnson was a man with few redeeming virtues, so given to seething rages and staggeringly illogical table-pounding rants that Dean Acheson, who served alongside him as secretary of state, was convinced that he was either brain-damaged or mentally ill. General Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, concluded that "Truman had replaced one mental case with another." As this drama played out at the Pentagon, Truman himself wondered whether he had put a madman in charge of American national security. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 374; Omar N. Bradley and Clay Blair, A General's Life: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 503.

Chapter Five

"run the railroads": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: RandomHouse, 2003), p. 82.

Many among them were desperate refugees: In 1948, John W. McDonald, an American officer, was serving as the district attorney of Frankfurt under the American occupation when he encountered the CIA at work. He told the story as follows:

The police had captured a ring of eighteen people. The number-one person was a Pole named Polansky, a displaced person. He had done a brilliant job of making these plates for fifty-dollar U.S. greenbacks. We caught him and a hundred thousand dollars in counterfeit currency, and the presses and the plates and the ink--everything you could possibly ask for. He also had a U.S. Army uniform. He had an ID card and an Army .45-pistol and a PX card. The whole bit. So I thought this was great. We were about to go to trial with the whole group of them when I was visited one day by a Major, who came into the office.

The conversation went like this:

"I'm Overt."

"Major Overt, it's a pleasure to meet you."

"No, you don't understand. Overt as opposed to Covert."

"Who are you?"

"I'm a member of the CIA."

"What can I do for you?"

"You have this Pole in prison, named Polansky. He's one of us."

"What do you mean, one of us?"

"He's on our payroll. He's part of the CIA."

"Since when does the CIA employ counterfeiters of U.S. dollars?"

"No, no, no. He did that on his own time."

"So it doesn't count, is that right?"

"Well, yes, it doesn't count. He is our best maker of documents, passports and all kinds of things like that that we use for going

Eastward."

"Well, that's fine, but he has still committed a crime and I couldn't care less about who he is working for."

McDonald continued: "I showed him the door. The next day a Colonel came to see me about the same case and we had exactly the same discussion. I was unimpressed. Two days after that a Major General came to see me. Now that is a lot of brass in those days. It was very serious, I could see that. But he was smarter than the other two, he said, 'As you know by now, this man worked for us. We are the ones who gave him the uniform, and the .45 and all the ID cards and so forth. I would very much appreciate it if you would drop those charges, so that we will not be publicly embarrassed.' I went on and a week or so later went to trial and of course got the maximum of ten years, which was the maximum under German law for counterfeiting. But I've never forgotten Major Overt. My first encounter with the CIA was not a very auspicious one." McDonald oral history, FAOH.

"encouraging resistance movements into the Soviet World": Wisner cited in Kevin C. Ruffner, "Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA's Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists," Central Intelligence Agency, 1998.

"a reserve for a possible war emergency": "U.S. Policy on Support for Covert Action Involving Emigres Directed at the Soviet Union," December 12, 1969, FRUS, 1969-1970, Vol. XII, document 106.

a CIA history: Ruffner, "Cold War Allies."

"We will just have to tell the House" and "The less we say about this bill, the better": Both in Hearings Before the House Committee on Armed Services, as declassified, 81st Congress, 1st session, 1949.

Mikola Lebed: Norman J. W. Goda, "Nazi Collaborators in the United States," in U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, National Archives, pp. 249-255. Army intelligence officers had already started a touch-and-go relationship with the Ukrainians, using them to try to gather information on the Soviet military and Soviet spies in postwar Germany. Their first hireling in Munich had been Myron Matvieyko, a German intelligence agent during the war, a murderer and counterfeiter afterward. Suspicions soon grew that he was a mole for Moscow; his subsequent defection to the Soviet Union confirmed that fear.

"rendering valuable assistance" and "of inestimable value": The Dulles and Wyman letters are in the National Archives, Record Group 263, Mikola Lebed name file, made public in 2004. After Lebed was admitted to the United States, the agency maintained an operational relationship with his Ukrainians that proved to be one of its most resilient alliances with anticommunist emigre groups. His Supreme Council for the Liberation of the Ukraine eventually turned to less lethal forms of resistance activity. The CIA set up a publishing house for Lebed in New York in the 1950s. He lived to see the Soviet Union fall and Ukraine free to chart its own difficult destiny.

"however slim the possibility of success or unsavory the agent": Ruffner, "Cold War Allies."

General Reinhard Gehlen: Allen Dulles had the last word on Gehlen: "There are few archbishops in espionage. He's on our side and that's all that matters. Besides, one needn't ask him to one's club." The American rationale for recruiting Nazi spies was clear to men like army captain John R. Boker, Jr., as early as the summer of 1945. "Now was the ideal time to gain intelligence of the Soviet Union if we were ever going to get it," said Boker, a skilled interrogator with deep German roots who started nosing around for Nazis days after their surrender. Boker found his man in Reinhard Gehlen. The American captain regarded the German general as "a goldmine that we had found." Both men agreed that a new war with the Soviets was coming soon and that their nations should make common cause against the communist threat. Brigadier General Edwin L. Sibert, the army intelligence chief in Europe and soon to be the CIA's first assistant director for covert operations, bought this pitch. He decided to hire Gehlen and his spy ring. He did not clear his decision with his superiors--Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar Bradley--on the sound assumption that they would have rejected it. On Sibert's say-so, General Gehlen and six of his fellow German spies flew to Washington on the personal plane of the future director of central intelligence General Walter Bedell Smith. The Germans were vetted and debriefed for ten months at a secret military installation within Fort Hunt, outside Washington, before they were returned to their fatherland to work against the Russians. This was the birth of a long partnership between America's intelligence officers and Hitler's washed-up spies. John R. Boker, Jr., "Report of Initial Contacts with General Gehlen's Organization," May 1, 1952. This debriefing and a host of CIA documents on the Gehlen organization are collected in Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, edited by Kevin C. Ruffner of the CIA's History Staff, printed by CIA's Directorate of Operations, European Division, and declassified in 2002. The documents include Gehlen's statements enclosed in James Critchfield [Chief of Station, Karlsruhe] to Chief, FBM, CIA HQ, February 10, 1949; "Report of Interview with General Edwin L. Sibert on the Gehlen Organization," March 26, 1970; "SS Personnel with Known Nazi Records," Acting Chief, Karlsruhe Operations Base, to Chief, FBM, August 19, 1948.

"a rich blind man": Chief, Munich Operations Base, to Acting Chief of Station, Karlsruhe, July 7, 1948.

"no question the Russians know": Helms to ADSO, Col. Donald Galloway, March 19, 1948.

"We did not want to touch it": Sichel interview with author.

"given how hard it was for us": Tanner interview with author.
Tanner, who retired from the CIA in 1970, added the following contribution, written in the third person, to the previously untold story of the agency's support for the Ukrainian insurgents:

Tanner found only one group meeting his criteria, namely the Supreme Council for the Liberation of the Ukraine (UHVR). Surprisingly, no Russian emigre group qualified. UHVR not only had overland courier contact with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the Carpathian Mountains, but also received some reports from Ukraine via couriers, Catholic clerics, plus occasional travelers and escapees.

The key interests of the UHVR and CIA seemed to dovetail: both desperately wanted radio contact with insurgent headquarters, "behind enemy lines." Policy bigwigs in Washington approved this formula, which had worked well in wartime France, Italy and Yugoslavia.

Over nine months, two couriers were trained under Tanner's supervision in radio operation, enciphered codes, parachuting and target practice for self-defense. They parachuted onto a mountain meadow near Lvov the night of September 5, 1949. This first air drop and the next one in 1951 produced radio contact, but no earthshaking information. The final two missions were definitely compromised via Angleton's briefings to Philby and the unlucky courier groups were arrested on the spot by Soviet NKVD "welcoming committees."

To Ukrainian nationalists in the USSR, the first air drop was a huge morale boost and must have led to exaggerated expectations. By mid-1953, however, the Soviets had effectively overwhelmed armed insurgent resistance.

Four errors and stellar stupidities in the postwar era stuck in Tanner's mind. First, at the end of World War Two, the Allies forcibly repatriated Soviet citizens. When they found out they were about to be handed back to the Russians, many committed suicide. And those handed back never reached Soviet soil, but were shot or hung in Eastern Europe by Security Service death squads.

Second, the cover of CIA's Munich base personnel was blown skyhigh by an error in the 1949 U.S. Army phone book: names listed with no unit designation all belonged to CIA people. The Army might as well have placed an asterisk next to their names.

Thirdly, after World War Two parachute experts and trainers left OSS as the need for their services was over. There were two results: a Serbo-American OSS veteran who had parachuted into wartime Yugoslavia taught the two Ukrainian couriers to somersault backwards when they hit the ground, despite the four-foot carbines strapped to their sides. Also, for the September 1949 drop Washington advised using the wrong freight chute and the crate holding 1400 pounds of equipment burst into small pieces upon impact.

Fourthly, and worst of all, James Angleton briefed Kim Philby, the Soviet mole in British intelligence, about the REDSOX program [the overall effort to infiltrate former Soviet and ethnic foreign nationals behind the iron curtain].

"What had we done wrong?": John Limond Hart's convincing critique of Angleton is in his posthumous memoir, The CIA's Russians (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002), especially pp. 136-137. Hart was called out of retirement in 1976 to assay the damage Angleton had done to the CIA as its counterintelligence chief. On the Albanian operation: McCargar oral history, FAOH; Michael Burke, Outrageous Good Fortune (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), pp. 140-169. Wisner picked Mike Burke to train the Albanians. Burke, later the president of the New York Yankees, was an OSS veteran and he liked the covert life. He signed on as a $15,000-a-year contract agent and was off to Munich, where he met the Albanian politicos at a safe house in a working-class district of the city. "As the youngest person in the room, representing a young and rich country, I commanded their attention," Burke wrote. He believed that he and the exiles understood one another. The Albanians saw things differently: "The Americans who prepared our men for these missions knew nothing of Albania, the Albanian people or their mentality," said Xhemal Laci, an Albanian monarchist who recruited men for the cause in Germany. The operation was so completely compromised from the start that it was anyone's guess where the deepest roots of the disaster lay. McCargar, who was a good friend of Angleton's, concluded: "The Albanian community in Italy was so thoroughly penetrated, not only by the Italians but by the Communists, that to me that was where the Russians were getting their information, as were the Albanian Communist authorities."

"The ends don't always justify the means": Coffin interview with author.

"assistance to the emigres for the eventuality of war": This retrospective look is in "U.S. Policy on Support for Covert Action Involving Emigres Directed at the Soviet Union."

the CIA confidently declared: CIA Intelligence Memorandum No. 225, "Estimate of Status of Atomic Warfare in the USSR," September 20, 1949, reprinted in Michael Warner (ed.), CIA Cold War Records: The CIA Under Harry Truman (Washington, DC: CIA History Staff, 1994). The full text: "The earliest possible date by which the USSR might be expected to produce an atomic bomb is mid-1950 and the most probable date is mid-1953." The assistant director of the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence, Willard Machle, reported to Director of Central Intelligence Hillenkoetter that the agency's work on Soviet atomic weapons had been an "almost total failure" at every level. The spies had "failed completely" to gather scientific and technical data on the Soviet bomb, and the CIA's analysts had resorted to "geological reasoning" based on guesstimates of the Soviets' ability to mine uranium.
In Machle's memo to Hillenkoetter, "Inability of OSI to Accomplish Its Mission," dated September 29, 1949, he lamented that it had "proved difficult to find persons with acceptable qualifications who could be prevailed upon to accept employment in the Agency." Machle memo, in George S. Jackson and Martin P. Claussen, Organizational History of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1950-1953, Vol. 6, pp. 19-34, DCI Historical Series HS-2, CIA Historical Staff, 1957, Record Group 263, NARA.
The in-house CIA historian Roberta Knapp noted that as of September 1949, "the official coordinated statement on Soviet completion of an atomic weapon was to be found in an estimate that predicted three different dates for it--1958, 1955, and 'between 1950 and 1953'--all wrong." This, she concludes, "constituted clear evidence of disarray." As a consequence, the CIA's Office of Reports and Estimates (ORE) was "doomed," according to another CIA historian, Donald P. Steury in "How the CIA Missed Stalin's Bomb," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 49, No. 1, 2005,CIA/CSI. This internal history notes that many ORE analysts were nuclear physicists and engineers from the Manhattan Project who had the optimistic notion that they could track the progress of the Soviet nuclear program by reading published scientific papers, supplemented by evidence from clandestine sources. By 1948 there was no useful evidence in open-source literature emerging from the Soviet Union. But since 1947, a German source at the former I. G. Farben complex (makers, among other things, of Nazi death-camp gases) had reported that the Soviets were importing thirty tons of distilled metallic calcium a month from the plant. The quantity of the pure calcium, which was used to refine uranium ore, was roughly eighty times the annual U.S. output. The source's reporting was independently corroborated. It should have raised an alarm. It did not.

Chapter Six

"One is God, and the other is Stalin": "Nomination of Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith to Be Director of Central Intelligence Agency," Executive Session, August 24, 1950, CIA, Walter Bedell Smith papers, DDEL.

"I expect the worst" and "It's interesting to see all you fellows here": David S. Robarge, "Directors of Central Intelligence, 1946-2005," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 49, No. 3, 2005, CIA/CSI.

"It was the place where all the money was spent": Bedell Smith quoted in "Office of Policy Coordination, 1948-1952," CIA/CREST.

"the heart and soul of CIA": Bedell Smith quoted in George S. Jackson and Martin P. Claussen, Organizational History of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1950-1953, Vol. 9, Part 2, p. 38. This 1957 history was declassified in 2005. DCI Historical Series HS-2, CIA Historical Staff, Record Group 263, NARA.

"an impossible task": Sherman Kent, "The First Year of the Office of National Estimates: The Directorship of William L. Langer," CIA/CSI, 1970.

"estimating is what you do when you do not know": Sherman Kent, "Estimates and Influence," Foreign Service Journal, April 1969.

Four hundred CIA analysts: Jackson and Claussen, Organizational History of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1950-1953, Vol. 8, p. 2.

The CIA found itself manipulated: James Lilley, former CIA station chief in Beijing, interview with author. The problem persisted well into the late 1960s, when Lilley found that "the same sort of fabricated Chinese intelligence networks that we had resisted and thrown out 15 years ago" were back in business, picking up tidbits from provincial newspapers in China and selling them to American spies in Hong Kong.

"the most significant intelligence loss in U.S. history": David A. Hatch with RobertLouis Benson, "The Korean War: The SIGINT Background," National Security Agency, available online at http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00022.cfm. Weisband's role in the history of American intelligence has been misrepresented for decades. The magisterial KGB: The Inside Story by Christopher Andrew, one of the world's preeminent intelligence historians, and Oleg Gordievsky, the defector from Soviet intelligence, devotes three sentences to Weisband and incorrectly gives the date of his recruitment by Soviet intelligence as 1946. According to the official National Security Agency and CIA histories of the case, Weisband was recruited by the Soviets in 1934. An aircraft industry worker in California told the FBI in 1950 that Weisband had been his KGB handler during the war. Weisband was born in Egypt to Russian parents in 1908, came to the United States in the late 1920s, and became an American citizen in 1938. He joined the Army Signals Security Agency in 1942 and was assigned to North Africa and Italy before returning to Arlington Hall. Weisband was suspended from his work at the security agency and then failed to appear at a federal grand jury hearing on Communist Party activity. Convicted of contempt, he was sentenced to a year in prison--and there the matter ended, for to accuse him openly of espionage would have deepened the problems of American intelligence. Weisband died suddenly in 1967, apparently of natural causes, at age fifty-nine.

"no convincing indications": The only thing the CIA at headquarters knew for sure was that General MacArthur believed that the Chinese were not coming. CIA reporting and analysis on Korea from June to December 1950 reflected that fallacy. The reporting is detailed in P. K. Rose, "Two Strategic Intelligence Mistakes in Korea, 1950," Studies in Intelligence, Fall/Winter, No. 11, 2001; CIA Historical Staff, "Study of CIA Reporting on Chinese Communist Intervention in the Korean War, September-December 1950," prepared in October 1955 and declassified in June 2001; and Woodrow J. Kuhns, "Assessing the Soviet Threat: The Early Cold War Years," CIA Directorate of Intelligence, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1997.

an impossible tangle: Before Bill Jackson resigned as Bedell Smith's deputy director in 1951, he gave the general a report on Wisner's operations. "Subject: Survey of Office of Policy Coordination by Deputy Director of Central Intelligence," May 24, 1951, CIA/CREST. It said: "The job...exceeds the capacity of any one man." The Office of Policy Coordination was trying to build "a world-wide machine, comparable in many ways to a military force" without adequate levels of competent control, personnel, training, logistics, or communications. "There is a great discrepancy between the most highly qualified Division Chiefs and the least qualified," he reported. "The burdens of operational commitments have overtaken the capacity to recruit highly qualified personnel."

It was $587 million: "CIA/Location of Budgeted Funds/Fiscal Year 1953," a document from the files of Representative George Mahon, one of four members of Congress with knowledge of the CIA's budget. When Professor David Barrett of Villanova University found this document in 2004, it changed history. For almost thirty years, every book about the CIA has faithfully reprinted the 1976 finding of Senate investigators that Wisner's budget was $82 million in 1952. That figure is clearly erroneous. The OPC's budget in 1952 was in fact roughly four times bigger than previously reported.

"a distinct danger": Director's meeting, November 14, 1951, CIA/CREST. The minutes of the daily meetings of the director of central intelligence, his deputies, and his staff, contained in newly declassified records obtained through CREST, give the flavor of the struggles of the CIA. The minutes of this meeting state: "The Director wants them [Dulles and Wisner] to take a very close look at OPC. Paramilitary operations should be sorted out from the rest of the budget as should all operations that do not contribute to intelligence. He believes we have arrived at a point where the size of our OPC operations have become a distinct danger to CIA as an intelligence agency."

Bedell Smith saw that United States "had no strategy for conducting this kind of war," meaning Wisner's kind of war. "Preliminary Staff Meeting, National Psychological Strategy Board," May 8, 1951, CIA/CREST. He told Dulles and Wisner, "You do not have in government a basic approved strategy for this kind of war.... While we have the equipment and the power, we are not doing the job we should."

Bedell Smith tried more than once to remove Wisner from control of paramilitary operations. Director's meeting, April 16, 1952, CIA/CREST. He argued in vain that they far exceeded what had been contemplated in NSC 10/2, the political-warfare manifesto of 1948. But State and Defense all wanted an expansion of covert action--one of "great magnitude." Bedell Smith to NSC, "Scope and Pace of Covert Operations," May 8, 1951, CIA/CREST. Bedell Smith's warning not "to withhold" or "to whitewash unfortunate incidents or serious errors" came at the August 21, 1951, daily staff meeting, CIA/CREST. He had days before implored Wisner and other senior intelligence officers "to give serious attention to the problems of fabrication and duplication in intelligence sources." Minutes of meeting, August 9, 1951, CIA/CREST.

The newly available CREST records show that Bedell Smith had inherited "a sort of Holy Roman Empire in which the feudal barons pursued their respective interests subject to no effective direction and control by their titular emperor," in the words of Ludwell Lee Montague, his personal representative on the National Security Council staff, who recordedthat the general "came to suspect that Dulles and Wisner...would eventually lead him into some ill-conceived and disastrous misadventure." CIA/LLM, pp. 91-96, 264.

The classified CIA histories: The classified Central Intelligence Agency histories are "CIA in Korea, 1946-1965," "The Secret War in Korea, June 1950-June 1952," and "Infiltration and Resupply of Agents in North Korea, 1952-1953." They were first cited by Michael Haas, a retired air force colonel, in his monograph, In the Devil's Shadow: U.N. Special Operations during the Korean War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000).

"They were suicide missions": Sichel interview with author.

"a great reputation and a terrible record": Gregg interview with author. In the case of Korea, the record has been obscured or falsified. For instance, John Ranelagh, The Agency (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), long considered a standard reference on the CIA, contains three paragraphs on covert paramilitary activities during the Korean War. It claims that OPC operations chief Hans Tofte successfully placed agents all over Korea, China, and Manchuria: "These 'closed' areas were successfully penetrated with Korean and Chinese CIA agents," and Tofte's "multifaceted and complex" operations used "trained guerrillas to operate in North Korea" and placed "agents across Korea who could act as guides and provide hideouts for lost airmen" (pp. 217-218). This is false, as the CIA's operational histories of Korea show. Tofte was a fabricator. He faked film footage of CIA guerrillas operating in North Korea; the fraud was quickly unmasked when someone back in Washington wondered why commando missions were being launched in broad daylight. More to the point, the actual missions, as opposed to the staged one, were by and large disasters. The CIA's own internal histories flatly contradict the pretty picture of Korean War operations represented in The Agency.

"controlled by the other side": Thomas oral history, FAOH.

"a hard look at the miraculous achievements": John Limond Hart's posthumous memoir, The CIA's Russians (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2004), spells out his extraordinary experiences in succeeding Al Haney as station chief in Seoul.

"The CIA, being a new": Hart quoted in Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), pp. 193-194.
Hart's reports of Haney's fraud were buried, as were Haney's mistakes. Haney himself later noted, "There was considerable talk during and after Korea by many responsible senior officers that CIA should profit from its experience and be better prepared for the next Korea." But, he concluded, "I seriously doubt if CIA has profited at all from Korea or that the experiences there have even been catalogued let alone studied for lessons for the future." Haney to Helms, "Subject: Staff Study re Improvement of CIA/CS Manpower Potential Thereby Increasing Operational Capability," November 26, 1954, declassified April 2003, CIA/CREST. Haney survived his incredible performance in the Korean War because at the end of his tour in November 1952, he had helped arrange for the transportation of a grievously wounded marine lieutenant in Korea from the battlefield to the hospital ship Constellation to the United States, where seven weeks later the brain-damaged soldier was photographed receiving a rare kiss from his father, Allen W. Dulles. The photo was taken the day before the elder Dulles's confirmation hearings to become director of central intelligence. Dulles paid his debt of gratitude by making Haney the Florida-based commander of Operation Success in 1954.

"Blown operations indicate a lack of success": Becker to Wisner, undated but December 1952 or January 1953, CIA/CREST. Before resigning as deputy director of intelligence, Loftus Becker told his colleagues that he was "distressed to learn how uninformed our people in the field were" and expressed his doubts about the CIA's ability to gather intelligence anywhere in Asia. Deputy director's meeting, December 29, 1952, CIA/CREST. Then he confronted Frank Wisner directly.

"CIA was being duped": Kellis made his accusations of false testimony by senior CIA officials in a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, May 24, 1954, DDEL.

"We are all aware that our operations in the Far East are far from what we would like": Wisner, "[Deleted] Report on CIA Installations in the Far East," March 14, 1952, CIA/CREST.

The officers on the agency's China operations desk: The history of American intelligence operations in and around China in the years between the end of World War II and the beginning of Mao's dictatorship has never been completely recounted. A score of OSS veterans had hung on in China under military cover after Truman's abolition order, taking the name External Security Detachment 44. Lieutenant Colonel Robert J. Delaney first ran ESD-44; he later became chief of the CIA's tiny Tokyo station in 1947, and then the number-two man at OPC's Western Enterprises operation on Taiwan. In 1945, when the war was over, Delaney wrote of the tasks ahead in a dispatch sent from Shanghai. He noted that American intelligence officers faced a vast terrain as unfamiliar as the mountains of the moon, great swaths of land running from the South China Sea west to Afghanistan, from Saigon north to Siberia. They had to know the capabilities and intentions of the Soviet, communist Chinese, and Nationalist Chinese military and intelligence services, and they had to puzzle out the particulars of all the politics and pressure groups in the Far East. These tasks would take the better part of fifty years. They were complicated by CIA's conventional wisdom: Mao's Chinese, Ho Chi Minh's Vietnamese, and Kim Il-sung's Koreans all were creatures of the Kremlin, an immutable monolith, of one mind, made in Moscow. The OSS and early CIA men of the Far East sent bales of intelligence back to Washington. Much of it went unread, "locked up in archives in the company of silence and rats." Maochun Yu, OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 258-259.
The CIA's first officers in China were commanded by Amos D. Moscrip, who worked out of a French outpost in Shanghai, where he played the socialite, drank hard, and slept with a White Russian girlfriend. Some State Department diplomats thought they could do business with Mao, who after all had worked with the OSS against the Japanese. But the communists clearly suspected that Americans in China, diplomats or not, would try to subvert them. By October 1948, the State Department wanted all American diplomatic outposts in China evacuated, because anyone who could remotely be connected by the communists to espionage on behalf of the United States faced prison or perhaps worse. In Mukden, a city of two million in Manchuria, those evacuation orders arrived as the American consul general, Angus Ward, and his twenty-one-member staff were placed under a yearlong house arrest after refusing to surrender the consulate to Mao's troops. "He was accused of espionage, which, frankly, he was guilty of!" remembered John F. Melby, then a State Department political officer reporting out of Chungking. "He'd been working with what was known as ESD-number something or other, which was a CIA outpost. He was up to his eyeballs, working with the crew that he had up there with him in Manchuria." Melby oral histories, HSTL, FAOH.
The chief of "the crew" was Jack Singlaub, one of the more audacious cold warriors of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1948, Singlaub had been conspiring with the Chinese Nationalists, attempting to insert a network of White Russians into the Soviet Union, and seeking ways to plant spies in Soviet-occupied North Korea. Singlaub did in fact manage to run some Korean agents through Manchuria into North Korea in 1948. He dispatched dozens of men who had been prisoners of war held by the Japanese with orders to try to join the communist military in the North and report back on their intentions and capabilities. A handful seemed at first to have succeeded. But when he tried to find safe houses for those spies in Seoul, he was thwarted by MacArthur's resistance. Singlaub sent an extraordinary request through CIA channels to the White House--it was addressed "Eyes Only Moscrip, For the President"--pleading for Truman to arm the Chinese Nationalists with American war stockpiles on Okinawa. The president was unmoved. With the fall of Mukden imminent, Singlaub cabled the nearest American naval commander: "IMPERATIVE I NOT BE CAPTURED." He flew out under artillery attack, passing a reconnaissance plane with a red star insignia, knowing this battle of the cold war was lost. John K. Singlaub, Hazardous Duty: An American Soldier in the Twentieth Century (New York: Summit, 1992), pp. 132-149.
In Shanghai, the station chief, Fred Schultheis, had been building a fair-size network of agents and informers in the city, in part because he spoke impeccable Chinese, which he honed by reading anything he could get his hands on, from newspapers to comic books. He was, among Americans, an old China hand, having been stationed in country with the army throughout the war. With Mao on the march, winning city after city in late 1948, Schultheis couldn't wait to get out. He went to Hong Kong as chief of station in 1949, and soon became convinced that Hong Kong, too, was about to come under communist attack. He began sending out terrifying reports based on speculation and surmise, warning that the city was the next domino to fall. One State Department officer and OSS veteran stationed with him in Hong Kong, Joseph A. Yager, remembered that fear vividly: "We had various intelligence that seemed to indicate that an attack was coming. It turned out to be wrong." But "Schultheis was convinced that it was coming. He was very alarmist. He said, 'This time, it won't be Stanley. It will be Belsen.' Stanley was Stanley Peninsula, where the Japanese had interned the foreigners. That was pretty bad. They had nearly starved them to death. Of course, Belsen was one of the death camps of the Germans." Yager oral history, FAOH.
At headquarters in 1950, Singlaub, installed as the CIA's China desk officer after Mao's triumph, oversaw stations abandoned and operations routed. He worked feverishly to maintain the dwindling network of CIA officers and stay-behind agents in China, and to re-establish broken espionage networks in Manchuria and North Korea.
In Tihwa, the capital of Xinjiang, in China's desolate wild west, Douglas Mackiernan was the CIA man at the two-man American consulate. He had been posted there during the war as an army air force officer and knew the terrain, rich with uranium, oil, and gold. He lived about as far from Western civilization as any American on earth. Finally forced to abandon the consulate in the face of communist forces, Mackiernan was stranded. He would have to find his own way out. At the end of a seven-month, 1,200-mile trek out of China, he was shot, pointlessly, by a Tibetan border guard, the first CIA officer to die in the line of duty.
In Shanghai, Hugh Redmond, who had been Singlaub's underling in Mukden, tried to operate under a thin cover as the local representative of a British import-export firm. "He was a likeable guy, but not terribly effective," Singlaub observed. "It was the height of folly to believe that an amiable young amateur like Hugh Redmond, no matter how dedicated, could function well against a ruthless totalitarian foe." Chinese security forces arrested Redmond as a spy. He killed himself after almost two decades in prison. Robert F. Drexler, a longtime China intelligence hand at the State Department, received Redmond's mortal remains. "His ashes, I can still see them," Drexler remembered, "an enormous package, about two feet long and one foot square, with a muslin covering and the large letters of his name on the side. And this was set on my desk. Perfectly horrible. The Chinese told us he committed suicide, after being held for 20 years, with a razor blade in a Red Cross package. The Red Cross told us they never put razor blades in their packages." On Mackiernan and Redmond: Drexler oral history, FAOH; Ted Gup, The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives (New York: Anchor, 2002).

"We haven't even a policy on Chiang Kai-shek": Bedell Smith, preliminary staff meeting, National Psychological Strategy Board, May 8, 1951, CIA/CREST.

"they tested me on my loyalty": Kreisberg oral history, FAOH.

"Luckily for me": Coe interview with author. Mike Coe was sent to White Dog Island, off the China coast, where the futility of the mission was considerably eased by the camaraderie. His companions on the island included Phil Montgomery, born Philippe-Louis de Montgomery, an heir to the Noilly Prat vermouth fortune, who kept the bar well stocked; and the legendary R. Campbell James, Jr., who drained it as best he could. "Zup" James, Yale '50, with the mannerisms and clipped mustache of a British grenadier, was the last Western Enterprises officer to leave Taiwan in 1955. He went on to Laos, where he recruited the nation's leaders over cocktails and roulette.

the CIA decided that there had to be a "Third Force" in China: Lilley and Coe interviews with author. Lilley FAOH. 60 arms and ammunition for 200,000 guerrillas: "OPC History," Vol. 2, p. 553, CIA.

Dick Fecteau and Jack Downey: The CIA recently declassified its first formal admission of the deaths of its agents in the Third Force fiasco and the bungling that led to the capture of Fecteau and Downey: Nick Dujmovic, "Two CIA Prisoners in China, 1952-1973," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 50, No. 4, 2006:

The first Third Force team to be airdropped did not deploy until April 1952. This four-man team parachuted into southern China and was never heard from again. The second Third Force team comprised five ethnic Chinese dropped into the Jilin region of Manchuria in mid-July 1952. Downey was well known to the Chinese operatives on this team because he had trained them. The team quickly established radio contact with Downey's CIA unit outside of China and was resup-plied by air in August and October. A sixth team member, intended as a courier between the team and the controlling CIA unit, was dropped in September.

In early November, the team reported contact with a local dissident leader and said it had obtained needed operational documents such as official credentials. They requested air ex-filtration of the courier, a method he had trained for but that the CIA had never attempted operationally.... Pilots Norman Schwartz and Robert Snoddy had trained in the aerial pickup technique during the fall of 1952 and were willing to undertake the mission.... Late on 29 November, Downey and Fecteau boarded Schwartz and Snoddy's olive-drab C-47 on an airfield on the Korean peninsula and took off for the rendezvous point in Chinese Communist Manchuria, some 400 miles away...heading for a trap.

The agent team, unbeknownst to the men on the flight, had been captured by Communist Chinese security forces and had been turned. The request for exfiltration was a ruse, and the promised documentation and purported contact with a local dissident leader were merely bait. The team members almost certainly had told Chinese authorities everything they knew about the operation and about the CIA men and facilities associated with it. From the way the ambush was conducted, it was clear that the Chinese Communists knew exactly what to expect.... As the C-47 came in low for the pickup, flying nearly at its stall speed of around sixty knots, white sheets that had been camouflaging two antiaircraft guns on the snowy terrain flew off and gunfire erupted at the very moment the pickup was to have been made. The guns, straddling the flight path, began a murderous crossfire.... Fecteau later remembered standing outside the aircraft with Downey, both stunned but conscious, telling each other that they were "in a hell of a mess." The Chinese security forces descended on them, "whooping and hollering," and they gave themselves up to the inevitable.

[T]here is the question of whether the field ignored warnings that the deployed team had been turned by the communists.... A former senior operations officer who, as a young man, had served in Downey and Fecteau's unit in 1952...asserts that, in the summer before the November flight, an analysis of two messages sent by the team made it "90 percent" certain, in his view, that the team had been doubled.

Bringing his concerns to the attention of the unit chief, the officer was rebuffed for lack of further evidence. When he persisted, he was transferred to another CIA unit. After Downey and Fecteau's flight failed to return, the unit chief called the officer back and told him not to talk about the matter, and he followed instructions--much to his later regret....

No record of an inquiry into the decision to send Downey and Fecteau on the flight appears to exist. It is clear that no one was ever disciplined for it.... Many years later, Downeyt old a debriefer that he felt no bitterness toward the man who sent him on the mission: "I felt for him. It turned out to be such a goddamned disaster from his point of view."

the Li Mi operation: The operation would have terrible consequences. The first of these came after the CIA neglected to inform the American ambassador in Burma, David M. Key, about Li Mi. When he found out, he was furious. He cabled Washington, protesting that the operation was becoming an open secret in the Burmese capital and in Bangkok as well, and that the trampling of Burma's sovereignty was doing deep damage to American interests. The assistant secretary of state for the Far East, Dean Rusk, instructed his ambassador to shut up: he was to categorically deny any American involvement in the operation and blame it all on freelance gunrunners. Li Mi and his forces later turned their guns on the Burmese government, whose leaders, suspecting American connivance, severed relations with the United States and began a half century of isolation from the West that produced one of the world's more repressive regimes. Aspects of the Li Mi operation are in Major D. H. Berger, USMC, "The Use of Covert Paramilitary Activity as a Policy Tool: An Analysis of Operations Conducted by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, 1949-1951," available online at http://www.global security.org/intell/library/reports/1995/BDH.htm. Further details were supplied by Al Ulmer, who succeeded Desmond FitzGerald as Far East division chief; Sam Halpern, FitzGerald's executive officer; and James Lilley.
The CIA's Thai allies were deeply into Li Mi's heroin trade. Things almost got out of hand in Bangkok in 1952. The CIA's Lyman Kirkpatrick, then the assistant director for special operations and thought to be in line to succeed Wisner, flew out to Asia in late September 1952, along with his counterpart, Wisner's assistant director, Colonel Pat Johnston. At least one American mixed up with the drug dealing was dead, and the matter appears to have been referred to the attorney general of the United States. None of it was sorted out to anyone's satisfaction. Colonel Johnston resigned his post immediately thereafter. Kirkpatrick contracted polio during the trip and nearly died. He returned to the CIA a year later, was passed over for promotion, and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, serving as the CIA's brooding inspector general, a study in frustrated ambition.

"I have found, through painful experience": Smith to Ridgway, April 17, 1952, CIA, DDEL.

A postscript to the CIA's Korean calamities: On the effort to supplant Syngman Rhee: "Rhee was becoming senile, and the CIA sought ways to replace him...," The Ambassador in Korea (John Muccio) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (John Allison), Secret, February 15, 1952, FRUS, Vol. XV, pp. 50-51. An NSC memo to Secretary of State Dulles, dated February 18, 1955, said that President Eisenhower had approved an operation "to select and encourage covertly the development of new South Korean leadership" and to bring it to power if needed. Peer de Silva's recounting of the CIA's near-shooting of President Rhee is in his memoir, Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 1978), p. 152.

"Our intelligence is so bad that it approaches malfeasance in office": Melby, FAOH.

"people who are ready and willing to stand up and take the consequences": Dulles in transcript of "Proceedings at the Opening Session of the National Committee for a Free Europe," misdated but May 1952, declassified May 28, 2003, DDEL.

Chapter Seven

"If we are going to move in and take the offensive": Dulles transcript, "Proceedings of the National Committee for a Free Europe," misdated but May 1952, declassified May 28, 2003, DDEL.

"a major covert offensive against the Soviet Union," aimed at "the heartland of the communist control system": The orders were to "contribute to the retraction and reduction of Soviet power," and to "develop underground resistance and facilitate covert and guerrilla operations in strategic areas." They came from Admiral L. C. Stevens, a senior war planner from the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had been Smith's naval attache in Moscow. Admiral L. C. Stevens memo to Wisner, "Subject: OPC Strategic Planning," July 13, 1951, CIA/CREST. The goal was to "place the maximum strain on the Soviet structure of power." NSC staff memo, "Scope and Pace of Covert Operations," June 27, 1951, CIA/CREST.

"Like Guantanamo": Polgar interview with author. Bedell Smith's orders to Truscott are dated March 9, 1951, CIA/CREST.

a program code-named Project Artichoke: Untitled memo for deputy director of central intelligence, May 15, 1952; memo for director of central intelligence, "Subject: Successful Application of Narco-Hypnotic Interrogation (Artichoke)," July 14, 1952, CIA/CREST. This second report noted that Dulles had met with military intelligence service chiefs in April 1951 to seek their help with Project Artichoke; only the navy liaison had come through. The result of the navy's assistance was the Panama brig. A follow-up memo, sent to Bedell Smith, reported that two Russians had been interrogated for two weeks in June 1952 by a joint Navy-CIA team under Project Artichoke, and a combination of drugs and hypnosis had proved useful. All of this was an outgrowth of the national emergency created by the Korean War and the suspicion that American prisoners were being brainwashed in North Korea. Senate investigations got to the margins of this program thirty years ago, but the paper trail had largely been destroyed. Project Artichoke, the investigators reported in four terse paragraphs, included "overseas interrogations" involving both "a combination of sodium pentothal and hypnosis" and "special interrogation techniques" including "truth serums." The nature of the "overseas interrogations" was not explored by Congress.

"special interrogation" techniques continued for several years thereafter: Senate investigators confirmed that plans for overseas interrogations were a topic of monthly meetings at the CIA from 1951 to at least 1956, and probably for several years thereafter: "The CIA maintains that the project ended in 1956, but evidence suggests that Office of Security and Office of Medical Services use of 'special interrogation' techniques continued for several years thereafter." Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, "Testing and Use of Chemical and Biological Agents by the Intelligence Community," Appendix I, August 3, 1977.

a group called the Young Germans: Tom Polgar and McMahon interviews with author.

the CIA's Free Jurists: Polgar and Peter Sichel interviews with author, see also David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 113-126.

"Poland represents": Smith and Wisner at deputies' meeting, August 5, 1952 CIA/CREST. For Shackley's encounter with WIN, see Ted Shackley with Richard A. Finney, Spymaster: My Life in the CIA (Dulles, VA: Potomac, 2005), pp. xvi-20.

"CIA had clearly thought": Loomis oral history, FAOH.

Frank Lindsay...told Dulles and Wisner: Lindsay's prophetic report was called "A Program for the Development of New Cold War Instruments," March 3, 1953, declassified in part July 8, 2003, DDEL. Lindsay interview with author. Dulles did his best to suppress the report. The leaders of the CIA never took time to assess the consequences of covert action's failures, or accept criticism that could cost them their jobs if it ever leaked out. Nor did they heed one of their best spies, Peter Sichel, Helms's chief of espionage operations for Eastern Europe in the early 1950s, who warned that the only way to fight the enemy was to know the enemy. Sichel said he argued that "the minute you get involved in ideology you are no longer going to have dependable intelligence. You are exposing intelligence agents to danger. You can't be a political agent without exposing yourself to the system that you are trying to undermine. If you're trying to undermine a political system that's autocratic, you're going to get hurt."

"Our insight into the Soviet Union was zero": McMahon interview with author.

"We can't get qualified people": Smith quoted in CIA Support Functions: Organization and Accomplishments of the DDA-DDS Group, 1953-1956, Vol. 2, Chap. 3, p. 128, Director of Central Intelligence Historical Series, declassified March 6, 2001, CIA/CREST.

"improperly trained or inferior personnel": Minutes of meeting, October 27, 1952, CIA/CREST.

"A word about the future": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 102-104.

PART TWO

Chapter Eight

"We have no reliable inside intelligence": The report, "Intelligence on the Soviet Bloc," is cited in Gerald Haines and Robert Leggett (eds.), CIA's Analyses of the Soviet Union, 1947-1991: A Documentary History, CIA History Staff, 2001, CIA/CSI.

Eisenhower fumed: Emmet J. Hughes, The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years (New York: Atheneum, 1963), p. 101. The president was equally unhappy to learn that the agency had no riposte for the Soviet peace offensive that followed soon after Stalin's funeral--a crude, cynical, occasionally effective propaganda campaign to convince the world that the Kremlin had copyrighted the concepts of Justice and Freedom.

"Stalin never did anything to provoke a war with the United States": Jerrold Schecter and Vyacheslav Luchkov (trans. and ed.), Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), pp. 100-101.

"any prior warning": NSC minutes, June 5, 1953, declassified February 12, 2003, DDEL.

"as though the hour of decision were at hand": NSC minutes, September 24, 1953, declassified September 29, 1999, DDEL.

"the Russians could launch an atomic attack"..."We could lick the whole world": NSC minutes, October 7, 1953, declassified February 28, 2003, DDEL.

The uprising was crushed: The June 1953 East Berlin uprising is conclusively documented by the CIA's David Murphy in Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 163-182. The endlessly repeated story--see, among many, John Ranelagh, The Agency (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 258--that the CIA's Berlin base wanted to distribute weapons to the East German protestors is false. The figure of 370,000 protestors comes from James David Marchio, "Rhetoric and Reality: The Eisenhower Administration and Unrest in Eastern Europe, 1953-1959" (Ph.D. diss., American University, 1990), cited in Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America's Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 132-133.

"train and equip underground organizations": NSC 158, "United States Objectives and Actions to Exploit the Unrest in the Satellite States," DDEL. Eisenhower signed the order on June 26, 1953.

170 new major covert actions: In "Coordination and Policy Approval of Covert Actions," February 23, 1967, NSC/CIA.

Dulles polished the public image: A partial list of news organizations that cooperated with the CIA under Allen Dulles includes CBS, NBC, ABC, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Scripps-Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers, Copley News Service, and the Miami Herald. For a comprehensive list of war-propaganda veterans running American newsrooms in 1953, see Edward Barrett, Truth Is Our Weapon (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953), pp. 31-33. This is a story that remains to be told, although Carl Bernstein had a very good cut at it in "The CIA and the Media," Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977. Bernstein got it precisely right in this passage: "Many journalists who covered World War II were close to people in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the CIA; more important, they were all on the same side. When the war ended and many OSS officials went into the CIA, it was only natural that these relationships would continue. Meanwhile, the first postwar generation of journalists entered the profession; they shared the same political and professional values as their mentors. 'You had a gang of people who worked together during World War II and never got over it,' said one Agency official. 'They were genuinely motivated and highly susceptible to intrigue and being on the inside.'"

The minutes of the daily meetings of Dulles and his deputies: The records were obtained from the CREST system at the National Archives in 2005 and 2006. They reflect a grinding fear that the CIA's weaknesses would be exposed to public view.
At the meetings of August 28 and September 23, 1953, CIA inspector general Lyman Kirkpatrick warned that military officers were leaving CIA in droves, and "with an unfriendly attitude." The agency's personnel policies were "causing disgruntlement and leaving the door wide open for these individuals to approach members of Congress."
On June 13, 1955, Kirkpatrick asked Dulles whether a CIA officer "recently convicted of manslaughter...as a result of a fight with an RAF officer should be terminated or allowed to resign." On October 5, 1955, Deputy Director of Intelligence Robert Amory noted that "the Army is presently preparing a history of Korea, which if published as presently written will put CIA in a bad light."
The station chief in Switzerland who killed himself was James Kronthal, an OSS veteran who had succeeded Allen Dulles in Bern and had served there since 1946. He was a homosexual suspected of succumbing to Soviet blackmail. The case was not proven. He committed suicide in Washington during Dulles's first days as director in March 1953.
The 17 percent annual turnover rate--one in six CIA personnel left in 1953--was a finding of the "Final Report on Reasons for Low Morale Among Junior Officers," November 9, 1953, CIA/CREST. The survey of 115 CIA officers recorded deep unhappiness at corruption, waste, and misdirected missions.

"a major personnel crisis": House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, IC21, "Intelligence Community Management," p. 21.

a man he regarded as a pompous blowhard: CIA historians have surmised that Bedell Smith expected Ike to name him chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not want to serve as undersecretary of state, did not like John Foster Dulles, and was uneasy about Allen Dulles's appointment as director of central intelligence. John L. Helgerson, "Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952-1992," CIA/CSI.

"a couple of drinks would loosen his tongue": Transcript of Nixon interview with Frank Gannon, April 8, 1983, Walter J. Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia, available online at http://www.libs.uga.edu/media/ collections/nixon.

Chapter Nine

This chapter is based in part on two classified CIA clandestine service histories: "Zindabad Shah!" obtained by the author, dated 2003, with redactions, and "Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran," written in March 1954 by Donald Wilber, the propaganda chief for Operation Ajax, and published on the Web site of The New York Times in 2000. "Overthrow" is the official authorized American intelligence version of the coup, a digest of what the CIA officers on the scene recorded and reported to their headquarters at the time. But it is not close to the full truth. The officers on the scene, like Kim Roosevelt, all but ceased relaying the news back home in the final days of the coup, because the news was almost all bad. The CIA history ignores the rationales behind the operation and strenuously downplays the central British role in the overthrow of Mossadeq. It explains President Eisenhower's reflection that "reports from observers on the spot in Tehran during the critical days sounded more like a dime novel than historical fact." Wilber, the author of "Overthrow," was also the rewrite man on the script for the coup itself. Every facet of the plot was polished in May 1953 at the British intelligence station in Nicosia, Cyprus, by Wilber, an OSS veteran who had served in Iran during the war and returned to the Tehran station, and his British counterpart Norman Darbyshire. What emerged was a play in which the Iranians were puppets.

"When is our goddamn operation going to get underway?": Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for Control of Iran (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), pp. 78-81, 107-108. The book is much more novel than fact, but the cited quotation has the ring of authenticity. Kim Roosevelt, born to wealth, schooled in muscular Christianity at Groton, cut his teeth on secret intelligence at the OSS station in Cairo. Donovan's spies claimed a network of five hundred Arab agents by the war's end, across the Middle East, in every nation except Saudi Arabia. After the war, Roosevelt returned to the Middle East, ostensibly working for the Saturday Evening Post and gathering material for his 1947 book, Arabs, Oil and History. When the call came to join Frank Wisner's clandestine service, Kim heard it clearly. The legacy of big-stick diplomacy he inherited from his grandfather, the man who seized the Panama Canal and the Philippines, compelled him to become Wisner's grand vizier of the nations of Islam in 1950. As chief of the Near East division, Kim spent eight years trying to cajole the leaders of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia into pledges of American allegiance, using guns and money and promises of American support as inducements, and mounting the occasional coup when those means failed. He put young King Hussein of Jordan on the CIA's payroll, and he dispatched a corps of General Reinhard Gehlen's former storm troopers to train the secret service of the new Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The agency had a little experience in running Middle Eastern operations before Ajax. In the early 1950s. Miles Copeland, an Arabic-speaking smoothie from Alabama and the CIA's first station chief in Damascus, worked closely with the American military attache in Syria, Stephen J. Meade, on a plan to back an "army supported dictatorship," to quote a December 1948 cable by Meade to the Pentagon. Their man was Colonel Husni Za'im, described by Copeland as an officer known for "his will of iron and brain to match." Copeland encouraged the colonel to overthrow his president, who had blocked an Arabian-American Oil Company pipeline across Syria, and he promised that President Truman would grant him political recognition. Za'im toppled the government on March 30, 1949, pledged complete cooperation with the pipeline project, and, as Meade reported, threw "over 400 Commies" into prison. The iron-brained colonel lasted less than five months before he was overthrown and executed. Back to the drawing board, Copeland cheerfully conceded.
The CIA's 1953 coup in Iran could never have started without the British, and it likely would not have succeeded. British intelligence had a deep understanding of the underlying political intrigues of Iran, gleaned from their agents in the government, the bazaar, and the underworld. The British government had an immense economic motive. And their plot to do away with Mossadeq had a powerful political impetus. It was driven forward by Sir Winston Churchill himself.

"unseat Mossadeq": The longtime deputy director of intelligence Robert Amory recorded in his official diary for November 26, 1952, a discussion with the director concerning an "effort to unseat Mossadeq" and a subsequent lunch at which the main topic was Iran and the participants included Wisner, Ambassador Loy Henderson, and, though his name is deleted from the declassified record, doubtlessly Monty Woodhouse.

"CIA makes policy by default": Deputies' meeting, August 10, 1953, CIA/ CREST.

"consequences of Soviet take over": Dulles briefing notes for NSC meeting, March 4, 1953, CIA/CREST.

a $100 million loan: NSC meeting minutes, March 4, 1953, DDEL.

They could not maintain that Mossadeq was a communist: Soviet intelligence reports in 1953 more concisely judged Mossadeq as "a bourgeois nationalist," and no ally in Moscow's eyes. Vladislav M. Zubok, "Soviet Intelligence and the Cold War: The 'Small' Committee of Information, 1952-53," Diplomatic History, Vol. 19, Summer 1995, pp. 466-468.

"rescued by the Americans": Stutesman oral history, FOAH.

"to liquidate the Mossadeq government": "Radio Report on Coup Plotting," July 7, 1953, National Security Archive, CIA/Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) release.

Brigadier General Robert A. McClure: General McClure's central role in the coup has gone unrecognized; the CIA's official in-house history of the plot all but erases him. The agency deliberately downplayed his work, for the general was no great friend of the CIA. See Alfred H. Paddock, Jr., U.S. Army Special Warfare: Its Origins (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1982). I am grateful to Paddock for sharing the insights he derived from reading McClure's personal papers. McClure's "very fine relationships with the Shah" were mentioned in a note from Eisenhower to Army Secretary Robert Ten Broeck Stevens, April 2, 1954, Presidential Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, document 814.

"The failure of the military coup": CIA Office of Current Intelligence, "Comment on the Attempted Coup in Iran," August 17, 1953, declassified November 16, 2006.

"'After you, Your Majesty'": The dialogue is reproduced in the classified CIA history of the coup titled "Zindabad Shah!" (Victory to the Shah!)

"an almost spontaneous revolution": Rountree oral history, FAOH.

One was the Ayatollah: It has been alleged that Ayatollah Kashani was in the pay of the CIA. Mark J. Gasiorowski, "The 1953 Coup D'Etat in Iran," International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 19, 1987, pp. 268-269. But Reuel Marc Gerecht, who joined the CIA in 1985 as a member of the Iran desk of the clandestine service, wrote that Kashani was "beholden to no foreigner." Gerecht read the CIA's history of Operation Ajax, and he said the lesson in it was this: "One has to be generous to give American operatives in Iran much credit for restoring the Shah. Virtually every detail of their plan went awry. The principal American operatives at our embassy didn't speak Persian. When Teheran started to boil and it was impossible to make contact with the usual English-and French-speaking Iranian sources, the CIA station went blind. The coup succeeded only because Iranians who were neither on the American or British payrolls nor under foreign control seized the initiative to topple Prime Minister Mossadeq." Reuel Marc Gerecht, "Blundering Through History with the C.I.A.," The New York Times, April 23, 2000.

"his old friend Bedell Smith": Roosevelt's recounting of this scene appears in chapter 9 of "Overthrow," the official CIA history.

"Romantic gossip about the 'coup' in Iran": Ray S. Cline, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA (Washington, DC: Acropolis, 1976), p. 132. Note the quotation marks Cline placed around coup.

"CIA's greatest single triumph": Killgore oral history, FAOH.

Chapter Ten

This chapter is based on the richest documentation of a CIA covert operation now available. In May 2003, the State Department published a supplemental volume of The Foreign Relations of the United States covering the role of the United States in the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954 (available online at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/ike/guat/), along with a chronological, collated collection of 5,120 redacted CIA documents on the covert operation made public that same day (available online at http://www.foia.cia.gov/guatemala.asp). The publication of these documents was the result of a twenty-year struggle, and it represented a high-water mark in CIA historiography.

Unless otherwise noted, the quotations in this chapter are taken verbatim from these primary documents and from the CIA's own internal history of the coup, written by Nicolas Cullather, published in redacted form as Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

The role of William Pawley at the crucial hour of the coup was revealed by the historian Max Holland in "Private Sources of U.S. Foreign Policy: William Pawley and the 1954 Coup d'Etat in Guatemala," Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2005, pp. 46-73. Holland uncovered Pawley's unpublished memoirs at the George C. Marshall Library in Lexington, Virginia.

The memoirs of the key players include Dwight Eisenhower, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963); Richard Bissell, Jr., with Jonathan E. Lewis and Frances T. Pudlo, Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); and David Atlee Phillips, The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service (New York: Atheneum, 1977). Phillips gives the players cover names, but the declassified documents make that cover transparent.

The Guatemalan operation began under General Walter Bedell Smith. On January 24, 1952, Allen Dulles told a State Department official overseeing Latin America that the "CIA was giving consideration to the possibility to rendering assistance to a group headed by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas plotting the overthrow of the Government of Guatemala." Castillo Armas sought the help from Latin America's most powerful dictators--Nicaragua's Somoza, the Dominican Republic's Trujillo, Cuba's Batista--as his proposal gradually filtered up to the CIA's chiefs. In the spring and summer of 1952, Bedell Smith and Undersecretary of State David Bruce repeatedly discussed plans for a CIA-backed coup. The operation was code-named Fortune and the job was handed to J. C. King, the chief of the CIA's newly formed Western Hemisphere Division.

King devised a plan to ship weapons and $225,000 to Castillo Armas and his allies. In October 1952, he packed up 380 pistols, 250 rifles, 64 machine guns, and 4,500 hand grenades, all labeled as farm machinery, and he was set to ship them south from New Orleans. But the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza and his son Tacho had talked freely about the plot. Word filtered back to Washington that its cover was blown, and David Bruce called the whole thing off. But behind the State Department's back, with Bedell Smith's approval, King requisitioned an aging navy transport to carry the weapons to Nicaragua and Honduras. On its first trip, the ship was spied by several hundred curious Nicaraguans as it sought to land on a supposedly deserted island; on its second voyage, its engines conked out and the navy had to send a destroyer to rescue the crew and cargo.

A trickle of CIA aid reached Castillo Armas nonetheless, and in March 1953 he and most of his followers, about two hundred strong, tried to seize a remote Guatemalan army garrison. They were crushed, and while Castillo Armas escaped to Honduras, his movement was badly wounded. Operation Fortune had failed.

When it was revived as Operation Success, Bedell Smith played his role as undersecretary of state to the fullest. The American ambassadors in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua reported to the CIA through Bedell Smith. All shared the sense that "Communism is directed by the Kremlin all over the world, and anybody who thinks differently doesn't know what he is talking about," as Ambassador Peurifoy said. But the Kremlin thought little about Latin America in the days before Fidel Castro came to power. It had all but ceded the terrain to the United States, the dominant force in the hemisphere since the nineteenth century. Had the CIA infiltrated Guatemala's small but influential communist party, it would have known that the Guatemalans were not in touch with the Soviets.

The agency nevertheless saw Guatemala's President Arbenz as a Red puppet marching to music from Moscow. He had instituted the most ambitious and successful program of land reform in all of Latin America, taking fallow fields from corporations such as United Fruit and deeding them to hundreds of thousands of peasants. United Fruit felt threatened, and the CIA knew it; the company had tremendous political power in Washington and made its anger known at the highest levels of the government. But the CIA was not fighting for bananas. It saw Guatemala as a Soviet beachhead in the West and a direct threat to the United States. It also saw United Fruit and its lobbyists as an irritating impediment; it tried to shove them out of the picture as the operation gained steam.

the classic CIA resume of the 1950s--Groton, Yale, Harvard Law: Perhaps too much has been made of the influence brought to bear at the CIA by the school of muscular Christianity practiced at Groton. But Operation Ajax in Iran was led by Kermit Roosevelt, class of 1936, with help from his cousin Archie Roosevelt, class of 1934. The planning and execution of Operation Success was led by Tracy Barnes, class of 1932, and Richard Bissell, class of 1931. Bissell, Barnes, and John Bross, the senior prefect of the class of 1932, led the charge at the Bay of Pigs. And the toxins that the CIA aimed to use to kill Fidel Castro were prepared in an agency lab run by Cornelius Roosevelt, class of 1934.

"Barnes proved unable": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 175-177.

"Dulles's apprentice": Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, pp. 84-91.

"What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign": E. Howard Hunt interview for the CNN Cold War series, 1998, National Security Archive transcript available online at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/ interviews/episode-18/hunt1.html.

"we were all at our wit's end": Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, pp. 84-91.

"we really didn't think it was much of a success": Esterline oral history in James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh (eds.), Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), p. 40.

Chapter Eleven

"Secrecy now beclouds": Congressional Record 2811-14 (1954).

"CIA success stories": Deputies' meeting, February 29, 1956, CIA/CREST.

"risky or even unwise": Dulles, "Notes for Briefing of Appropriations Committee: Clandestine Services," March 11, 1954, CIA/CREST. Such candor before Congress was exceedingly rare. John Warner, one of Allen Dulles's in-house lawyers at the CIA, recalled a far more typical encounter between Dulles and the House Appropriations Committee chairman, Clarence Cannon of Missouri. Cannon was close to eighty years old at the time: "Cannon greets Dulles; 'Oh, it's good to see you again, Mr. Secretary.' He thinks it's Foster Dulles.... They swap stories for two hours. And at the end--'Well, Mr. Secretary, have you got enough money in your budget for this year, the coming year?'--'Well, I think we are all right, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much.' That was the budget hearing."

"the CIA had unwittingly hired": Roy Cohn, McCarthy (New York: New American Library, 1968), p. 49.

"CIA was neither sacrosanct": Transcript of telephone conversation between Allen and Foster Dulles, cited in David M. Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005), p. 184.

a down-and-dirty covert operation: The declassified CIA history outlining the CIA's work against McCarthy is Mark Stout, "The Pond: Running Agents for State, War, and the CIA," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 48, No. 3, 2004, CIA/CSI. The congressional testimony came from William J. Morgan, a Yale-trained psychologist and OSS veteran who had been the CIA's deputy chief of training, in a March 4, 1954, hearing before the McCarthy committee titled "Alleged Threats Against the Chairman." The transcript was unsealed in January 2003. Morgan, who was detailed to Walter Bedell Smith's Operations Coordinating Board, testified that his superior, a CIA officer named Horace Craig, suggested that "the best thing to do was penetrate the McCarthy organization." Failing that, Craig speculated, more severe measures might be taken: No other known evidence corroborates the charge that the CIA was thinking about killing McCarthy. The senator drank himself to death in good time.

Senator Charles E. Potter (R., Ill.): He stated in essence that this man should be liquidated, referring to Senator McCarthy?

Dr. Morgan: It may be necessary.

Senator Potter: And that there are madmen--

Dr. Morgan: For a price willing to do the thing.

A congressional task force led by Eisenhower's trusted colleague General Mark Clark: Clark's secret report, declassified in 2005, called the CIA "virtually a law unto itself," its conduct "unique and in many ways strange to our democratic form of government." See Michael Warner and J. Kenneth McDonald, "US Intelligence Community Reform Studies Since 1947," 2005, CIA/CSI.

an extraordinary six-page letter: Kellis to Eisenhower, May 24, 1954, DDEL. 108 Doolittle went to see the president: President's meeting with Doolittle Committee, October 19, 1954, DDEL. The notes from this meeting, hastily taken, convey the awkwardness of a bearer of bad news.

The Doolittle report: Special Study Group, "Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency," September 30, 1954, declassified August 20, 2001, CIA/CREST.

"sensitive and/or delicate operations": Director's meeting, October 24, 1954, CIA/CREST. The problem of uncontrolled secret operations persisted in the Dulles years. The director had determined that he could decide whether his superiors needed to know what he was up to. Some of his underlings felt the same way about him and his top aides. A senior CIA officer, John Whitten, gave secret Senate testimony in 1978 stating that "there were a number of operations in the clandestine services that neither the DDO nor the ADDO knew" in the 1950s and early 1960s. The DDO was the deputy director for operations--the chief of the clandestine service--and the ADDO his top assistant. Deposition of John Whitten, Assassination Transcripts of the Church Committee, May 16, 1978, pp. 127-128. Whitten testified under the alias "John Scelso" his true identity was declassified by the CIA in October 2002.

not even Wisner: At a deputies' meeting on November 8, 1954, Wisner asked Dulles if he would be allowed to read the Doolittle report. Dulles refused the request. He allowed Wisner to see a brief version of the report's recommendations, but not the devastating critique itself.

Dulles was desperate: John Maury and Edward Ellis Smith interviews, R. Harris Smith papers, Hoover Institute, Stanford University.

"Let's not have another Pearl Harbor": NSC minutes, March 3, 1955, DDEL.

A secret CIA history of the Berlin tunnel: "Clandestine Services History: The Berlin Tunnel Operation, 1952-1956," CIA, August 25, 1967, declassified February 15, 2007.

glimmer of warning that Moscow intended to go to war: The CIA officers who had started out at the Berlin base under Richard Helms still saw the city and the techniques they had learned there as the best windows into Moscow. Helms and his men thought that the big CIA stations in Germany and Austria and Greece should carefully and patiently establish resident agents inside Eastern Europe. These networks of trusted foreigners would recruit other like-minded spies, coming closer and closer to the seats of power, each creating sources of information that, when analyzed and sifted, would become intelligence for the president. That was the way to know your enemy, they believed, and by the mid-1950s they were starting to think that they might be starting to see a picture emerging out of the darkness.

The CIA found its first real Russian spy as the Berlin Tunnel project got under way. The Vienna station was in contact with Major Pyotr Popov, an actual Soviet military intelligence man, the first Russian spy of lasting value that the CIA ever had. He knew a thing or two about tanks and tactical missiles and Russian military doctrine, and over the course of five years he betrayed the identities of some 650 of his fellow officers. Frank Wisner, inevitably, had wanted to turn Popov into the leader of an underground network of resistance fighters. The espionage side of the house fought hard and this time wore Wisner down; the bitterness over this fight lingered for years. Popov was not a perfect spy; he drank like a fish, forgot things, and ran terrible risks. But for five years, he was unique. The CIA would claim with conviction that Popov saved the United States half a billion dollars in military research and development. He cost the CIA about $4,000 a year. The British mole George Blake, betrayer of the Berlin tunnel, exposed Popov too. The major died before a KGB firing squad in 1959.

"Those of us who knew": Polgar interview with author.

"We obtain little significant information": Technological Capabilities Panel, "Report to the President," February 14, 1955, DDEL.

"one of these machines is going to be caught": James R. Killian, Sputnik, Scientists and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), pp. 70-71.

"the last refuge of organizational privacy": Bissell, "Subject: Congressional Watchdog Committee on CIA," February 9, 1959, declassified January 29, 2003, CIA/CREST.

Bissell saw the U-2: Bissell's thoughts about the U-2 are in his memoir, Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 92-140. Reber's observation that "we didn't raise the right questions" is on p. 105. Helms knew the U-2 was no silver bullet. He once told a meeting of clandestine service officers in the days when Bissell's star was at its zenith that "a good reporter does not need a magical black box to get useful information.... As long as there has been an airplane, pictures have been taken from it. CIA needs to use every collection device it can.... But in the final analysis, the only way you can get at what a man thinks is to talk to him."

A five-volume CIA history: Wayne G. Jackson, Allen Welsh Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence, declassified 1994, Vol. 3, 1973, pp. 71ff., CIA.

"There are some things he doesn't tell the President": Eleanor Dulles's remark is recorded in Ambassador William B. Macomber, Jr., oral history, FAOH. Macomber was assistant secretary of state for congressional relations under Eisenhower.

Chapter Twelve

The relationship between the CIA and the leaders of Japan in the 1950s was detailed in the author's interviews with Al Ulmer, CIA's Far East division chief from 1955 to 1958; Clyde McAvoy, Kishi's CIA case officer in the mid-1950s; Horace Feldman, a former CIA station chief in Tokyo; Roger Hilsman and U. Alexis Johnson, senior State Department officials under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson; Jim Lilley and Don Gregg, formerly CIA station chiefs and U.S. ambassadors in Beijing and Seoul, respectively; and Douglas MacArthur II, the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo under Eisenhower.

The relationship was first limned in the author's New York Times article, "CIA Supported Japanese Right in '50s and '60s," October 9, 1994. That article had its origins in a struggle then ongoing between the CIA and the State Department over the release of a volume of The Foreign Relations of the United States covering Japan in the 1960s. Twelve years later, in July 2006, the State Department belatedly acknowledged that "the U.S. Government approved four covert programs to try to influence the direction of Japanese political life." The statement described three of the four programs. It said that the Eisenhower administration authorized the CIA before the May 1958 elections for the Japanese House of Representatives to provide "a few key pro-American and conservative politicians" with money. It said the Eisenhower administration also authorized the CIA "to institute a covert program to try to split off the moderate wing of the leftist opposition in the hope that a more pro-American and 'responsible' opposition party would emerge." In addition, "a broader covert program, divided almost equally between propaganda and social action," sought to encourage the Japanese people to embrace the ruling party and reject the influence of the left. The deep relationship with the rising politician and future prime minister Kishi was not acknowledged. FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXIX, Part 2.

After Japan fell, the American occupation led by General MacArthur purged and imprisoned right-wing militarists such as Kishi and his allies. But things changed after George Kennan was sent to Japan in 1948 by Secretary of State Marshall to try to persuade MacArthur to change his views. An example of MacArthur's policies could be seen on the docks of Osaka, where dismantled machinery from Japanese industries was being greased, crated, and shipped at great expense to China as part of a war reparations program. Americans were paying to take Japan apart and support China at the moment it was being overrun by the communists. Kennan argued that the United States should move as fast as possible from the reformation of Japan toward its economic recovery. This about-face required an end to MacArthur's purges. It meant that accused war criminals such as Kishi and Kodama would be released. It led to their recruitment by the CIA and the eventual restoration of powerful leaders, business cartels, internal security forces, and political parties.

"The U.S. should do what it can to encourage effective conservative leadership in Japan," said the Operations Coordinating Board, in a report to the White House dated October 28, 1954, and declassified fifty years later. If the conservatives were united, they could work together to control Japan's political life, the board said, and "to take legal measures against Communists, and to combat the neutralist, anti-American tendencies of many of the individuals in Japan's educated groups." This is precisely what the CIA did from 1954 onward.

The CIA provided $2.8 million in financing: Japanese conservatives needed money. The American military needed tungsten. "Somebody had the idea: Let's kill two birds with one stone," said John Howley, a New York lawyer and OSS veteran who helped arrange the transaction. The Kodama-CIA operation smuggled tons of tungsten out from Japanese military caches into the United States and sold it to the Pentagon for $10 million. The smugglers included Kay Sugahara, a Japanese American recruited by the OSS from an internment camp in California during World War II. His files, researched by Howard Schonberger, a University of Maine professor writing a book nearly completed at his death in 1991, described the operation in detail. The proceeds were pumped into the campaigns of conservatives during Japan's first post-occupation elections in 1953. Howley said: "We had learned in O.S.S., to accomplish a purpose, you had to put the right money in the right hands."

"He is a professional liar": "Background on J.I.S. and Japanese Military Personalities," September 10, 1953, National Archives, Record Group 263, CIA Name File, box 7, folder: Kodama, Yoshio.

"Strange, isn't it?": Dan Kurzman, Kishi and Japan: The Search for the Sun (New York: Obolensky, 1960), p. 256.

"It was clear that he wanted at least the tacit backing of the United States government": Hutchinson oral history, FAOH.

"if Japan went Communist": MacArthur interview with author.

Kaya became a recruited agent: The records of Kaya's relationship with the CIA are in the National Archives, Record Group 263, CIA Name File, box 6, folder: Kaya, Okinori.

"we ran it in a different way": Feldman interview with author.

 

Chapter Thirteen

"He would heft them and decide": Lehman oral history interview, "Mr. Current Intelligence," Studies in Intelligence, Summer 2000, CIA/CSI.

NSC 5412/2: "Directive on Covert Operations," December 28, 1955, DDEL.

The division was dysfunctional: "Inspector General's Survey of the Soviet Russia Division, June 1956," declassified March 23, 2004, CIA/CREST.

"'indict the whole Soviet system'": Ray Cline oral history, March 21, 1983, LBJL.

His interference created a split signal at Radio Free Europe: The radios' director, OSS veteran Bob Lang, complained about "the intrusion in each and every element of our affairs" by Wisner and his lieutenants. The CIA's Cord Meyer, the division chief in charge of Radio Free Europe, said he felt "pressure to distort the purpose of the radios."

Vice President Nixon argued: NSC minutes, July 12, 1956, DDEL; NSC 5608/1, "U.S. Policy Toward the Soviet Satellites in East Europe," July 18, 1956, DDEL. Under the auspices of the Free Europe program, the CIA already had floated 300,000 balloons containing 300 million leaflets, posters, and pamphlets from West Germany into Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. The balloons carried an implicit message: the Americans could cross the iron curtain with more than tin medals and radio waves.

"CIA represented great power": Ray Cline, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars, Blueprint of the Essential CIA (Washington, DC: Acropolis, 1976), pp. 164-170.

"dead wrong": NSC minutes, October 4, 1956, DDEL.

Dulles assured Eisenhower: Memorandum of conference among Eisenhower, Allen Dulles, and acting secretary of state Herbert Hoover, Jr., July 27, 1956, DDEL; Eisenhower diary, October 26, 1956, Presidential Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, document 1921; Dillon oral history, FAOH; deputies' meeting notes from October, November, and December 1956, CIA/CREST.

"wishful blindness": The state of Wisner's operations in Hungary is described in two clandestine service histories: The Hungarian Revolution and Planning for the Future: 23 October-4 November 1956, Vol. 1, January 1958, CIA; and Hungary, Volume I[deleted] and Volume II: External Operations, 1946-1965, May 1972, CIA History Staff, all declassified with deletions in 2005.

"Freedom or Death!": Transcripts of Radio Free Europe programs, October 28, 1956, in Csasa Bekes, Malcolm Byrne, and Janos M. Rainer (eds.), The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2002), pp. 286-289.

"terrible mistakes and crimes of these past ten years": "Radio Message from Imre Nagy, October 28, 1956," in Bekes, Byrne, and Rainer, The 1956 Hungarian Revolution, pp. 284-285.
Few knew that Wisner had more than one frequency to fight with. In Frankfurt, the Solidarists, the neofascist Russians who had worked for the CIA since 1949, began broadcasts into Hungary saying an army of exile warriors was heading for the border. They sent their message in the name of Andras Zako, who had served as a general in the fascist wartime Hungarian government and ran an Iron Cross outfit called the League of Hungarian Veterans. "Zako was the very model of an intelligence entrepreneur," Richard Helms noted. He had sold millions of dollars' worth of fabricated intelligence to every major American military and intelligence service from 1946 to 1952. The general had earned the rare distinction of a "burn notice," a worldwide CIA order barring him from doing business with the agency.

Reflecting on the CIA's decision to amplify and beam back the low-wattage broadcasts of Hungarian partisans--using its own frequencies to broadcast their pleas for violent struggle against the Soviets--John Richardson, Jr., the president of Radio Free Europe, said: "The freedom fighters would be telling the folks whatever they wanted to tell them and whatever they'd believe. Then RFE would pick that up and rebroadcast it. That was, I think, the single most serious mistake that was made." Richardson oral history. FAOH.

"What had occurred there was a miracle": NSC minutes, November 1, 1956, DDEL.

"the promise that help would come": William Griffith, Radio Free Europe, "Policy Review of Voice for Free Hungary Programming" (December 5, 1956), in Bekes, Byrne, and Rainer, The 1956 Hungarian Revolution, pp. 464-484. This document constitutes an official acknowledgment of a fact long denied by the CIA: that RFE implied or stated to its Hungarian listeners that help was on the way. RFE's Hungarian desk was purged after Griffith's detailed but self-absolving report. Two years later, its voice had changed. It inaugurated a hugely popular and truly subversive program that captured the popular imagination: a rock 'n' roll show called Teenager Party. See also Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), pp. 95-104; and George R. Urban, Radio Free Liberty and the Pursuit of Democracy: My War Within the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 211-247.

"headquarters was caught up in the fever of the times": Peer de Silva, Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 1978), p. 128.

a fresh but false report from Allen Dulles that the Soviets were ready to send 250,000 troops to Egypt: Eisenhower diary, November 7, 1956, DDEL.

"near a nervous breakdown": William Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), pp. 134-135.

"revved up": John H. Richardson, My Father the Spy: A Family History of the CIA, the Cold War and the Sixties (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 126.

"We are well-equipped": Director's meeting, December 14, 1956, CIA/CREST.

Bruce's personal journals: Bruce's journals are at the University of Virginia. They show that as the American ambassador in Paris, Bruce had heard through the grapevine in June 1950--on a day he lunched with Allen Dulles--about "the horrible possibility" that he might be asked to become director of central intelligence. Walter Bedell Smith took the job instead.

His top secret report: Though the report from the president's board of intelligence consultants has become known as the "Bruce-Lovett report," its style clearly shows that David Bruce wrote it. The investigation team was Bruce; former secretary of defense Robert Lovett; and a former deputy chief of naval operations, retired admiral Richard L. Conolly. Until recently, the only evidence of the existence of the report was a set of notes taken by the historian Arthur Schlesinger from a document now said to have disappeared from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library. The declassified version of the document--long excerpts from a collection of Eisenhower-era intelligence reports compiled for the Kennedy White House after the Bay of Pigs--appears here for the first time in book form, with abbreviations spelled out for clarity, typographical errors corrected, and the CIA's deletions noted.

 

The conception, planning and, even on occasion the approval itself [deleted] of covert operations, enormously significant to our military and foreign policies, is becoming more and more exclusively the business of the CIA--underwritten heavily by unvouchered CIA funds. (This is only the inevitable result of the structure, system and personalities concerned with the initiation and conduct of such operations.) The CIA, busy, monied and privileged, likes its "King-making" responsibility (the intrigue is fascinating--considerable self-satisfaction, sometimes with applause, derives from successes--no charge is made for "failures"--and the whole business is very much simpler than collecting covert intelligence on the USSR through the usual CIA methods!).

Although these extremely sensitive, costly operations are justifiable only insofar as they are in support of U.S. military and foreign policies, the responsible long-range planning and sustained guidance for these, which should be forthcoming from both the Defense and State Departments, appear too often to be lacking. There are always, of course, on record the twin, well-worn purposes of "frustrating the Soviets" and keeping others "pro-western" oriented. Under these almost any psychological warfare and paramilitary action can be and is being justified [deleted].

Initiative, and continuing impetus for psychological warfare and paramilitary operations, for the most part, reside in CIA. And, once having been conceived, the final approval given to any project (at informal meetings of the Operations Coordinating Board inner group) can, at best, be described as pro forma.

Upon approval, projects in most instances pass to the management of the CIA and remain there to conclusion. Since these operations are so inextricably interwoven with (and, on occasion, dictate the course of) our other foreign policy operations, it would appear they should have not only the prior approval of the National Security Council (rather than OCB) itself, but also the continuous surveillance of that body.

As a matter of fact, in most instances, approval of any new project would appear to comprise simply the endorsement of a Director of Central Intelligence proposal, usually without demurrer, from individuals preoccupied with other important matters of their own. Of course there is a preliminary (CIA proprietary) staffing of each project and an eventual (after the fact) reporting of its results to the NSC--but even after this report is rendered orally by the Director of Central Intelligence on an "off the record"--and on a naturally understandable, biased basis.

Psychological warfare and paramilitary operations themselves, at any one time, whether through personal arrangement between the Secretary of State and the DCI (deciding between them on any one occasion to use what they regard as the best "assets" available) or undertaken at the personal discretion of the DCI, frequently and in direct and continuing dealings between CIA representatives and the heads of foreign states [deleted]. Oftentimes such dealings are in reality only the continuation of relationships established at a time when the foreign personalities involved may have been "the opposition." (It is somewhat difficult to understand why anyone less than the Senior U.S. Representative [i.e., the Ambassador] in any country should deal directly with its Head in any matter which involves the official relationships of the two countries.) One obvious, inevitable result of this is to divide U.S. foreign policy resources and to incline the foreigner--often the former "opposition" now come into power (and who knows with whom he is dealing)--to play one U.S. agency against the other or to use whichever suits his current purpose [deleted].

A corollary to this is the exclusion of responsible American officials from knowledge they should have to properly discharge their obligation. (It has been reported by people in its intelligence area that there is great concern throughout the State Department over the impacts of CIA psychological warfare and paramilitary activities on our foreign relations. The State Department people feel that perhaps the greatest contribution this board could make would be to bring to the attention of the President the significant, almost unilateral influences that CIA psychological warfare and paramilitary activities have on the actual formation of our foreign policies and our relationships with our "friends.")

CIA support and its maneuvering of local news media, labor groups, political figures and parties and other activities which can have, at any one time, the most significant impacts on the responsibilities of the local Ambassador are sometimes completely unknown to or only hazily recognized by him.... Too often differences of opinion regarding the U.S. attitude toward local figures or organizations develop, especially as between the CIA and the State Department.... (At times, the Secretary of State-DCI brother relationship may arbitrarily set "the U.S. position.")

...CIA is in propaganda programs [five lines deleted, probably dealing with the agency's financing of dozens of magazines, journals, publishing houses, and the Congress of Cultural Freedom] which are difficult to identify as part of the responsibilities assigned to it by Congress and the National Security Council....

The military expects that it will be responsible for the conduct of unconventional warfare (and there is difference of opinion here as to the extent of that responsibility); it is not quite sure who will be responsible for other psychological warfare and paramilitary operations in time of war--or how (or when) the responsibilities for them will be distributed.

Psychological warfare and paramilitary operations (often growing out of the increased mingling in the internal affairs of other nations of bright, highly graded young men who must be doing something all the time to justify their reason for being) today are being conducted on a world-wide basis by a horde of CIA representatives [deleted] many of whom, by the very nature of the personnel situation [deleted] are politically immature. (Out of their "dealings" with shifty, changing characters their applications of "themes" suggested from headquarters or developed by them in the field--sometimes at the suggestion of local opportunists--strange things are apt to, and do, develop.)

Fortunately in some instances, unfortunately in others, the results of many of these operations are comparatively short-lived [seven lines deleted]. If exposed these operations couldn't possibly be "plausibly denied"--indeed it would seem to be utterly naive for anyone to think that the American hand in these operations is not only well known to both local country and Communist Party officials, but to many others (including the press)--and in derogation of the specific caveat contained in NSC [orders that the American role in covert operations remain unseen].

Should not someone, somewhere in an authoritative position in our government, on a continuing basis, be counting the immediate costs of disappointments (Jordan, Syria, Egypt, et al.), calculating the impacts on our international position, and keeping in mind the long-range wisdom of activities which have entailed the virtual abandonment of the international "golden rule," and which, if successful to the degree claimed for them, are responsible, in a great measure, for stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exist in many countries of the world today? What of the effects on our present alliances? Where will we be tomorrow?

We are sure that the supporters of the 1948 decision to launch this government on a positive psychological warfare and paramilitary program could not possibly have foreseen the ramifications of the operations which have resulted from it. No one, other than those in the CIA immediately concerned with their day to day operation, have any detailed knowledge of what is going on. With the world situation in the state it is today now would appear to be the time to engage in a reappraisal and realistic adjustment of that program with perhaps some accompanying "unentanglement" of our involvement, and a more rational application of our activities than is now apparent.

 

"a strange kind of genius": Ann Whitman memo, October 19, 1954, DDEL.

 

Chapter Fourteen

"If you go and live with these Arabs": NSC minutes, June 18, 1959, DDEL.

"a target legally authorized by statute for CIA political action": Archie Roosevelt, For Lust of Knowing: Memoirs of an Intelligence Officer (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), pp. 444-448.

few CIA officers spoke the language: "Inspector General's Survey of the CIA Training Program," June 1960, declassified May 1, 2002, CIA/CREST; Matthew Baird, CIA Director of Training, "Subject: Foreign Language Development Program," November 8, 1956, declassified August 1, 2001, CIA/CREST.

"the 'holy war' aspect" and "a secret task force": Goodpaster memorandum of conference with the president, September 7, 1957, DDEL. Eisenhower's hopes for military action to protect Islam against militant atheism and his meetings with Rountree to orchestrate secret American military aid to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon were recorded by his staff secretary, General Andrew J. Goodpaster, in memos dated August 23 and August 28, 1957, DDEL.

"These four mongrels": Symmes oral history, FAOH.

Frank Wisner's proposal: Frank G. Wisner, memorandum for the record, "Subject: Resume of OCB Luncheon Meeting," June 12, 1957, CIA/CREST. The memo says that "Wisner pushed need for across-the-board assistance to Jordan," in addition to CIA support. "The Agency is strongly in favor of getting Saudi Arabia and Iraq to put up as much as they can."

"Let's put it this way": Symmes oral history, FAOH.

"a likeable rogue": Miles Copeland, The Game Player (London: Aurum, 1989), pp. 74-93.

"ripe for a military coup d'etat": Dulles in NSC minutes, March 3, 1955. The best account of the CIA's work in the region is Douglas Little, "Mission Impossible: The CIA and the Cult of Covert Action in the Middle East," Diplomatic History, Vol. 28, No. 5, November 2004. Little's essay is a tour de force based on primary documents. Copeland's memoirs are strong on atmosphere but untrustworthy on telling details unless independently confirmed by scholarship like Little's.

A document discovered in 2003: The British document describing the joint CIA-SIS plot against Syria was discovered by Matthew Jones and detailed in his monograph "The 'Preferred Plan': The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957," Intelligence and National Security, September 2004.

"The officers with whom Stone was dealing": Curtis F. Jones oral history, FAOH. "We were trying to overcome more than the Rocky Stone episode," Jones said. "For example, we had financed arms purchases by Armenians who buried them in Syria"--until Syrian intelligence dug up the arms caches and broke up the underground battalion.

"particularly clumsy CIA plot": Charles Yost, History and Memory: A Statesman's Perceptions of the Twentieth Century (New York: Norton, 1980), pp. 236-237.

"some soul-searching" and "pulling the strings": Deputies' meeting, May 14, 1958, CIA/CREST.

"caught completely by surprise": Gordon oral history, FAOH.

"the most dangerous place in the world": NSC minutes, May 13, 1958, DDEL.

"We have no evidence that Qasim is a communist": CIA briefing to NSC, January 15, 1959, CIA/CREST.

"The only effective and organized force in Iraq": Deputies' meeting, May 14, 1959, CIA/CREST.

another failed assassination plot: In 1960, Critchfield proposed the poisoned handkerchief. Helms endorsed it. So did Bissell. Dulles approved. All believed they were carrying out the wishes of the president of the United States.

"We came to power on a CIA train": Sa'adi quoted in Said Aburish, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (New York: St. Martin's, 2001). Aburish was a committed Ba'athist who broke with Saddam and chronicled the brutality of his regime. He gave an instructive interview to Frontline, published on the Web site of the PBS documentary series(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saddam/interviews/ aburish.html). "The U.S. involvement in the coup against Kassem in Iraqin 1963 was substantial," he said. "There is evidence that CIA agents were in touch with army officers who were involved in the coup. There is evidence that an electronic command center was set up in Kuwait to guide the forces who were fighting Kassem. There is evidence that they supplied the conspirators with lists of people who had to be eliminated immediately in order to ensure success. The relationship between the Americans and the Ba'ath Party at that moment in time was very close indeed. And that continued for some time after the coup. And there was an exchange of information between the two sides. For example it is one of the first times that the United States was able to get certain models of MiG fighters and certain tanks made in the Soviet Union. That was the bribe. That was what the Ba'ath had to offer the United States in return for their help in eliminating Kassem." James Critchfield, who orchestrated the operation as the Near East chief of the clandestine service, said to the Associated Press shortly before he died in April 2003: "You have to understand the context of the time and the scope of the threat we were facing. That's what I say to people who say, 'You guys in the CIA created Saddam Hussein.'"

 

Chapter Fifteen

"measures by this Government that would cause the fall of the new regime in Indonesia": NSC minutes, September 9, 1953, DDEL.

"a tremendous hold on the people; is completely noncommunist": "Meeting with the Vice President, Friday, 8 January, 1954," CIA/DDRS.

"There was planning of such a possibility": Bissell testimony, President's Commission on CIA Activities (Rockefeller Commission), April 21, 1975, Top Secret, declassified 1995, GRFL.

"all feasible covert means": NSC 5518, declassified 2003, DDEL.

"a number of political figures": Bissell oral history, DDEL.

"God, we had fun": Ulmer interview with author.

fire-breathing cables: CIA report summaries, "NSC Briefing: Indonesia," February 27 and 28, March 5 and March 14, and April 3 and 10, 1957; CIA deputies' meeting, March 4, 1957; CIA estimate, "The Situation in Indonesia," March 5, 1957.

"Sumatrans prepared to fight": "NSC Briefing: Indonesia," April 17, 1957; CIA chronology, "Indonesian Operation," March 15, 1958, declassified January 9, 2002. All CIA/CREST.

"attempt to find out State Department policy on Indonesia": Director's meeting, July 19, 1957, CIA/CREST.

"subversion by ballot": F. M. Dearborn to White House, "Some Notes on Far East Trip," November 1957, declassified August 10, 2003, DDEL. Dearborn personally reported on his trip in a face-to-face meeting with Eisenhower on November 16, according to the president's diary. CIA, "Special Report on Indonesia," September 13, 1957, declassified September 9, 2003, DDEL. "Indonesian Operation," March 5, 1958, CIA/CREST.

Al Ulmer believed: Ulmer and Sichel interviews with author. In the summer of 1957, Ulmer sent out a call to clandestine service officers to monitor Sukarno during his annual jaunt on a chartered Pan Am jet to Asia's most exclusive bordellos. The fruits of his mission were limited to a sample of Sukarno's stool for medical analysis, obtained by the chief of the Hong Kong station, Peter Sichel, with the help of a patriotic Pan Am crew in the CIA's pay. In the absence of knowledge, all evidence was germane.

"beyond the point of no return": NSC minutes, August 1, 1957, DDEL.

"utmost gravity": Deputies' meeting, August 2, 1957, CIA/CREST.

"the dismemberment of Indonesia": Cumming Committee, "Special Report on Indonesia," September 13, 1957, declassified July 9, 2003, DDEL. At this time, Ambassador Allison accepted a summons to come over to the presidential palace for an informal chat. Sukarno wanted Eisenhower to come to Indonesia, to see the country for himself, to be the very first head of state to visit the lovely new guest house he was building on Bali. When the cold rejection from Washington arrived two weeks later, Allison handed it over with a shudder: "I literally saw Sukarno's jaw drop as he read President Eisenhower's letter. He couldn't believe it." Allison's views and quotations cited in this chapter are in John M. Allison, Ambassador from the Prairie, or Allison Wonderland(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), pp. 307-339.

Eisenhower ordered the agency: The language of the order is printed in the CIA's chronology, "Indonesian Operation," March 15, 1958, CIA/CREST.

Wisner flew to the CIA station in Singapore: CIA records show two trips to the region in the fall of 1957 and the spring of 1958. Wisner sought to make sure that the State Department knew as little as possible about his covert-action plans. The minutes of the director's meeting on December 26, 1957, say that he had meetings scheduled with State Department officials set for December 30 "concerning the Indonesian situation. Mr. Wisner expressed the hope that these discussions could be fairly well limited to policy matters rather than permitted to slice over into operational matters."

The CIA's Jakarta station: "Indonesian Operation," March 15, 1958, CIA/CREST. The paramilitary operation is detailed in Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, Feet to the Fire: CIA Covert Operations in Indonesia, 1957-1958 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999), pp. 50-98. The background of the political-warfare programs is in Audrey R. Kahin and George M. T. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).

"sons of Eisenhower": Office of U.S. Army attache, Jakarta, to State, May 25, 1958, cited in Kahin and Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy, p. 178. The CIA asked the Pentagon to help find more English-speaking Indonesian Army officers who wanted to seize power with the CIA's assistance. Memo to Allen W. Dulles from Major General Robert A. Schow, the army's intelligence chief, February 5, 1958.
The responses should have given the Americans some pause. General Nasution, the professional military officer who led the Indonesian Army and stayed loyal to the government, assured the U.S. Army attache in Jakarta, Major George Benson, that he already was purging every suspected communist from any position of influence. Lieutenant Colonel D. I. Pandjaitan, an Indonesian military attache based in Bonn--and a Christian, his American counterparts noted--proclaimed: "If the U.S. knows of any Communists, let them tell us, and we will have them removed.... We will do anything except shoot Sukarno or attack the Communists without proof of illegal actions on their part. In our country now we cannot arrest Communists just because they are Communists; we will remove them"--and here the colonel stabbed at the air as if holding a knife--"if they step out of line." Memorandum of conversation with Indonesian army officers, date unclear but probably early 1958, declassified April 4, 2003, CIA/CREST.

Foster said he was "in favor of doing something": JFD telephone call transcripts, DDEL.

"the United States faced very difficult problems": NSC minutes, February 27, 1958, DDEL.

"It was a very strange war": NSC minutes, April 25, 1958, DDEL.

"any operations partaking of a military character in Indonesia": NSC minutes, April 14, 1958, DDEL. John Foster Dulles, memorandum of conversation with the president, April 15, 1958, DDEL.

"I enjoyed killing Communists": Pope interview with author.

"almost too effective": NSC minutes, May 1, 1958, DDEL.

"stirred great anger": NSC minutes, May 4, 1958, DDEL.

"it could not be conducted as a completely covert operation": "Indonesian Operation," March 15, 1958, CIA/CREST. Incredibly, Allen Dulles pleaded poverty as the reason for the failed mission. The CIA needed at least $50 million more in its covert action budget, he told Eisenhower: "We were quite thin in our resources to meet situations such as that in Indonesia." 152 "They convicted me of murder": Pope interview with author. Sukarno waited two years before putting Pope on trial. The CIA pilot was held at a summer resort on the slopes of Mount Merapi, where his guards took him hunting and gave him every chance to escape. He calculated this as a plot, a way for the government to turn a strapping blond, blue-eyed American prisoner over to the Communist Party of Indonesia. After four years and two months of captivity, he was set free in July 1962 at the personal request of the attorney general of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy. He went back to flying for the CIA in Vietnam for the rest of the 1960s. In February 2005, at age seventy-six, Al Pope was awarded the Legion of Honor by the government of France for his role in the resupply of besieged French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

"glaring mix-up": Director's meeting, May 19, 1958, CIA/CREST.

favorable to the United States: "NSC Briefing: Indonesia," May 21, 1958, declassified January 15, 2004, CIA/CREST.

"The operation was, of course, a complete failure": Bissell oral history, DDEL.

"Dissident B-26 aircraft shot down": "NSC Briefing: Indonesia," May 21, 1958, CIA/CREST.

He came back from the Far East in June 1958 at the edge of his sanity, and at summer's end he went mad: But Wisner had been demonstrably unsound since late 1956, and so had the clandestine service. Paul Nitze, a good friend who had worked closely with Wisner as Kennan's successor at the State Department, observed that "the upshot of the strains of that Hungarian episode and the Suez episode were more than Frank could bear and he had a nervous breakdown after that. I think that the difficulties[at the clandestine service] began after Frank had a nervous breakdown.... They began after Frank was no longer competent to run it." Nitze oral history, HSTL. Wisner suffered through "a very hard time" during his treatment, Dulles wrote to his old deputy director, Bill Jackson, in December 1958. "I hope it will not now be many weeks before he is out of the sanitarium." Allen Dulles papers, declassified February 13, 2001, CIA. At the time, electroshock was "used for a variety of disorders, frequently in high doses and for long periods.... Many of these efforts proved ineffective, and some even harmful." See "Report of the National Institute of Mental Health Consensus Development Conference on Electroconvulsive Therapy," Journal of the American Medical Association,Vol. 254, 1985, pp. 2103-2108.

"at a loss": Director's meeting, June 23, 1958, CIA/CREST.

"We had constructed": Smith cited in Douglas Garthoff, "Analyzing Soviet Politics and Foreign Policy," in Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett(eds.), Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union CIA/CSI, 2003.

a report from his intelligence board: "Subject: Third Report of the President by the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities" and memorandum of conference with the president [by the board], December 16, 1958, CIA/DDEL. At this meeting with the president, former defense secretary Robert Lovett "reinforced the views of the Board that the present organization is weak by citing the example of Indonesia," read the top secret minutes of the meeting. "Mr. Lovett pointed out by way of general summary that we have two basic ways of obtaining reliable information, through gadgets and through individual secret agents. It is in this latter field, the secret agents, that he feels we will obtain our best information.... We are not good in this field and we should get better."

"our problems were getting greater every year": Dulles, minutes of senior staff meeting, January 12, 1959, CIA/CREST.

 

Chapter Sixteen

Richard Bissell became the chief: Bissell's ambitions for the CIA were great; the obstacles against them were greater. He told his senior officers that his mandate was to merge the "Hot War plans and Cold War capabilities" of the United States--to make the CIA more sword than shield in the battle against the Soviets. He created a new division, Development Projects, that allowed him to run covert action programs out of his hip pocket. He saw the CIA as an instrument of American power no less potent--and much more useful--than the nuclear arsenal or the 101st Airborne Division. "Mr. Bissell's Remarks, War Planners Conference," March 16, 1959, declassified January 7, 2002, CIA/CREST.

Bissell knew the agency was dangerously short on the talent needed to achieve his goals. His own "sheer brilliance," said one of his top assistants, Jim Flannery, "could not overcome the fact that the clandestine service is basically people." Flannery quoted in Peter Wyden, Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 320.

Bissell immediately ordered his division chiefs to "identify substandard employees and dispose of them." He wanted an "unrelenting and constant" culling of the herd. "Look beyond the case of inefficiency or wrongdoing," he instructed his underlings. "Identify and terminate those employees who are not carrying, can not, or will not carry their fair share of the work." Richard Bissell, "Subject: Program for Greater Efficiency in CIA," February 2, 1959, declassified February 12, 2002, CIA/CREST.

A detailed internal survey of the CIA's clandestine service in November 1959 showed the source of Bissell's concerns: the recruitment of talented young officers had dwindled while the ranks of the mediocre and middle-aged swelled. "A very considerable percentage" of the CIA's officers soon would be at least fifty years old; they were the World War II generation, and in three short years they would start retiring en masse after twenty years of military and intelligence service. "There is a strongfeeling of frustration widespread among the best Clandestine Service officers which has its origin in the Agency's apparent inability to solve the manpower problem," the internal CIA study showed. That problem remains unsolved today. "Subject: A Manpower Control Problem for the Clandestine Services Career Program," November 4, 1959, declassified August 1, 2001, CIA/CREST.

A secret CIA history: Unless otherwise noted, quotations and citations on the CIA and Cuba in this chapter are taken from the CIA's clandestine history of the planning on the Bay of Pigs operation: Jack Pfeiffer, Evolution of CIA's Anti-Castro Policies, 1951-January 1961, Vol. 3 of Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, CIA, NARA (hereinafter cited as Pfeiffer).
Pfeiffer was named the CIA's chief historian in 1976; he retired in 1984 and spent a decade thereafter unsuccessfully suing the CIA to release this work. His three-hundred-page history turned up in the National Archives in June 2005, unearthed by Professor David Barrett of Villanova University.

Jim Noel: Noel quoted in Pfeiffer. Ambassador William Attwood, who served as President Kennedy's personal back channel to Castro in the summer of 1963, remembered: "I was in Cuba, in '59, and I met CIA people there whose main sources were members of the Havana country club.... They didn't get out among the people." Attwood oral history, FAOH.

Al Cox: Cox quoted in Pfeiffer.

Robert Reynolds: Reynolds made the remark to the author and several other reporters attending a conference on the Bay of Pigs in Havana in 2001.

"a new spiritual leader": Quoted in Pfeiffer.

"Though our intelligence experts backed and filled": Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace: The White House Years: 1956-1961 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), p. 524.

"the elimination of Fidel Castro": Authorship of the memo may be credited to J. C. King, then finishing his ninth year as chief of the Western Hemisphere division. The editing by Dulles is in Pfeiffer.

"anybody with eyes could see": Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Jake Esterline in this book are from videotaped interviews with Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive or from Esterline's remarks at transcripts of conferences on the Bay of Pigs conducted at the Musgrove Plantation in Georgia in 1996. The Musgrove conference is in James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh (eds.), Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

"The Dripping Cuban": Helms and the dripping Cuban are in Pfeiffer. "Helms completely divorced himself from this thing. I mean absolutely!" Dick Drain, chief of operations for the Cuba task force, recounted. "The third time that he said, 'You know I have nothing to do with this project,' I said, 'Well, Mr. Helms, I don't want to be fatuous about this, but I wish to Christ that you did because we could use your expertise.' He said, 'Hahaha...yes...well, thank you very much,' and that was the end of that. He avoided the thing like the plague."

It had four: Raymond L. Garthoff, "Estimating Soviet Military Intentions and Capabilities," in Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett (eds.), Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union, CIA/CSI, 2003.

"provocative pin-pricking": Goodpaster memo, October 30, 1959, DDEL.

"the lie we told about the U-2": Ike made the remark to journalist David Kraslow; it is cited in several sources, including David Wise, The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power (New York: Random House, 1973).

"Bissell probably believed": Michael Warner, "The CIA's Internal Probe of the Bay of Pigs Affair," Studies in Intelligence, Winter 1998-1999, CIA/CSI.

should be eliminated: The evidence that Eisenhower wanted Lumumba dead is overwhelming. "The President did want a man whom he regarded (as did lots of others, myself included) as a thorough scoundrel and a very dangerous man, got rid of," Bissell said later in an oral-history interview for the Eisenhower presidential library. "I have not the slightest doubt that he wanted Lumumba got rid of and he wanted it badly and promptly, as a matter of urgency and of very great importance. Allen's cable reflected that sense of urgency and priority." NSC secretary Robert Johnson's testimony on Eisenhower's order to kill Lumumba at the NSC meeting on August 18, 1960, and Devlin's quoted testimony on his orders coming from "the President" were given to investigators for the Church Committee. Devlin testified on August 25, 1975; Johnson testified on June 18 and September 13, 1975. On the murder of Lumumba, see "Conclusions of the Enquiry Committee," a thousand-page parliamentary report published by the government of Belgium in December 2001. See also NSC minutes, September 12 and 19, 1960, DDEL. Steve Weissman, former staff director, House of Representatives subcommittee on Africa, granted the author an illuminating interview on the structure of the covert operation in the Congo; see also Weissman's "Opening the Secret Files on Lumumba's Murder," Washington Post, July 21, 2002. After the killing, Nikita Khrushchev had a conversation with the American ambassador in Moscow, who reported in an eyes-only cable to Washington: "With respect to Congo K said what had happened there and particularly murder of Lumumba had helped communism. Lumumba was not Communist and he doubted if he would have become one." FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. X, document 51. Moscow nonetheless established the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University for students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the KGB used it as a rich recruiting ground. But Soviet intelligence would never return to the Congo under Mobutu, who personally staged a mock execution of the last Soviet intelligence officer he expelled from the capital.

The CIA delivered $250,000: Personal testimony on the payoffs to the CIA's allies in the Congo comes from Owen Roberts, later a U.S. ambassador under President Ronald Reagan. Roberts was the ranking expert on the Congo at the State Department's intelligence and research bureau in Washington in 1960. He had served for two years in the Congolese capital and was the first American foreign service officer who knew all the new leaders personally. He was working on a book-length study of the country financed by the CIA in 1960, and he served as the escort officer when Prime Minister Lumumba, President Joseph Kasavubu, and eighteen of their ministers visited Washington and the United Nations, where the general assembly convened in September 1960. "The CIA made some payoffs, I know," to the Congolese delegation at the United Nations, Ambassador Roberts said. Roberts oral history, FAOH.

"We had made a major effort": Bissell interview in Piero Gleijeses, "Ships in the Night: The CIA, the White House, and the Bay of Pigs," Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 27, 1995, pp. 1-42.

"a tired old man": Lehman oral history, "Mr. Current Intelligence," Studies in Intelligence, Summer 2000, CIA/CSI.

"worth the risk": "Report from the Chairman of the President's Board of Intelligence Consultants" and "Sixth Report of the President's Board of Consultants," January 5, 1961, DDEL; "Report of the Joint Study Group," December 15, 1960, DDEL; Lyman Kirkpatrick, memorandum for director of central intelligence, "Subject: Summary of Survey Report of FI Staff, DDP," undated, CIA/CREST; NSC minutes, January 5 and 12, 1961, DDEL.

"I reminded the President": Gordon Gray, memorandum of meeting with President Eisenhower, January 18, 1961, DDEL.

"an eight-year defeat" and "a legacy of ashes": Memorandum of discussion at the 473rd meeting of the NSC, January 5, 1961, DDEL; memorandum from Director of Central Intelligence Dulles, January 9, 1961 (Dulles claiming that he had "corrected deficiencies" in the clandestine service and that everything there was "now satisfactory"); memorandum of discussion at the 474th meeting of the NSC, January 12, 1961, DDEL(Dulles saying that American intelligence was "better than it ever had been," that creating a director of national intelligence would be "illegal," and that such a director would be "a body floating in thin air"). The declassified NSC minutes, published in 2002, are not verbatim notes, but they preserve the president's anger and frustration. All are collected in FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. XXV, released in March 7, 2002.

PART THREE

 

Chapter Seventeen

"Senator Kennedy asked the President's judgment": "Transfer: January 19, 1961, Meeting of the President and Senator Kennedy," declassified January 9, 1997, DDEL.

"He had his torture chambers": Dearborn oral history, FAOH. This is a remarkably candid interview.

"The great problem now": RFK notes cited in Church Committee report.

The worst that could happen: Unless otherwise indicated, the reconstruction of the Bay of Pigs invasion in this chapter is drawn directly from The Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Vol. 10, Cuba, 1961-1962, declassified in 1997, and its microfiche supplements, published in 1998, Vol. 11; Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, 1962-1963, declassified in 1996, and its 1998 supplements; and Jack Pfeiffer, Evolution of CIA's Anti-Castro Policies, 1951-January 1961, Vol. 3 of Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, CIA, NARA. Quotes from Jake Esterline are from the Musgrove conference transcript, in James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh (eds.), Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

another blown operation: The station chief who tried to buy off the government was Art Jacobs, Frank Wisner's law school friend and gatekeeper in the early days of the CIA, a diminutive man known in those days as Ozzard of Wiz. "We had a bandit down in Singapore, a cabinet minister who was on the CIA payroll," remembered Ambassador Sam Hart, then a political officer at the American embassy in Malaysia. "One night they had him wired to a polygraph in a safe house.... The Singapore M-5 burst in on the safe house and there's this cabinet minister wired to the polygraph." Hart oral history, FAOH. The subsequent letter from Rusk read: "Dear Mr. Prime Minister: I am deeply distressed...regret very much...unfortunate incident...improper activities...very serious...reviewing activities of these officials for possible disciplinary actions."

could not launch air strikes: Cabell and Bissell, memorandum for General Maxwell D. Taylor, "Subject: Cuban Operation," May 9, 1961, JFKL, DDRS.

The president said he was unaware that there were going to be any air strikes on the morning of D-Day: FRUS, Vol. XI, April 25, 1961 (Taylor Board).

"The time has come for a showdown": Robert F. Kennedy to the president, April 19, 1961, JFKL, cited in Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 97.

"Mr. President, I stood right here": The aides were Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger, and their accounts are, respectively, Kennedy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), and Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978).

an instrument of government he had disdained: President Kennedy had torn out the wiring in the White House for governing the use of secret power. Eisenhower had exerted the presidential power through a rigorous staff system, like the army's. Kennedy had tossed it around like a pigskin at a touch football game. Days after taking office, he had abolished the president's panel of intelligence consultants and the Operations Coordinating Board. They were assuredly imperfect institutions, but they were better than nothing, which was what John Kennedy had built in their place. The post-Bay of Pigs meeting of the NSC was the first serious roundtable discussion of covert action in the Kennedy administration.

"I'm first to recognize": Dulles quoted in "Paramilitary Study Group Meeting"(Taylor Board), May 11, 1961, declassified March 2000 and available online at http://www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB29/06-01.htm.

"take the bucket of slop": Smith quoted in "Paramilitary Study Group Meeting" (Taylor Board), May 10, 1961, NARA.

"He leaves an enduring legacy": Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 204. Bissell came to believe he had left the CIA with "a legacy that has still not been put to rest historically and perhaps never will be." In secret testimony declassified in 1996, Bissell gave this assessment of the CIA's clandestine service: "In part because of my own failings and shortcomings, by the late '60s the Agency already had, I thought, a rather lamentable record.... Reviewing the whole range of different kinds of covert operations--they involved propaganda operations, paramilitary operations, political action operations, and the whole range--the Clandestine Service is not the place where one would expect to look for professional competence." Bissell said that basic skills in military affairs, political analysis, and economic analysis had not been developed at the CIA. The agency had become nothing more than a secret bureaucracy--and a "very sloppy" one at that. Bissell testimony, President's Commission on CIA Activities (Rockefeller Commission), April 21, 1975, GRFL.

"and unmistakable self-confidence": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 195.

"not a man that people were going to love": James Hanrahan, "An Interview with Former CIA Executive Director Lawrence K. 'Red' White," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 43, No. 1, Winter 1999-2000, CIA/CSI.

McCone tried to get the big picture: On his worldwide tour to meet the troops, at the Far East station chiefs' retreat at the mountain resort of Baguio in the Philippines in October 1961, McCone chose a new deputy director to serve as the CIA's chief intelligence analyst: Ray Cline, then chief of station in Taipei.

There were more than a few operations that McCone and the Special Group knew little or nothing about: Division chiefs such as J. C. King, who had served a decade under Dulles, thought nothing of running operations as they saw fit. McCone also never knew that his appointment had set off an internal rebellion at the agency. "I, for one, underestimated the strength of the opposition in the second and third levels of CIA," McGeorge Bundy told the president. "Some very good men are disquieted." Robert Amory, the deputy director of intelligence, called McCone's appointment "a cheap political move." Other foes within the CIA feared McCone would sacrifice the agency to the young lions at the White House. Still others at the clandestine service were unhappy at an outsider's coming to power.

"The President explained": McCone memo, November 22, 1961, FRUS, Vol. X. 182 "a 'cloak and dagger' outfit": McCone memorandum for the file, January 13, 1964: "I have felt, and expressed myself to the late President Kennedy, to President Johnson, and to Secretary Rusk and others, that the DCI and CIA image must be changed. Its basic and primary responsibilities by law are to assemble all intelligence, analyze, evaluate, estimate and report such intelligence for the benefit of policy makers. This function has been submerged and CIA has been consistently referred to as a 'cloak and dagger' outfit whose activities involve (almost exclusively) operations designed to overthrow governments, assassinate Heads of State, involve itself in political affairs of foreign states.... I wish to attempt to change this image." FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXXIII, document 184. McCone was "a man who believed he had two hats: one hat was running the Agency, and the other hat was as one of the President's policymakers." Richard Helms oral history, September 16, 1981, LBJL. McCone said he consistently argued that the CIA "had through the years been subordinated to operational activities"--and "this had to be changed." McCone memo, "Discussion with Attorney General Robert Kennedy," December 27, 1961, CIA/CREST. He drafted and received a written understanding that he would be "the Government's principal intelligence officer." JFK to McCone, January 16, 1962, CIA/CREST.

"You are now living on the bull's eye": David S. Robarge, "Directors of Central Intelligence, 1946-2005," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 49, No. 3, 2005, CIA/CSI.

"Berlin was a sham": Smith interview with author.

"operations in East Germany were out of the question": Murphy, CNN Interactive chat transcript, 1998, available online at http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/guides/debate/chats/murphy/.

The agency was all but out of business: Murphy to Helms, "Subject: Heinz Felfe Damage Assessment," February 7, 1963, declassified June 2006, CIA.

"the top priority": Helms to McCone, January 19, 1962, FRUS, Vol. X.

"Of the 27 or 28 agents": McCone memo, "Discussion with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, 2:45 P.M., 27 December 1961," FRUS, Vol. X.

the Catholic Church and the Cuban underworld: Lansdale to McCone, December 7, 1961, FRUS, Vol. X.

"Ed had this aura around him": Esterline, Musgrove transcript, Politics of Illusion, p. 113.

"Let's get the hell on with it": Helms, A Look over My Shoulder, p. 205.

"he wanted fast answers": Elder statement to Church Committee investigators, August 13, 1975, declassified May 4, 1994.

"it would meet with the president's approval": The question of whether president Kennedy authorized the CIA to kill Castro can be answered, at least to my satisfaction. In 1975, Bissell testified to the presidential commission led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller on the question of presidential authorization of assassinations by the CIA.

 

Rockefeller questioned Bissell:

 

Q: Any assassination or assassination attempt would have to have the highest approval?

A: That's correct.

Q: From the President?

A: That is correct.

 

"mad as hell": Houston to the historian Thomas Powers: "Kennedy was mad," Houston said. "He was mad as hell.... He was not angry about the assassination plot, but about our involvement with the Mafia." Powers, "Inside the Department of Dirty Tricks,"Atlantic Monthly, August 1979.

"no question in my mind that he did": Helms interview with author. This seems to me to settle the question of JFK's authorization, taken together with Bissell's testimony and the overwhelming weight of circumstantial evidence. The counterargument is that John Kennedy would never have done such a thing, and that argument has worn very thin.

"why shouldn't they kill yours?": The full context of Helms's observation is worth reproducing, now that the CIA is back in the business of targeted killings. "Let's leave aside the notion of theology and the morality of all good men for just a moment," he said in 1978. "Leaving that aside, one comes smack up against the fact that if you hire someone to kill somebody else, you are immediately subject to blackmail, and that includes individuals as well as governments. In short, these things inevitably come out. That is the most compelling reason for not getting involved. But then there is an ancillary consideration. If you become involved in the business of eliminating foreign leaders, and it is considered by governments more frequently than one likes to admit, there is always the question of who comes next.... If you kill someone else's leaders, why shouldn't they kill yours?" The question was very much on Helms's mind after November 22, 1963. Helms interview with David Frost, 1978, full transcript reprinted in Studies in Intelligence,September 1993, CIA/CSI.

"CIA was suffering" and "morale was pretty well shattered": McCone oral history, August 19, 1970, LBJL. McCone recounted his first meeting with President Kennedy, when he was offered the job as director of central intelligence: "[JFK said]: 'Now, there are only four people besides Allen Dulles that know that we are having this discussion: Bob McNamara and his deputy Roswell Gilpatric, and Dean Rusk, and [Chairman of the Senate Atomic Energy Committee] Senator Clinton Anderson.' And he said, 'I don't want anybody else to know about it, because if these liberals. o.b.'s that work in the basement of this building hear that I am talking to you about this, they'd destroy you before I can get you confirmed.'" McCone oral history, April 21, 1988, Institute of International Studies, University of California at Berkeley.

"accident-prone"..."alcohol-addicted"..."something should be done immediately to restore morale in the Agency": Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Jr., "Report of the Task Force on Personnel Management in CIA," July 26, 1962, CIA/CREST; Kirkpatrick's handwritten notes from an August 6, 1962, Executive Committee meeting on the report, CIA/CREST.

1,300 Cuban refugees: Harvey to Lansdale, May 24, 1962, CIA/DDRS

"forty-five men": Lansdale to Special Group (Augmented), July 5, 1962, FRUS, Vol. X.

"Can CIA actually hope to generate such strikes?": Lansdale to Harvey, August 6, 1962, FRUS, Vol. X.

 

Chapter Eighteen

John F. Kennedy walked into the Oval Office and switched on the brand-new state-of-the-art taping system: Direct quotations in this chapter are drawn from the recently transcribed Kennedy White House tapes, unless otherwise cited. The tapes, McCone's newly declassified memos, and more than one thousand pages of internal CIA records create a rich mosaic of the daily life of the agency in the summer and fall of 1962. The White House tapes from July 30 through October 28, 1962, are compiled in Timothy Naftali, Philip Zelikow, and Ernest May (eds.), The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, 3 vols. (New York: Norton, 2001), produced by the Miller Center of Public Affairs. The cited McCone memos are from three sources: FRUS, CREST, and DDRS. The internal CIA records were obtained by the author from CREST.

The return on these investments: Two years after this Oval Office conversation, Goulart was overthrown, and Brazil was on the road to a police state. Bobby Kennedy had gone to Brazil to see the situation for himself: "I didn't like Goulart," he said. The 1964 coup backed by the CIA led to the first in a series of military dictatorships that ruled Brazil for the better part of twenty years.

McCone had given the go-ahead: The director drew a distinction in his own mind between a coup in which there might be a bloodbath and a targeted assassination attempt against a head of state. One was moral, the other was not; a coup in which a president was killed might be deplorable, but not reprehensible.

On August 10...The subject was Cuba: Almost every record of this meeting has been destroyed, but fragments were painstakingly reassembled by State Department historians from the files of the director of central intelligence: "McCone maintained at the meeting that the Soviet Union had in Cuba an asset of such importance that 'the Soviets will not let Cuba fail.' To prevent such a failure McCone expected that the Soviet Union would supplement economic, technical, and conventional military aid with medium-range ballistic missiles, which they would justify by reference to U.S. missile bases in Italy and Turkey.... [T]he issue of the assassination of Cuban political leaders came up during the discussion. According to an August 14 memorandum from Harvey to Richard Helms, the issue was raised during the meeting by McNamara.... On April 14, 1967, McCone sent a memorandum from his retirement to Helms, who had become Director of Central Intelligence, in which he wrote of the discussion at the August 10 meeting: 'I recall a suggestion being made to liquidate top people in the Castro regime, including Castro. I took immediate exception to this suggestion, stating that the subject was completely out of bounds as far as the USG and CIA were concerned and the idea should not be discussed nor should it appear in any papers, as the USG could not consider such actions on moral or ethical grounds.'" FRUS, Vol. X, editorial note, document 371. McCone first raised the question of nuclear weapons in Cuba at a March 12, 1962, Special Group meeting: "Could we now develop a policy for action if missile bases are placed on Cuban soil?" FRUS, Vol. X, document 316. But on August 8, 1962, only two days before delivering his first warning that Soviet missiles would be sent to Cuba, McCone had told a gathering of twenty-six Republican senators that he was "positive that there were no missiles or missile bases in Cuba." "Luncheon Meeting Attended by the DCI of Senate Republican Policy Committee," August 8, 1962, declassified May 12, 2005, CIA/CREST.

"If I were Khrushchev": Walter Elder, "John McCone, the Sixth Director of Central Intelligence," draft copy, CIA History Staff, 1987, partially declassified and released in 1998.

"the Soviets were going to be Number One": Ford quoted in John L. Helgerson, "CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates," May 1996, CIA/CSI.

"They had charts on the wall": Ford cited by the author, The New York Times, July 20, 1997.

"I went to see President Kennedy": Jagan interview with author.

"the United States supports the idea": "Interview Between President Kennedy and the Editor of Izvestia," November 25, 1961, FRUS, Vol. V. 192 "a really covert operation": Schlesinger memo, July 19, 1962, FRUS, Vol. XII.

time to bring matters to a head: Memo to Bundy, August 8, 1962.

The president launched a $2 million campaign: The author laid out some of its consequences in "A Kennedy-C.I.A. Plot Returns to Haunt Clinton," The New York Times, October 30, 1994. The article touched on the struggle over the declassification of the government records about the covert operation. In 2005, the State Department published the following "editorial note" in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXXII: "During the Johnson administration, the U.S. Government continued the Kennedy administration's policy of working with the British Government to offer encouragement and support to the pro-West leaders and political organizations of British Guiana as that limited self-governing colony moved toward total independence. The Special Group/303 Committee approved approximately $2.08 million for covert action programs between 1962 and 1968 in that country. U.S. policy included covert opposition to Cheddi Jagan, the then pro-Marxist leader of British Guiana's East Indian population. A portion of the funds authorized by the Special Group/303 Committee for covert action programs was used between November 1962 and June 1963 to improve the election prospects of the opposition political parties to the government of Jagan's People's Progressive Party. The U.S. Government successfully urged the British to impose a system of proportional representation in British Guiana (which favored the anti-Jagan forces) and to delay independence until the anti-Jagan forces could be strengthened."

e note continued: "Through the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States provided Forbes Burnham's and Peter D'Aguiar's political parties, which were in opposition to Jagan, with both money and campaign expertise as they prepared to contest the December 1964 parliamentary elections. The U.S. Government's covert funding and technical expertise were designed to play a decisive role in the registration of voters likely to vote against Jagan. Burnham's and D'Aguiar's supporters were registered in large numbers, helping to elect an anti-Jagan coalition. Special Group/303 Committee-approved funds again were used between July 1963 and April 1964 in connection with the 1964 general strike in British Guiana. When Jagan's and Burnham's supporters clashed in labor strife in the sugar plantations that year, the United States joined with the British Government in urging Burnham not to retaliate with violence, but rather to commit to a mediated end to the conflict. At the same time, the United States provided training to certain of the anti-Jagan forces to enable them to defend themselves if attacked and to boost their morale.

"Following the general strike, 303 Committee-approved funds were used to support the election of a coalition of Burnham's People's National Congress and D'Aguiar's United Force. After Burnham was elected Premier in December 1963, the U.S. Government, again through the CIA, continued to provide substantial funds to both Burnham and D'Aguiar and their parties. In 1967 and 1968, 303 Committee-approved funds were used to help the Burnham and D'Aguiar coalition contest and win the December 1968 general elections. When the U.S. Government learned that Burnham was going to use fraudulent absentee ballots to continue in power in the 1968 elections, it advised him against such a course of action, but did not try to stop him."

"the most dangerous area in the world": Memorandum of conversation, June 30, 1963, Birch Grove, England, "Subject: British Guiana." Participants included President Kennedy, Dean Rusk, Ambassador David Bruce, McGeorge Bundy, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Lord Home, and Sir David Ormsby-Gore. FRUS, Vol. XII.

"all about the dirty tricks": Naftali, Zelikow, and May, The Presidential Recordings. Later that day, the president read aloud from the doctrine paper, a classic of geostrategic gobbledygook: In the interests of U.S. national security seek to replace local leadership with indigenous leaders who are more amenable and sympathetic to the need for eliminating the breeding areas for dissension...seeking to insure that modernization of the local society evolves in directions which will afford a congenial world environment for fruitful international cooperation and for our way of life. "That's a lot of crap," Kennedy said scornfully. "'For our way of life.'"

On August 21, Robert Kennedy asked McCone: RFK argued for a "Remember the Maine" incident--a staged attack on Guantanamo--at this meeting and continued to advocate it during the missile crisis. McCone memo, August 21, 1962, in "CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis," CIA/CSI, 1992; McCone memo on McCone-JFK meeting, August 23, 1962, FRUS, Vol. X, document 385.

"How are we doing with that set-up on the Baldwin business?": Naftali, Zelikow, and May, The Presidential Recordings. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI went to interrogate Baldwin and to tap his home telephone. Baldwin was a graduate of the naval academy who had resigned his commission in 1927, worked as a military analyst for The New York Times since 1937, won the Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from Guadalcanal and the western Pacific in 1943, and was a dependably pro-military voice in the pages of the paper. His sources at the Pentagon were first-rate. After his visit from the FBI, the shaken Timesman told a colleague in a conversation taped by the bureau on the night of July 30: "I think the real answer to this is Bobby Kennedy and the President himself, but Bobby Kennedy particularly putting pressure on Hoover." A transcript of that conversation was on the attorney general's desk the next day. The president's foreign intelligence advisory board met with John Kennedy the following afternoon and told him that Baldwin's work was a grave danger to the United States. "We would suggest," said James Killian, the author of the 1954 "surprise attack" report under Eisenhower, "that the Director of Central Intelligence be encouraged to develop an expert group that would be available at all times to follow up on security leaks...a team available to him operating under his direction." Clark Clifford, a member of the board and a drafter of the CIA's charter in the National Security Act of 1947, when he served as Harry Truman's White House counsel, urged President Kennedy to create "a full-time group that is working on it all the time" at the CIA. "They can find out who are Hanson Baldwin's contacts," Clifford said. "When he goes over to the Pentagon, who does he see? Nobody knows now. The FBI doesn't know. But I think it would be mighy interesting." Clifford's many friends in the Washington establishment would have been appalled at this skulduggery. Congressional hearings in 1975 laid responsibility for the taps solely on Attorney General Kennedy and the FBI--not President Kennedy and the CIA.

"I would be only too happy": McCone to Kennedy, August 17, 1962, declassified August 20, 2003, CIA/CREST.

"an understandable reluctance": McCone, "Memorandum for: The President/The White House," February 28, 1963, JFKL.

"Put it in the box and nail it shut" and "universal repugnance": "CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis," CIA/CSI, 1992.

"who wants to start a war?": "IDEALIST Operations over Cuba," September 10, 1962, CIA/CREST.

The photo gap: The whys and wherefores of the "photo gap" are in Max Holland, "The 'Photo Gap' That Delayed Discovery of Missiles in Cuba," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 49, No. 4, 2005, CIA/CSI.

195"I never knew his name": Halpern in James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh(eds.), Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

"a considerable discussion (with some heat)": "CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis," CIA/CSI, 1992.

"'Massive activity'": "Minutes of Meeting of the Special Group (Augmented) on Operation Mongoose, 4 October 1962," declassified February 19, 2004, CIA/CREST; McCone memo, October 4, 1962, FRUS, Vol. X.

"The near-total intelligence surprise": The report survives in a 2001 declassified excerpt in an editorial note in FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. XXV, document 107, and a 1992 version in "CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis," CIA/CSI, 1992, pp. 361-371.

"Those things we've been worrying about.": McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 395-396.

"Damn it to all hell and back": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 208.

"we had also fooled ourselves": Robert Kennedy, Thirteen Days (New York: Norton, 1969), p. 27.

 

Chapter Nineteen

"The president flicked on his tape recorder": Until 2003 the question of what was really on the White House tapes was still a hot dispute. After four decades, what really happened, and who said what to whom, has been settled by a reliable transcript, the result of more than twenty years of labor by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library's historian, Sheldon Stern.
Conventional wisdom contends that the crucible of the Cuban missile crisis transformed John and Robert Kennedy, making a brilliant leader out of a callow commander in chief, converting young Bobby from hawk to dove, and changing the White House from a Harvard seminar into a temple of wisdom. It is in part a myth, founded on an inaccurate and falsified historical record. President Kennedy fed favored journalists with poetic but palpably untrue stories. Robert Kennedy's posthumously published book on the crisis contains inventions and made-up dialogue, repeated by otherwise reliable historians and the loyal circle of Kennedy acolytes.
We now know that the Kennedys distorted the historical record and concealed how the crisis was resolved. And we now can see that where they plotted a path out of the crisis, they were as often as not following a course charted by John McCone. See Sheldon Stern, Averting "The Final Failure": John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). This chapter relies on Stern's transcriptions and McCone's declassified memos, except where noted.

Thinking of the Mongoose missions: Carter, "16 October (Tuesday)/(Acting DCI)," declassified February 19, 2004, CIA/CREST; "Mongoose Meeting with the Attorney General," October 16, 1962; "CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis," CIA/CSI, 1992; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 227-228.

The six single-spaced pages of notes: McCone, "Memorandum for Discussion Today," CIA/CREST; untitled McCone memo; and "Talking Paper for Principals," all dated October 17, 1962, declassified March 5, 2003.

"opinions had obviously switched": Presidential recordings, October 19-22, JFKL.

"the course which I had recommended": McCone memos, October 19-22, 1962, CIA/CREST. A formal meeting of the National Security Council was held in the Oval Room of the Executive Mansion at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 20. The meeting was not taped, but Cline's briefing notes and handwritten scribbles survive, as does the formal record of the NSC's note taker, Bromley Smith. Cline's notes are in "CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis," CIA/CSI, 1992.

"there was no such deal ever made": McCone oral history, April 21, 1988, Institute of International Studies, University of California at Berkeley.

"he's a real bastard, that John McCone": This snarl was caught on tape on March 4, 1963, presidential recordings, JFKL. It was first reported by the historian Max Holland, author of The Kennedy Assassination Tapes (New York: Knopf, 2004), and recounted in his monograph "The 'Photo Gap' That Delayed Discovery of Missiles in Cuba," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 49, No. 4, 2005, CIA/CSI.

McCone had tried to put a leash on Mongoose: McCone's actions are reflected in the tapes of the 10 a.m. meeting on October 26, his memos, and the FRUS record of the meeting. The tape transcript is fragmentary. On October 30, "Mr. McCone stated that all MONGOOSE operations must be held in abeyance until this week of negotiations is over." Marshall Carter, memorandum for the record, October 30, 1962, declassified November 4, 2003, CIA/CREST. Covert operations planned and conducted against Cuba during and after the missile crisis are detailed in FRUS, Vol. XI, documents 271, 311, 313, and 318-315.

the final mission to kill Fidel Castro: The plot is outlined in the 1967 CIA inspector general's report to Helms, declassified in 1993. J. S. Earman, Inspector General, "Subject: Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, 23 May 1967," CIA. Quotes and citations in the following paragraphs are drawn from the report. John McCone never found out about the last plot as it unfolded. But he came close. On August 15, 1962, a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times telephoned CIA headquarters, asking about connections between the notorious Mafia chieftain Sam Giancana, the CIA, and the anti-Castro Cubans. The word went up to McCone, who asked Helms if this could possibly be true. In response, Helms handed over a three-page single-spaced memo from the CIA's chief of security, Sheffield Edwards. It recorded that RFK had been briefed on May 14, 1962, about "a sensitive CIA operation" conducted against Fidel Castro between August 1960 and May 1961, involving "certain gambling interests" represented by "one John Rosselli of Los Angeles" and one "Sam Giancana of Chicago." The attorney general knew those names very well. The memo never mentioned assassination, but its meaning was clear. Helms handed it to Mc-Cone with his own covering note: "I assume you are aware of the nature of the operation discussed in the attachment." McCone became intensely aware in the four minutes it took to read it. He was furious beyond words.
That may be why Helms never troubled to tell him about the new assassination plot that FitzGerald was leading--or about who was in charge of the plotting. In 1975, Helms told Henry Kissinger that Bobby Kennedy had "personally managed" more than one assassination attempt against Fidel Castro. Kissinger and Ford, memorandum of conversation, January 4, 1975, GRFL.

 

Chapter Twenty

"We must bear a good deal of responsibility for it": JFK Tapes, November 4, 1963, JFKL. The recording, worth hearing, is available online at http://www.whitehousetapes.org/clips/1963_1104_jfk_vietnam_mem oir.html.

"I was part and parcel of the whole conspiracy": Conein's 1975 testimony to Senate investigators was declassified in September 1998. All quotations in this chapter from him are taken from that transcript. Born in Paris in 1919, Conein was sent to Kansas City to live with an aunt, a French war bride, in 1924. He raced to enlist in the French Army when World War II erupted in 1939. When France fell in 1940, he made his way to the United States and wound up in the OSS. In 1944, based in Algiers, he was dropped into occupied France to rendezvous with the Resistance. With France liberated, the OSS sent him to southern China to join a French-Vietnamese commando team assigned to attack a Japanese port in northern Vietnam. He formed an attachment to Vietnam. The affair ended badly for both.
Conein awaits his biographer. Stanley Karnow, the historian and author of Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking, 1983), spent seventy hours interviewing him, but abandoned the project after deciding his subject was beginning to resemble Somerset Maugham's fictional spy Ashenden, a man so consumed by espionage that he cannot sort out his cover stories from the story of his life. "He was out of his time," Karnow said. "He was the swashbuckling soldier of fortune--the guy who has ceased to exist except in fiction. A marvelous storyteller. Whether the stories were true or not was beside the point. They were almost always almost entirely true."
The author wrote Conein's obituary, "Lucien Conein, 79, Legendary Cold War Spy," The New York Times, June 7, 1998.

"do what you can to save South Vietnam": Rufus Phillips oral history, FAOH.

"a flashpoint": John Gunther Dean oral history, FAOH.

a new Lao government: The decision to try to buy a new government was made after Allen Dulles warned President Eisenhower that "we had a good deal to fear in the 1959 general elections" in Laos, and the president replied "that it would be a serious matter if any country such as Laos went Communist by the legal vote of its people." NSC minutes, May 29, 1958, DDEL. The CIA's own analysts reported: "The Communist resumption of guerrilla warfare in Laos was primarily a reaction to a stronger anti-Communist posture by the Laotian government and to recent US initiatives in support of Laos." Special National Intelligence Estimate 68-2-59, "The Situation in Laos," September 18, 1959, declassified May 2001, CIA/CREST.

"The suitcase contained money": John Gunther Dean oral history, FAOH.

a roulette wheel: James interview with author.

"That was the real go-ahead": William Lair oral history, Vietnam Archive Oral History Project, Texas Tech University, interview conducted by Steve Maxner, December 11, 2001. Used with the kind permission of Mr. Maxner and the archive.

double its tribal forces in Laos and "make every possible effort to launch guerrilla operations in North Vietnam": The latter order is in the Pentagon Papers, United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967, Vol. 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972), p. 18. The former is in a Special Group memo reprinted in FRUS, Vol. XXVIII: "The genesis of this program stems from high level U.S. Government approval in late 1960 and early 1961 [for] CIA [to] enlist tribal support to fight communism. The main effort in this program has been development of the Meo, the largest non-Lao ethnic group in Laos.... As authorized by the Special Group in June 1963, this program has expanded to a present force of approximately 19,000 armed Meo guerrillas (23,000 authorized) engaged in village defense and guerrilla activities against the Pathet Lao."

"the ignorance and the arrogance": Richard L. Holm, "Recollections of a Case Officer in Laos, 1962 to 1964," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2003, CIA/CSI.

"the activisits were all for a war in Laos": There was a great debate inside CIA headquarters about the wisdom of a war in Laos. "The Agency was very badly split," said Robert Amory, Jr., the deputy director of intelligence from 1953 to 1962. "The activists were all for a war in Laos. They thought that was a great place to have a war.... Fitzgerald was very strong forit." Amory was not, and he soon resigned, but not before he helped draft President Kennedy's first major national television address, on the subject of Laos, on March 23, 1961. The president could not or would not pronounce the nation's name correctly; he thought no one would care for a country called "Louse." He said LAY-os was threatened by communist forces within and without, including combat specialists from North Vietnam. "Its own safety runs with the safety of us all," he told the nation. "In real neutrality, observed by all. All we want in Laos is peace, not war."

The Americans sent to Vietnam had an equally profound ignorance of the country's history and culture: Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the United States Army in Vietnam, 1941-1960, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1985), pp. x, xi. "Added to this propensity to try to make something out of nothing was an American ignorance of Vietnamese history and society so massive and all-encompassing that two decades of federally funded fellowships, crash language programs, television specials, and campus teach-ins made hardly a dent," Spector wrote. "Before the United States sets out to make something out of nothing in some other corner of the globe, American leaders might consider the historical and social factors involved."

"They had everything they wanted": Neher oral history, FAOH.

Project Tiger: The author described the fate of the CIA's Vietnamese agents in "Once Commandos for U.S., Vietnamese Are Now Barred," The New York Times, April 14, 1995. Hanoi's double-crossing of the CIA from 1961 to 1963 is definitively detailed in Richard H. Schultz, Jr., The Secret War Against Hanoi: Kennedy's and Johnson's Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1999). Schultz, director of international security studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, conducted extensive oral history interviews and reviewed declassified documents for the book.

"We harvested a lot of lies": Barbour oral history, FAOH.

In October 1961, President Kennedy sent: The sprawl of the CIA's paramilitary forces in the region at the time was impressive, as detailed by General Lansdale in a report to the White House. In Vietnam, CIA officers commanded 340 South Vietnamese soldiers of the First Observation Group, created by the agency in 1956 and trained to kill Vietcong infiltrators in the south, the north, and Laos. From Taiwan, Civil Air Transport, the CIA airline, flew hundreds of missions a year in Laos and Vietnam; the Chinese Nationalist army and the CIA trained hundreds of Vietnamese to serve as paramilitary officers. In Thailand, Bill Lair's own paramilitary forces stood at 550 trained Thai officers. At Fort McKinley outside Manila, the CIA ran a sprawling school for Filipino soldiers to fight communism throughout Asia. Hundreds more trainees from all across the region were being sent to the CIA base on the island of Saipan.

"the sending to Vietnam of some U.S. military forces": That secret was very deep indeed. The author obtained a unique copy of Taylor's full and uncensored report to the president from the CIA's archives in September 2005. It was the personal copy of Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Charles Pearre Cabell. Cabell had highlighted the sentence and written in the margins of his copy, To CIA readers: This concept must be kept very secure. CPC.

"Nobody liked Diem": Robert F. Kennedy oral history, JFKL, collected in Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman (eds.), Robert Kennedy, in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 396.

"Diem himself cannot be preserved": Telegram from the Department of State to the embassy in Vietnam, Washington, August 24, 1963, 9:36 p.m., FRUS, Vol. III.

"I should not have given my consent to it": JFK Tapes, November 4, 1963, JFKL.

the president had ordered Diem ousted: On Saturday evening, August 23, 1963, when JFK decided to topple Diem, the news from Vietnam was grim. South Vietnamese commandos trained by the CIA were killing Buddhist protestors, the president's daily brief from the CIA that morning noted, and "Nhu told a U.S. source yesterday that the generals recommended the imposition of martial law. [Nhu] denied this amounted to a coup, but warned it could become one if Diem vacillated or compromised on the Buddhist issue." FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. III, document 271. If Kennedy read this, he would have been encouraged to approve the Hilsman cable authorizing a move against Diem. The history of the Hilsman cable has been well established by declassified State Department records in the FRUS Vietnam series. McCone told Dwight Eisenhower that the president's casual approval of the uncoordinated cable was "one of the government's greatest errors" to date--a high standard. The former president was furious. Where was the National Security Council? What was the State Department doing running coups? McCone replied that Kennedy was surrounded by "liberals in his government who want to reform every country" in the world. Well, Eisenhower shot back, who appointed those damned liberals? The old general "expressed much concern over the future of the United States." McCone memo, "Conference with Former President Eisenhower," September 19, 1963, DDEL.

Helms handed the assignment to Bill Colby, the new chief of the CIA's Far East division: It is a terrible irony that Colby--who in a 1982 oral history for the LBJ Library said that "the overthrow of Diem was the worst mistake we made"--may well have planted a seed for it in an August 16, 1963, memo to Helms, Roger Hilsman at State, and Michael Forrestal at NSC. It weighed the chances for a "successful coup d'etat" and noted that "assassination may be an integral part of projected coups or may be done in hope that something better will somehow emerge from the resulting chaotic situation."

"songs they may sing": Colby cited in Harold Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, 1996, CIA/CSI, available at http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/ vietnam/epis1.hmtl. Ford was for many years a senior CIA analyst on Vietnam.

At the White House, Helms listened: Helms was at the White House meeting at noon on August 29, 1963, with the president, McNamara, and Rusk, among a dozen other top officials. The note taker recorded that Ambassador Lodge had already instructed the CIA's Rufus Phillips "to tell the Vietnamese generals that the U.S. Ambassador is behind the CIA approach." The message to the generals was that the CIA, the embassy, and the White House spoke with one voice. "The President asked whether anyone had any reservations about the course of action we were following," and Rusk and McNamara did. The president then decided that "Ambassador Lodge is to have authority over all overt and covert operations" in Vietnam. A personal, eyes-only cable went out to Lodge reserving presidential command over those covert operations. Memorandum of conference with the president, August 29, 1963, National Security file, JFKL. Lodge's job was to make sure that the American hand would not show. "I received my instructions from Ambassador Lodge," Conein testified. "If they were cabled instructions, he had a very good habit of not reading something. He would fold a piece of paper and what pertained to you for instructions, he would let you read that, and that alone, so you didn't know who was sending it or where it came from.... 'Those are the instructions, do you understand them?' 'Yes, sir.' 'All right, go carry them out.'" On the president's desire for secrecy, see Bundy to Lodge, October 5, 1963, FRUS, Vol. IV.

"CIA has more money; bigger houses than diplomats; bigger salaries; more weapons; more modern equipment": The clash between Lodge and Richardson is poignantly recorded in John H. Richardson, My Father the Spy: AFamily History of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Sixties (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).

Lodge decided he wanted a new station chief: Specifically, he wanted General Ed Lansdale, the ugly American. Absolutely not, said McCone, who had "no confidence in him at all. They could replace Richardson if Lodge wants it but not someone from the outside." Memorandum of telephone conversation between the secretary of state and the director of central intelligence, September 17, 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. IV, document 120.

"exposed him, and gave his name publicly to the newspapers": RFK oral history, JFKL; Guthman and Shulman, Robert Kennedy, in His Own Words, p. 398. The burning of a station chief by an ambassador was unprecedented in the history of the CIA. McCone sent a four-page briefing paper to President Kennedy the day before the president had a scheduled press conference on October 9, 1963, defending the CIA against the fury Lodge's leaks had set in motion. "You will undoubtedly be asked about CIA's role in Vietnam," McCone wrote. "The criticism which has found its way into hundreds of news articles and editorials is seriously eroding the spirit of this organization which I have now spent two years trying to rekindle." The president hewed closely to McCone's briefing in his answers to the press.

"We were fortunate": Tran Van Don, Our Endless War (San Francisco: Presidio, 1978), pp. 96-99.

"against the assassination plot," "supporting assassination," and if I were the manager of a baseball team: Church Committee, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Report, U.S. Senate, 94th Congress, 1st Session, 1975.

"a complete lack of intelligence," "exceedingly dangerous," and "absolute disaster for the United States": McCone memos, "Special Group 5412 Meeting," October 18, 1963, and "Discussion with the President--October 21," CIA/CREST. See also Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers.

"We should not thwart a coup": Lodge to Bundy and McCone, October 25, 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. IV, document 216. By then it was too late. On October 29, McCone, Helms, and Colby arrived at the White House for a 4:20 p.m. meeting with the president, his brother, and the entire national-security team. Colby presented a detailed military map showing that Diem's strength and the coup leaders' forces were evenly divided. So were the president's men. The State Department was in favor, the military and McCone opposed. But the White House had set in motion a force it could not stop.

"money and weapons": Don, Our Endless War, pp. 96-99.

"Diem looked at me quizzically and said, 'Is there going to be a coup against me?'": Phillips oral history, FAOH.

The coup struck on November 1: Conein's account here comes from his declassified Church Committee testimony; the cable traffic is reproduced in FRUS. Conein said that Nhu had arranged with the military commander of the Saigon military district to stage a fake Vietcong uprising in Saigon. The plan included the assassination of key American officials. Nhu then planned to send troops from the commander's contingent to put down the fake revolt and save Vietnam. But the commander told the coup plotters about Nhu's plans. As Conein put it, the rebel generals "double bumped" Nhu: when the real coup began, Nhu thought it was his fake coup. According to the Church Committee, Conein passed three million piasters ($42,000) to an aide of General Don's late on the morning of November 1 to procure food for the coup forces and to pay death benefits for those killed during the coup. Conein said in his testimony the sum he took from his house was five million piasters, or about $70,000. Colby said it was $65,000.

the president leaped to his feet and "rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay": General Maxwell D. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares: A Memoir (New York: Da Capo, 1990), p. 301. The White House-Saigon cables cited in this passage are reprinted in full in FRUS, Vol. IV.

"'Hey, boss, we did a good job, didn't we?'": Rosenthal oral history, FAOH.

 

Chapter Twenty-one

In 1975, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (hereinafter the "Church Committee") convened under the chairmanship of Senator Frank Church. Its investigators demanded and received depositions taken in secret, and later took limited public testimony. The work of lasting value was in the secret files.

This chapter is based in part on recently declassified testimony delivered by senior CIA officers--among them Richard Helms, John Whitten (identified by the alias "John Scelso"), and James J. Angleton. They gave secret depositions to the Church Committee in 1976 and to a follow-up investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 (hereinafter "HSCA"). Helms, McCone, Angleton, and others also testified before the Rockefeller Commission created by President Ford in 1975. The release of these transcripts twenty and twenty-five years after the fact sheds new light on what the CIA was thinking after the assassination, on its own investigation of the killing, and on its failure to fully inform the Warren Commission.

The depositions were declassified between 1998 and 2004 under the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act passed by Congress in 1992. Many have been published on a CD-ROM as Assassination Transcripts of the Church Committee, available online at http://www.history-matters.com. The work of the CIA's John Whitten investigating the Kennedy assassination for the agency was located at the JFK Library by the journalist Jefferson Morley in his research for a forthcoming biography of the Mexico City station chief Win Scott. He graciously shared copies with the author in 2006. That work is hereinafter cited as "Whitten report."

"I'm sure glad the Secret Service didn't catch us": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 227-229.

"What raced through my mind": LBJ, telephone conversation with Bill Moyers, December 26, 1966, LBJL. Many of Lyndon Johnson's White House tapes related to the Kennedy assassination have been collected, edited, annotated, and published by Max Holland in The Kennedy Assassination Tapes (New York: Knopf, 2004). Citations from that work are hereinafter "LBJ Tapes/Holland."

"Tragic death of President Kennedy": Helms, A Look over My Shoulder, p. 229.

"Mexico had the biggest and most active telephone intercept operations in the whole world": Whitten deposition, 1978.

"CIA had no sources": Whitten report, undated but December 1963, CIA/JFKL.

he was enraged: McCone's 11:30 p.m. meeting on November 22, 1963, included Deputy Director Carter, Richard Helms, and the agency's chief administrative officer, Red White, who recorded in his office diary that McCone had taken General Carter and "'wire-brushed' him thoroughly, had expressed himself as being most dissatisfied with the way the Agency was being managed." L. K. White diary, November 23, 1963, CIA/CREST.

"the most bitter feelings": Whitten gave his professional biography and described his run-ins with Angleton in both his 1976 and 1978 depositions; the quotation is from the latter.

"His having been to the Cuban and Soviet embassies": Helms deposition, August 9, 1978, House Special Committee on Assassinations. Top Secret, declassified May 1, 2001.

McCone...broke the news of the Cuban connection: McCone memo, November 24, 1963, CIA/CREST; LBJ and Eisenhower conversation, August 27, 1965, LBJ Tapes/Holland.

"this assassin": LBJ to Weisl, November 23, 1963, LBJ Tapes/Holland.

He had talked face-to-face: The innocent explanation was that Soviet intelligence officers in Mexico City were filling their cover roles as visa officers by day, just as CIA officers did in embassies worldwide. In a memoir, the Soviet intelligence officer Oleg Nechiporenko said he first overheard and then witnessed Oswald pleading for a visa in his barely passable Russian. He appeared to want to go to Cuba to save both himself and Fidel Castro from the forces of American intelligence: "Oswald was extremely agitated and clearly nervous, especially whenever he mentioned the FBI, but he suddenly became hysterical, began to sob, and through his tears cried, 'I am afraid...they'll kill me. Let me in!' Repeating over and over that he was being persecuted and that he was being followed even here in Mexico, he stuck his right hand into the left pocket of his jacket and pulled out a revolver, saying, 'See? This is what I must now carry to protect my life.'" Nechiporenko, Passport to Assassination: The Never-Before-Told Story of Lee Harvey Oswald by the KGB Colonel Who Knew Him (Secaucus, NJ: Birch Lane, 1993).

The station sent headquarters a list: The sequence of events, first raising the question of whether Cubela might be a double agent, is reconstructed in "The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Performance of the Intelligence Agencies," Church Committee staff report, 1975, declassified in 2000.

Dulles immediately called James Angleton: Angleton deposition, 1978, HSCA.

"Helms realized that disclosing the assassination plots would reflect very poorly on the Agency": Whitten testimony, 1976.

"We were treading very lightly": Helms testimony, August 1978, HSCA.

"gross incompetency" and "a direct admission": Hoover and DeLoach cited in "The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy." This secret Senate staff report, declassified in 2000, twenty-five years after it was conducted, found that the evidence "tends to impeach the process by which the intelligence community provided information to the Warren Commission." It concluded: "There is doubt as to whether these agencies can ever be relied upon to investigate their own operations and their own performance in critical situations."

"Dozens of people were claiming that they had seen Oswald here, there, and everywhere": Whitten testimony, 1976.

"We would have seen it more sharply": This and all other quotations from Angleton in this chapter are from his deposition before the HSCA, October 5, 1978, declassified 1998.

"I'd like to talk to you": Mark told of his encounter with Nosenko, a previously unpublished account, in a State Department oral history, FAOH.

Much was lost in translation: For example, Nosenko said an army sergeant at the American embassy in Moscow whom he identified as a spy for the KGB worked as "a code machine repairman." This later came out in English as "a mechanic," as in garage mechanic. When Nosenko tried to correct the record, he was accused of changing his story.

"a great deal had gone wrong on his watch": A formal acknowledgment of that fact finally appeared in 2006. See "The Angleton Era in CIA," in A Counterintelligence Reader, Vol. 3, Chap. 2, pp. 109-115, available online at http://www.ncix.gov/history/index.html.

the CIA threw Nosenko into solitary confinement: The case was chronicled years later by two senior CIA officers: Richards J. Heuer, Jr., "Nosenko: Five Paths to Judgment," Studies in Intelligence, Fall 1987, CIA/CSI; and John Limond Hart, The CIA's Russians(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002), pp. 128-160.

"I recognized we couldn't keep him in durance vile": Helms interview, Studies in Intelligence, December 1993, CIA/CSI.

seven major studies of the case: In 1976, the CIA's John Limond Hart was called out of retirement to re-investigate the Nosenko case. Hart had uncovered the deceptions of his predecessor as the chief of station in Seoul, Al Haney, nearly a quarter century before. He had gone on to a distinguished career--chief of station in Saigon, chief of foreign intelligence collection in China and Cuba, and chief of operations for Western Europe. He had known Angleton since 1948, when they served in Rome together--when the CIA won the Italian elections, the cold war was new, and Angleton still sane. The two men sat down for a four-hour interview on the case of Yuri Nosenko in 1976. When Hart read the transcript the next day, the words made no sense at all. "Perhaps because of his legendary thirst," Hart wrote, "Angleton's muddled mind by then had become a grab bag of haphazard minutiae, much of it totally irrelevant." Hart pronounced the Nosenko case "an abomination," the worst thing he had ever encountered in a lifetime of intelligence work. Hart, The CIA's Russians.

 

Chapter Twenty-Two

"a goddamn bunch of thugs": LBJ to Senator Eugene McCarthy, February 1, 1966, available online at http://www.whitehousetapes.org/clips/1966_0201_lbj_mccarthy_vietnam.html. LBJ expressed his "divine retribution" theory--"that because President Kennedy had been in a sense responsible for Diem's demise, he in turn was assassinated himself," as Richard Helms remembered--at a December 19, 1963, meeting with Mc-Cone, Helms, and Desmond FitzGerald. LBJ repeated this to Hubert Humphrey, who would be his vice president; Ralph Duggan, a White House aide; and Pierre Salinger, a Kennedy press secretary.

"The Attorney General intended to stay on": McCone memo, "Discussion with the President, 13 December--9:30 a.m.," declassified October 2002, CIA/CREST. McCone's memo continued: "I explained to the President that I had told Bobby he could not bring back the intimacy of the relationship with the President which he had had with his brother because that was a blood relationship, not an official relationship. A type of relationship which is seldom found between brothers and never found between officials, either in business or government." It was not found between the new president and his attorney general. Bobby could not stand to be in the White House with Johnson. "He's mean, bitter, vicious--an animal in many ways," he said a few months later, in the April 1964 oral history, for the Kennedy Library.

"'change the image of the CIA'": McCone memos, December 28, 1963; January 13, 1964; and February 20, 1964. The president was worried about his own image. He was discomfited by the publication of The Invisible Government, the first serious best seller examining the CIA and its relationship with the White House. It revealed the existence of the Special Group, the committee of top CIA, State, Pentagon, and White House men who approved covert action--and it made clear that presidents ultimately controlled those secret missions. The chairman of the Special Group, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, thought it might be best to change its name. After rejecting suggestions from his staff--among them "the Invisible Group"--he issued National Security Action Memorandum 303, changing the name to the 303 Committee.
The committee's declassified records show that the CIA undertook 163 major covert operations, slightly fewer than five each month, under President Kennedy. Under President Johnson, 142 new major covert operations were launched through February 1967, slightly fewer than four each month. The members' deliberations often were pro forma. In the course of a few spring days in 1964, they approved a shipment of arms for the military coup that overthrew the government of Brazil--"we don't want to watch Brazil dribble down the drain while we stand around waiting for the next election"--and sent an extra $1.25 million to swing the presidential ballot in Chile--"no problem, since we could get more if needed." President Johnson rarely sought the details of such decisions, though they had the imprimatur of his office.

"extremely worried": McCone memo, "DCI Briefing of CIA Subcommittees of Senate Armed Services and Senate Appropriations Committees, Friday, 10 January 1964," declassified December 15, 2004, CIA/CREST; Harold Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, 1996, CIA/CSI, available online at http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/vietnam/epis1.html. "The President should be informed that this is not the greatest thing since peanut butter": McCone, Helms, and Lyman Kirkpatrick cited in William Colby, memorandum for the record, "Meeting on North Vietnam," January 9, 1964, CIA/CREST.

"highly dissatisfied": McCone memos, April 22 and 29, 1964, and October 22, 1964, CIA/CREST; the latter also appears in FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, document 219. It is worth quoting, for it shows that President Johnson and John McCone had never had a substantial conversation about the CIA: "On 22 October I prepared to depart with Mrs. McCone to attend the funeral of Herbert Hoover, Sr. I was called by the White House and advised that the President requested specifically that we accompany him.... While traveling with the President I was able to discuss a number of matters with him. The principal items were: The President stated that he did not know too much about CIA's organization.... I emphasized the objectivity of the organization, the fact it had no parochial 'axe to grind' in any field most particularly those relating to foreign policy and defense policy. The Agency looked upon its responsibility as that of collecting intelligence by every possible means and evaluating our own intelligence and that gathered by all other Community members carefully and objectively. The President asked the size of the organization. I told him our budget was about [deleted] and said we had about [deleted] employees. He asked about the future outlook. I said that I thought the organization was pretty well shaking down, the five-year forecast indicated no increases in personnel and the increases in the budget were minimal and attributable largely to the wages and salary increases and other escalations. I said this resulted from very careful management and that we hope to 'hold the line' unless new tasks were assigned to the Agency. This would necessitate additional people and money. The President asked what part of our budget went for operational activities such as political action, paramilitary, etc., and I said about [deleted]. This was the first opportunity I have had to discuss the Agency with the President. I thought he was interested and impressed." McCone memo, "Discussion with the President--22 October 1964," emphasis added.
McCone tried to make the president pay attention to the fact that the fate of nations could turn on a successful trick of espionage. He had a couple of stories to tell, the best of which was this: a young station chief by the name of Clair George, posted in Bamako, Mali, one of the world's most obscure capitals, got a tip from a member of the host government in 1964. The African official said he had heard from a diplomat at the Chinese embassy that Beijing would conduct its first nuclear test in a matter of weeks. The report went straight to CIA headquarters. An early spy satellite looked down on the preparations at the test site in China. Mc-Cone personally took charge of the analysis. "We knew what they were doing," he recalled in an oral history for the LBJ Library. "Hard intelligence."
McCone told the White House and American allies that the Chinese would test a nuclear weapon within thirty to sixty days: "And on the thirty-first day they exploded the bomb. They made a prophet out of me." This intelligence coup began with news from nowhere--the capital of Mali. After that, Clair George was a made man. Twenty years later he became chief of the clandestine service. But McCone had far too few such success stories.

the new Defense Intelligence Agency: The DIA was "a perfect example of how not to create a government agency," said Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who served as its vice director in the mid-1970s before running the NSA and serving, briefly, as deputy director of central intelligence. Bobby R. Inman, "Managing Intelligence for Effective Use," Center for Information Policy Research, Harvard University, December 1980.

"take NRO and shove it": Transcript of telephone conversation between Director of Central Intelligence McCone and the assistant secretary of defense, February 13, 1964, FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, declassified 2004.

a highly detailed confession: Robert J. Hanyok, "Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964," Cryptologic Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 4/Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter 2000/Spring 2001, declassified November 2005. The quarterly is an official and highly classified NSA publication.

the American destroyers sent a flash message that they were under attack: Eight hours later, President Johnson asked McCone: "Do they want a war by attacking our ships in the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin?" McCone answered: "No. The North Vietnamese are reacting defensively to our attacks on their off-shore islands. They are responding out of pride."

"McNamara had taken over raw SIGINT": Ray Cline oral history, LBJL.

"shooting at flying fish": Hanyok, "Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish."

 

Chapter Twenty-Three

"Vietnam was my nightmare": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 309-311.

"our ignorance--or innocence": Helms oral history, September 16, 1981, LBJL.

"'Coward! Traitor! Weakling!'": LBJ quoted in Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), pp. 251-252.

"Counterinsurgency became an almost ridiculous battle cry": Amory oral history, JFKL.

"What we needed...were people who could shoot guns": Robert F. Kennedy oral history, May 14, 1964, JFKL, collected in Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman (eds.), Robert Kennedy, in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years(New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 310. President Kennedy established the Special Group (Counterinsurgency) on January 18, 1962, under National Security Action Memorandum 124. RFK led it--despite McCone's warning that it would be "an embarrassment for Bobby if it became known the Attorney General was running dirty tricks in favor of the counterinsurgency committee"--and created a great grab bag of worldwide programs in its name.

"Our Counterinsurgency Experiment and Its Implications": De Silva to Colby, undated, forwarded from Colby to McCone via Helms ("Subject: Saigon Station Experiment in Counterinsurgency"), November 16, 1964; with Marshall Carter's covering memo ("McCone's War"), declassified May 29, 2003, CIA/CREST.

"if South Vietnam fell": "DCI Briefing for CIA Subcommittee of House Appropriations Committee, December 5, 1963," declassified March 15, 2004, CIA/CREST.

"VC may be the wave of the future": McCone cited in Harold Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, 1996, CIA/CSI, available online at http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/vietnam/epis1.html.

"the Vietcong use of terror": Peer de Silva, Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 1978), pp. 220-254.

The corruption of intelligence: George W. Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), pp. 188-194.

"My world turned to glue": De Silva, Sub Rosa, p. 256.

"There must be somebody out there that's got enough brains": LBJ Tapes, March 30, 1965, 9:12 a.m., LBJL.

"increasing pressure to stop the bombing" and "mired down in combat in the jungle": McCone memos, April 2 and 20, 1965, LBJL. See also Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers.

"Let me tell you about these intelligence guys": Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 566. The source of this story was Richard Helms. Helms remembered it vividly as Johnson's statement to John McCloy at a dinner in the White House residence. It certainly sounds like LBJ.

 

Chapter Twenty-Four

"light the fuse": LBJ Tapes/Holland, April 2, 1965.

"close up the place and give it to the Indians": Carter, memorandum for the record, April 2, 1965, CIA, FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXXIII, declassified 2004.

"Now, I need you," Lyndon Johnson said: Transcript of telephone conversation between President Johnson and Admiral Raborn, April 6, 1965, 4:26 p.m., FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, declassified 2004, LBJL.

"Our CIA says": LBJ Tapes, April 30, 1965, 10:50 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.

"You don't think CIA can document it?": LBJ Tapes, April 30, 1965, 5:05 p.m.

"It was tragic": Ray Cline, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA (Washington, DC: Acropolis, 1976), pp. 211-212.

"Poor old Raborn": James Hanrahan, "An Interview with Former CIA Executive Director Lawrence K. 'Red' White," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 43, No. 1, Winter 1999/2000, CIA/CSI.

"If you ever decide to get rid of him, you just put that fellow Helms in there": Transcript of telephone conversation between the president and Russell, 8 p.m., September 14, 1965, FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, declassified 2004, LBJL.

"You think that we can really beat the Vietcong out there?": LBJ Tapes, July 2, 1965.

"as invisible as possible": William Lair oral history, Vietnam Archive Oral History Project, Texas Tech University, interview conducted by Steve Maxner, December 11, 2001. Used with the kind permission of Mr. Maxner and the archive.

"We saw some of our young guys killed": Lilley oral history, FAOH.

Colby was disheartened: Colby to Helms, August 16, 1966, FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXVIII. The memo describes Colby's impressions during his October 1965 tour.

"No one was talking theory here": The Shackley account is from his posthumous memoir, written with Richard A. Finney, Spymaster: My Life in the CIA (Dulles, VA: Potomac, 2005).

"an exemplary success story": Memorandum from the Central Intelligence Agency to the 303 Committee, September 8, 1966, FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXVIII, document 248.

Wild Bill Donovan: Donovan began his stint as ambassador by reviving the disastrous Li Mi operation. The defeated Chinese Nationalist forces had settled into the Golden Triangle, in the hills of eastern Burma, the northern borderlands of Thailand, and the western edge of Laos. They had become an aggressive occupying force running an international opium trade. Donovan saw them as freedom fighters, and he plunged into their cause, "providing supplies while denying publicly that there was any U.S. involvement," said Kempton B. Jenkins, then a State Department political officer in Bangkok. A sham evacuation of the Li Mi forces, overseen by Donovan, looked impressive--CIA pilots flew 1,925 men and boys out of the Golden Triangle to Taiwan--but thousands of men remained. Instead of fighting communists, they set about cornering the opium market, building refineries to make morphine, and shipping the drugs down to Bangkok. Jenkins provides a detailed look at Donovan's liaisons with the Thai police and military. Jenkins oral history, FAOH. See also Frank C. Darling, Thailand and the United States (Washington, DC: Public Affairs, 1965), for a look at the beginnings of CIA involvement in the region after the Korean war. The expanding power of the CIA's Laos station in the 1950s is well described in the FAOH oral histories of John Gunther Dean, L. Michael Rives, and Christian A. Chapman, all of whom served at the American embassy there.

"Money was no object": Thomas oral history, FAOH.

"financing of a political party, electoral support for this party, and support for selected candidates for parliament from the party"...to continue "the leadership and control of the present ruling group" and "to ensure that the party created is successful in winning a comfortable and commanding majority in elections": These goals are set out in the CIA's memorandum prepared for the 303 Committee, September 28, 1965, and 303 Committee minutes, October 8, 1965. FRUS, Vol. XXVII.

The CIA had warned: On March 5, 1965, in a discussion of ongoing covert action in Indonesia, a senior CIA officer told the 303 Committee that "the loss of a nation of 105 million to the 'Communist camp' would make a victory in Vietnam of little meaning." 303 Committee minutes, March 5, 1965. A separate CIA memorandum for the 303 Committee, dated February 23, 1965, lays out the developing covert-action program in Indonesia: "Since the summer of 1964, [deleted, but probably the Indonesia station and/or Colby's Far East division] has worked with the Department of State in formulating concepts and developing an operational program of political action in Indonesia.... The main thrust of this program is designed to exploit factionalism within the PKI itself, to emphasize traditional Indonesian distrust of Mainland China and to portray the PKI as an instrument of Red Chinese imperialism. Specific types of activity envisaged include covert liaison with and support to existing anti-Communist groups.... [Ongoing covert programs include] political action within existing Indonesian organizations and institutions [and] covert training of selected personnel and civilians, who will be placed in key positions....[Among the goals is to] cultivate potential leaders within Indonesia for the purpose of ensuring an orderly non-Communist succession upon Sukarno's death or removal from office." The 303 Committee records are in FRUS, Vol. XXVI.

"I recruited and ran Adam Malik": McAvoy interview with author. The documentation on the CIA's role in Indonesia, including the December 2, 1965, cable from Green to Bundy detailing a CIA payment to Adam Malik, is in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXVI, pp. 338-380. The volume was officially suppressed by the CIA and withdrawn from circulation--but not before some copies were printed, bound, and shipped. The National Security Archive posted the relevant pages in July 2001. The author's interview with McAvoy took place by telephone from McAvoy's home in Hawaii. McAvoy's crucial role as a CIA officer in Indonesia was confirmed by three of his contemporaries at the agency.

"in a clandestine setting": Green oral history, FAOH.

"It was certainly not a death list": Martens oral history, FAOH.

Ambassador Green later told Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey...that "300,000 to 400,000 people were slain": Memorandum of conversation, February 17, 1967; LBJ Oval Office meeting with Adam Malik, memorandum of conversation, September 27, 1966; both in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXVI.

"I think we would up that estimate to perhaps close to 500,000 people": Green testimony, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, January 30, 1967, declassified March 2007.

"We didn't create the waves": Green oral history, FAOH.

"deeply troubled about the leadership problem in CIA": Bundy to LBJ, "Subject: The CIA," citing a conversation with Clifford, January 26, 1966.

a long list of his accomplishments: Raborn to Moyers, February 14, 1966.

"totally oblivious": LBJ to Bundy, February 22, 1966, LBJ Tapes, All cited in FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, and declassified in 2004.

The committee got back to work in May: NSC memo to LBJ, March 24, 1966; undated memo for the deputy director of central intelligence, "The 303 Committee, Senior Interdepartmental Group and the Interdepartmental Regional Groups" "Coordination and Policy Approval of Covert Operations," February 23, 1967, CIA. All cited in FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, and declassified in 2004. The 1967 document on covert action is a uniquely detailed record. It listed major covert actions to date, showing the refinement of executive control over the CIA:

 

Projects approved by DCI on internal authority: (1949-1952)--81--Truman Administration

Projects approved by DCI in coordination with Operations Coordination Board or Psychological Strategy Board: (1953-1954)--66--Eisenhower Administration

Projects approved or reconfirmed by Operations Coordination Board, the Special Group or 303 Committee:

Eisenhower Administration--104

Kennedy Administration--163

Johnson Administration--142

Chapter Twenty-five

"a circus rider": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 311.

"We knew then...that we could not win the war": Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), pp. 20-22.

"This Agency is going flat out" and "the war is by no means over": Memorandum by the chief of the Far East Division, Central Intelligence Agency, July 25, 1967, FRUS, Vol. V.

"Stop the buildup": George W. Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), pp. 213-219. Allen wrote that the aim of the administration was to use manufactured intelligence for "opinion manipulation and political persuasion, with the aim of altering perceptions to make them coincide with certain notions, whether those notions were supportable by evidence or not." The practices he identified--the falsification of secret intelligence to control public perception and to manufacture political support--may sound familiar to many Americans today. Of course, there were built-in biases in the agency's reporting from Saigon, and these did not go unnoticed. In the summer of 1967, the question was whether Thieu or Ky would be South Vietnam's next president. The ultimate choice lay with the Vietnamese military command. The CIA maintained that the commanders would choose Ky. State Department officers in Saigon, including John Negroponte, the future czar of American intelligence, were certain it would be Thieu. "John told me later that the last report from the CIA--still predicting Ky--was filed just at the time that Ambassador Lodge was called to a meeting with the military command at which he was told that its candidate would be Thieu," recalled the State Department's Robert Oakley. "CIA had had a very close relationship with Ky for a long time; so they had a bias in his favor which undoubtedly colored their reporting." Oakley oral history, FAOH.

On September 19, McNamara telephoned the president: LBJ Tapes, September 19, 1966, transcribed in FRUS, Vol. IV.

"You guys simply have to back off," Komer told Carver: Komer's comments and the correspondence between Helms and Carver are in a full set of declassified cables between CIA headquarters and the Saigon station covering the order of battle controversy as it happened in September 1967, CIA/CREST.

"We believe that Communist progress": NIE 53-63, cited in Harold P. Ford, "Why CIA Analysts Were So Doubtful About Vietnam," Studies in Intelligence, 1997, CIA/CSI.

"The compelling proposition": John Huizenga, "Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam," September 11, 1967, CIA/CREST, with Helms's covering memo, declassified in 2004. Huizenga was chief of the CIA's Office of National Estimates staff, and later the director of the office.

 

Chapter Twenty-six

"over CIA involvement": "Problem of Expose of CIA Clandestine Youth and Student Activities," undated but February 1967, CIA/FOIA.

"LBJ left me the responsibility of pulling the Agency's scorched chestnuts out of the fire": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 345. A May 19, 1966, memo from Helms to Moyers at the White House detailing the personal and professional lives of Ramparts editors and reporters was declassified on November 13, 2006. Such reporting was arguably outside the CIA's charter.

Since 1961, Secretary of State Rusk had been warning: Rusk had asked the Special Group to address the following problems in a December 9, 1961, memo: "I. CIA now provides certain support to private organizations of an educational or philanthropic nature. 2. These covert funds become the subject of common gossip, or knowledge, both here and abroad. 3. Covert funds draw suspicion upon the organizations concerned and, indeed, may bar them from entry into certain countries. 4. Covert funds scare away funds from other sources which do not wish to become involved with CIA-type activities or purposes. 5. In most cases, there is no need to conceal that funds are being provided by the U.S. Government. 6. Every effort should be made to move from covert to overt support.... 7. What can be done about this in connection with such organizations as (a) Asia Foundation, (b) African student activities and (c) possibly others?" FRUS, Vol. XXV. The 303 Committee, meeting on June 21, 1968, to address the Asia Foundation problem, noted that "no one can accurately predict what, if any, federal monies will be allocated" to replace the CIA's subsidy. Nevertheless, "if there were deep sighs for the good old days of straight covert funding, they were not audible due to the hum of the air conditioner in the White House Situation Room." FRUS, Vol. X.

"We lack adequate detail": Memo from the Deputy Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research to the Deputy Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, February 15, 1967, FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, declassified 2004.

an hour-long off-the-record conversation: Pearson's papers are at the LBJ Library. His work appeared in more than six hundred American newspapers with a combined circulation of fifty million readers. Lyndon Johnson had a pew in the church of his heart roped off for Pearson, who had publicly supported his run for the Democratic nomination for president in 1960.

"This story going around about the CIA": LBJ Tapes/Holland, February 20, 1967.

"an irreducible minimum": Thomas Hughes, draft revision of NSC 5412, dated April 17, 1967, and discussed May 5, 1967, FRUS, Vol. XXXIII.

"ability to keep former employees quiet": Russell cited in "Briefing by the Director of CIA Subcommittees of the Senate Armed Services and Appropriations," May 23, 1967, declassified March 4, 2001, CIA/CREST.

what to do with Harvey: James Hanrahan, "An Interview with Former CIA Executive Director Lawrence K. 'Red' White," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 43, No. 1, Winter 1999/2000, CIA/CSI. 274 "his extreme bitterness toward the Agency": Osborn to Earman, memorandum for the record, October 4, 1967, CIA/FOIA.

"Angleton by the mid-1960s": Robert M. Hathaway and Russell Jack Smith, "Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence," 1993, CIA/CSI, declassified February 2007.

"a man of loose and disjointed thinking": John L. Hart, "The Monster Plot: Counterintelligence in the Case of Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko," December 1976, CIA/CSI.

"Loyal Agency employees had come under suspicion": Hathaway and Smith, "Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence," p. 124.

"we are deluding ourselves" and "paralysis of our Soviet effort": McCoy memos to Helms cited in Hathaway and Smith, "Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence," p. 108.

"one scrap of supportive evidence": Kingsley oral history interview, June 14, 1984, CIA, cited in Hathaway and Smith, "Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence," p. 123.

"Jim was a man obsessed": Taylor interview by Hart, in "The Monster Plot," CIA/CSI.

"The subsequent accuracy of this prediction": Hathaway and Smith, "Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence, p. 127.

"intelligence had a role in his life": Helms oral history interview, April 21, 1982, cited in Hathaway and Smith, "Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence," p. 143. The CIA history provides a fascinating footnote to the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967: "James Angleton found himself increasingly disturbed by the prospect of an endless cycle of war and more war in the Middle East. With this in mind he composed what those who saw it remember as an eloquent plea for some dramatic move to break through this destructive pattern. In a blind memo [to Helms, Angleton proposed] an anti-Soviet alliance consisting of Israel and some of the conservative Arab states such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The whole thing depended on urgency, Angleton continued; the longer Israel occupied the territories captured from the Arabs, the less willing Tel Aviv would be to give them up. [A deleted section of the history evidently discusses the crypto-diplomatic role played by Angleton and the Near East division chief James Critchfield in trying to create this alliance.] At this point the American State Department got wind of the scheme and vetoed any further U.S. role in the proceedings. Without the Americans as intermediaries, the arrangement crumbled. In the embittered views of Angleton and Critchfield, an opportunity of possibly historic proportions had been allowed to slip away." Ibid., pp. 146-147.

an excruciatingly sensitive operation...code-named Buttercup: The Buttercup operation is described at length in FRUS, Vols. IV and V.

The CIA had created and run the local Communist Party: This heretofore unknown operation was described by Tom Polgar in an interview with the author.

The program, code-named Globe: The Globe operation was described in interviews with CIA officers, including Gerry Gossens.

"You have to get the infrastructure": Helms testimony, President's Commission on CIA Activities (Rockefeller Commission), pp. 2497-2499.

"There have been charges that it is morally wrong": Albert R. Haney, "Observations and Suggestions Concerning the Overseas Internal Security Program," June 14, 1957, NSC Staff Papers, pp. 11-12, DDEL.

"You can get into Gestapo-type tactics": Amory oral history, JFKL.

"Castro was the catalyst": Polgar interview with author.

military juntas were good for the United States: Memorandum for the director, "The Political Role of the Military in Latin America," Office of National Estimates, April 30, 1968, LBJL. This was a formal twenty-nine-page statement by the chairman of the ONE, Abbot Smith, giving a tour of the region's eight most recently established military dictatorships, six of which were deemed good for American interests.

"Mobutu gave me a house": Gossens interview with author.

In a classic battle of the cold war: The capture of the CIA base chief, David Grinwis, is described in an unpublished interview with Grinwis at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Grinwis, the American consul Mike Hoyt, and two CIA communicators were held for 114 days before Belgian paratroops freed them. The battle between Che's Cubans and the CIA's Cubans is best told in Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 137-159.

A right-wing general, Rene Barrientos, had seized power: The details of the CIA's covert actions in support of Barrientos from 1962 to 1966 are in FRUS, Vol. XXXI, documents 147-180, declassified 2004.

"This can't be Che Guevara": Henderson oral history, FAOH.

"I am managing to keep him alive": Rodriguez's reporting from Bolivia is reproduced verbatim in two memos that Helms delivered to the White House on October 11 and 13, 1967, declassified in 2004 and reprinted in FRUS, Vol. XXXI, documents 171 and 172.

"Can you send fingerprints?"..."I can send fingers": Polgar interview with author.

"Once again CIA operations": UAR desk to Lucius D. Battle, March 16, 1967, FRUS, Vol. XVIII.

"He had been on the U.S. payroll": Battle oral history, FAOH.

"You will be criticized": Humphrey speech quoted in Helms transcript, Studies in Intelligence, September 1993.

"Review all projects which are politically sensitive": Memorandum from the Deputy Director of Plans of the Central Intelligence Agency(Karamessines) to all staff chiefs and division chiefs, September 30, 1967, declassified 2004, FRUS, Vol. XXXIII.

 

Chapter Twenty-seven

"I'm quite aware of that": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 280.

"The Subcommittee is very much interested in the operations of various militant organizations in this country": McClellan letter to Helms, October 25, 1967, declassified 2004, CIA/CREST.

"A Negro training camp": Karamessines memo to White House, October 31, 1967, declassified 2004, CIA/CREST.

"I'm not going to let the Communists take this government": "Luncheon Meeting with Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, Walt Rostow, CIA Director Richard Helms," November 4, 1967, LBJL.

"any direction other than their own": "International Connections of U.S. Peace Groups" and Helms cover letter to the president, November 15, 1967, declassified April 2001, CIA/CREST.

next to no intelligence on the enemy's intent: On February 16, 1968, Helms met with the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He said American intelligence on the Tet offensive had failed first and foremost "because of the lack of penetration of the Vietcong." FRUS, Vol. VI.

"Westmoreland doesn't know who the enemy is": "Notes of the President's Luncheon Meeting with Foreign Policy Advisors," February 20, 1968, FRUS, Vol. VI. Though some historians and memoirists have given the CIA analyst George Carver great credit for changing LBJ's mind about the war in the weeks and days before his decision to stand down, the CIA's leading Vietnam historian, Harold Ford, wrote that the influence of Carver and the CIA "was clearly less than that of many other forces above and beyond the inputs of CIA's intelligence: the shock of the Tet offensive itself; the sharply rising tide of antiwar sentiment among the Congress and the public; the candid, very grim post-Tet assessments given by JCS Chairman Earle Wheeler, Paul Nitze, and Paul Warnke; and the sudden defections of Clark Clifford and most of the other 'Wise Men' who had previously backed Johnson's war effort. Nonetheless, to these causes of the President's change of heart must be added the late-March assessments given him by State and CIA officers."

PART FOUR

Chapter Twenty-eight

he would have created a new organization outside the CIA: Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises (New York: Doubleday, 1962), p. 454. Nixon wrote that he stated his intention to JFK in 1960.

Nixon and Helms met for their first long talk: Recorded in "Notes of Meeting, Johnson City, Texas," August 10, 1968, 12:25 p.m. FRUS, Vol. VI. Helms met Nixon for the first time in November 1956, when he and Allen Dulles briefed the vice president on the crushed Hungarian revolution. In his posthumous memoir, Helms omits the LBJ Ranch session described here, which was evidently their second face-to-face encounter.

"What do you think about Helms?": Telephone conversation between President Johnson and President-elect Nixon, November 8, 1968, 9:23 p.m., LBJ Tapes, FRUS, Vol. VII.

"Richard Nixon never trusted anybody": Helms interview with Stanley I. Kutler, July 14, 1988, Wisconsin Historical Archives, box 15, folder 16, cited with the kind permission of Professor Kutler.

"I haven't the slightest doubt...that Nixon's carping affected Kissinger": Helms quoted in John L. Helgerson, "CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates," May 1996, CIA/CSI.

"Both were incurably covert": Thomas L. Hughes, "Why Kissinger Must Choose Between Nixon and the Country," The New York Times, December 30, 1973.

"make it very clear to the Director": Report of the Covert Operations Study Group, December 1, 1968, CIA/CREST. The study dovetailed in part with the final report of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to LBJ in December 1968. The board called the results of American espionage "inadequate." It urged "an intensification of efforts to obtain significant intelligence on priority targets through clandestine agent collection operations." It strongly recommended that the 303 Committee review "all approved covert programs in order to evaluate progress being made, and in appropriate instances, cancel unproductive projects." FRUS, Vol. X, document 222.

"Dr. Kissinger--Information Request": The one-paragraph memo turned up in the files of Red White, who in 1969 held the post of deputy director of central intelligence for support--the agency's chief administrator. Declassified May 15, 2003, CIA/CREST.

"I don't mean to say that they are lying": Memo from [deleted] to Helms, June 18, 1969, FRUS, 1969-1972, Vol. II, document 191, declassified December 21, 2006.

"Useless"..."A superficial mindless recitation": Kissinger to Nixon, "Subject: NIE 11-8-69, 'Soviet Strategic Attack Forces,'" with covering memo from Helms annotated by Nixon on December 8, 1969, FRUS, 1969-1972, Vol. II, document 198.

"Whose side is the Agency on?": Helms, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 382-388.

Helms always had believed that gadgets were no replacement for spies: Even the best electronic-eavesdropping intercepts were not intelligence. In 1968, the CIA and the NSA had a program code-named Guppy, which intercepted the mobile phone lines of the Russian leadership in Moscow. In September 1968, on the eve of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the head of the Warsaw Pact telephoned the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev from the Moscow airport. The CIA heard the call. "The problem was they were no fools and spoke in a word code--you know, 'the moon is red,' or some silly phrase--and we didn't have the faintest idea whether that meant the invasion was on or off," said a State Department intelligence officer, David Fischer. Fischer oral history, FAOH.

the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty talks then under way in Helsinki: The KGB resident in Helsinki and the CIA station chief had agreed that neither side would try to penetrate the other's delegation. "The consequences of getting caught would certainly outweigh any intelligence that could be collected," said the State Department's David Fischer. "As far as I know, both sides honored that agreement. Lord knows there were enough opportunities to entrap some poor American delegate with a buxom Finnish blonde." Fischer oral history, FAOH.

Soviet strategic nuclear forces: In 1979, the CIA's Howard Stoertz, Jr., then the national intelligence officer for strategic programs, reported "a series of gross overestimates in the late 1950's and early 1960's and a series of gross underestimates in the middle and late 1960's" in the CIA's analysis of Soviet strategic forces. Stoertz, Memorandum for Director, National Foreign Assessment Center, declassified July 2006. In March 2001, the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, said, "Every National Intelligence Estimate written on the subject from 1974 to 1986...overestimated the rate at which Moscow would modernize its strategic forces." Tenet remarks, Conference on CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union, Princeton University.

"The President called Henry Kissinger and me into the Oval Office": Helms, memorandum for the record, "Talk with President Nixon," March 25, 1970, FRUS, January 1969-October 1970, Vol. XII, document 147, declassified December 19, 2006. In a May 13, 1970, follow-up on proposed covert action against Moscow, Helms laid out a five-point plan:

 

* Sino-Soviet tensions. The Sino-Soviet border conflict and the worldwide struggle for control of Communist parties make the Soviets highly susceptible [one line of source text not declassified].

* Soviet involvement in the Middle East. Because the Soviet presence in the Middle East entails many volatile factors, there will be opportunities for inducing strain between the Arabs and the Soviets.

* Soviet relations with East Europe. The steady growth of nationalism in East Europe in the face of Soviet military intervention and economic exploitation makes this area a fertile ground for [less than one line of source text not declassified] operations to heighten tensions between the USSR and its vassal states.

* Soviet/Cuban relations. Castro's well-founded suspicion regarding Soviet maneuvers to dominate political and economic life in Cuba, possibly affecting Castro's own future leadership, creates a situation that invites [less than one line of source text not declassified] manipulation.

* Soviet domestic dissidence and economic stagnation. By fostering unrest among the Soviet intelligentsia it may be possible to create pressures inducing the Kremlin to curtail its foreign involvements in order to concentrate on critical domestic situations.

 

"facing the threat of a Communist Party or popular front election victory": Helms, "Tensions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: Challenge and Opportunity," undated but early April 1970, FRUS, January 1969-1970, Vol. XII, document 149.

Guy Mollet of France: Wells Stabler, who served as chief of the political section at the American embassy in Paris from 1960 to 1965, said, "Guy Mollet [and other French leaders of the Fourth Republic] had what you might call a fiduciary relationship with the United States and they indeed received some financial support from the US government. I would go to visit Guy Mollet and we would have a nice chat. The telephone would then ring and he would look up and smile at me and say, 'Well, one of your colleagues is here to see me.' We would have this revolving door act between myself and someone of the CIA station in Paris.... I found it quite frankly a rather embarrassing situation." Stabler oral history, FAOH

at least $65 million: The program begun in 1948, as detailed in Chapter 3, had cost at least $65 million, according to a 1976 report by the newly formed House Intelligence Committee. The minutes for the 303 Committee meeting of June 25, 1965, state: "The Italian proposal was generally viewed as a 'necessary evil' and approved with the following proviso: Mr.[McGeorge] Bundy, deploring the chronic failure of the Italian democratic political parties to utilize their own bootstraps, used the term 'annual shame.'"
On August 4, 1965, Bundy sent the following memo to President Johnson: "Over the years the U.S. has assisted the democratic Italian political parties and trade unions at a very high rate. Over the period 1955-1965, the total amount of assistance is just under [deleted]. In recent years we have been cutting this assistance back, primarily because the professionals closely related to the operation have concluded that we have not been getting our full money's worth and what the Italian political parties need is not so much U.S. money as energetic administrative leadership. President Kennedy had a personal feeling that political subsidies at this level were excessive.... Meanwhile, by separate and somewhat unusual channels,[deleted] have let us know that they would like a lot more money.... It remains true that the anti-Communist battle in Italy is one of politics and resources; but simple handouts and intelligently applied resources are two entirely different things." The 303 Committee minutes and the Bundy memo are in FRUS, Vol. XII, declassified April 2001.

"financial resources, political resources, friends, the ability to blackmail": Fina oral history, FAOH.

"that cold-eyed fellow": Robert Barbour oral history, FAOH. Barbour's predecessor, Samuel Gammon, said, "Graham would pull the wings off flies with relish if it were necessary as a power operation." These were men who admired Martin.

shadowy and strange: Michael E. C. Ely oral history, FAOH. 299 "slippery as a cold basket of eels": Ambassador James Cowles Hart Bon bright oral history, FAOH.

Martin had converted Marshall Plan funds: Benson E. L. Timmons, III, oral history, HSTL. Timmons was a deputy chief of the Marshall Plan mission in Paris.

"I have great personal confidence in Graham Martin": Nixon to Kissinger, February 14, 1969, FRUS, Vol. II, document 298.

Talenti went to see: According to Richard Gardner, the American ambassador to Italy from 1977 to 1981; Gardner remarks, Carnegie Council, January 19, 2006. See also Gardner's memoir, Mission Italy: On the Front Lines of the Cold War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). In 1981, Talenti joined the Reagan White House staff as an unpaid political adviser. He became part of a now-forgotten influence-peddling case known as the Wedtech scandal, which eventually led to the resignation of the attorney general of the United States, Ed Meese.

"he was just the man": Wells Stabler oral history, FAOH, and interview with author.

Nixon and Kissinger focused the CIA: Selected 303 Committee minutes covering the first eighteen months of the Nixon administration were declassified in April 2006. The CIA's covert support for Thieu's National Alliance for Social Revolution began in September 1968, when the 303 Committee authorized the first allotment of $725,000 in cash. Half of that sum was handed to Thieu in increments from September 1968 to March 1969. Records cited: Memorandum for the 303 Committee, August 29, 1968, FRUS, January-August 1968, Vol. VI; Kissinger to Nixon, "Covert Support for the Lien Minh (National Alliance for Social Revolution)," March 27, 1969; Kissinger to Nixon; "Operations Against Barracks and Storage Facilities in Dien Bien Phu in North Vietnam," July 18, 1969; Kissinger to Nixon, "Operations to Undermine Enemy Morale in Vietnam," December 9, 1969; memorandum for the 303 Committee, December 11, 1969; and "Minutes of the Meeting of the 303 Committee, 23 December 1969," in FRUS, January 1969-July 1970, Vol. VI, documents 47, 98, 156, 157, and 165.

"the President wondered": Memorandum for the record, "Subject: Discussion with the President on Tibet," February 4, 1960, CIA/CREST.

the agency requested $2.5 million more to support Tibet's insurgents: FRUS, Vol. XVII, 1969-1976, documents 273-280, citing 303 Committee meeting of September 30, 1969, and 40 Committee meeting of March 31, 1971. (The 303 Committee was renamed the 40 Committee in February 1970.)

"The CIA had no hand in it?": Kissinger-Chou memorandum of conversation, FRUS, Vol. XVII, 1969-1976, document 162, declassified September 2006

The CIA was out of business in China for years to come: Not entirely. A year after Nixon went to China, the CIA's Jim Lilley--born in China, twenty years an American spy in Asia--proposed that he join the soon-to-open United States Liaison Office in Beijing. It was to be the first American diplomatic mission since Mao took power close to a quarter century before.
Lilley got the go-ahead, and he served two years as the first station chief in Beijing, latterly under George H. W. Bush. This was prior to Bush's becoming director of central intelligence in 1976. Lilley's status as a CIA officer was openly declared to the Chinese communist government, and it was accepted on one condition: no spying. Lilley could recruit no espionage agents and run no covert operations--or else.
Lilley filed away a coded list of future targets of opportunity for the day that the CIA might open a real station in Beijing. But he was stymied until Bush arrived. The gregarious crypto-diplomat took Lilley under his wing, brought him to receptions to meet top Chinese officials, and introduced him to the rest of the diplomatic corps. Bush said: "I want you to be part of my job," Lilley recalled. "I want to work with you and make you part of the team." Lilley thus made friends with the future leaders of the United States and China. Bush and Lilley latched on to Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, who would emerge as the head of the regime that took power after Mao's death. (Deng used to say it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice. He would have made a good station chief.) Deng, Bush, and Lilley started working together. The new friends agreed in principle to collect military, strategic, and technological intelligence against the Soviet Union when the time was ripe. Bush and Lilley returned to China as private citizens and convinced Deng to open up China to American oil companies. The intelligence deal was consummated in full in 1989, after President Bush made Jim Lilley the American ambassador to China.

The CIA's bagman was Pote Sarasin: The Lotus records, declassified in December 2006, are in FRUS, Vol. XX, documents 2, 120, and 129. Document 2--memorandum of conversation, "Subject: Lotus," Bangkok, January 16, 1969--sets the scene.

"democracy doesn't work" and "There should be no change": FRUS, Vol. XX, documents 142 and 143 (Ambassador Len Unger's report on the coup and Kissinger's analysis of the coup for Nixon, November 17, 1971).

"Get the CIA jerks": Transcript of telephone conversation between President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, April 17, 1970, FRUS, Vol. VI, January 1969-July 1970.

"Get the money to Lon Nol": Nixon to Kissinger, April 20, 1970, FRUS, Vol. VI, January 1969-July 1970.

"CIA had described the flow of materials through Sihanoukville": "Record of President's Meeting with the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board," July 18, 1970, FRUS, January 1969-July 1970, Vol. VI, declassified April 2006.

"$6 billion per year on intelligence": Ibid.

"people lying to him about intelligence": "Record of President's Meeting with the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board," July 18, 1970, FRUS, 1969-1972, Vol. II, declassified December 2006. Here we see an example of the futility of official secrecy. The record was declassified twice in two different ways. The first revealed the intelligence budget as of 1970--$6 billion. The second concealed it on the grounds of national security--but reveals more of Nixon's critique than the first. The author applauds the inconsistency of government censors in this instance.

 

Chapter Twenty-nine

Few Latin American nations paid more than lip service to the ideals of democracy: One was Costa Rica, whose democracy was established in 1949 by Jose Figueres Ferrer, known as "Don Pepe." He had just been re-elected president for the third time in 1970. He was married to an American, he spoke excellent English, and on occasion over the years he had accepted money from the CIA, a fact he freely acknowledged later in his life.
"I was conspiring against the Latin American dictatorships and wanted help from the United States," he told The New York Times. "I was a good friend of Allen Dulles." The agency thought it had bought Figueres. It had only rented him.
In early 1970, the American ambassador was a career diplomat named Clarence Boonstra and the newly arriving CIA station chief was a hard-drinking, sixty-year-old Cuba hand named Earl Williamson. "Earl had worked with me in Cuba years before," Ambassador Boonstra said in an oral history. "When he was proposed as station chief, I had objected unless Williamson would work under my orders and would not do what he was noted for, disrupting things with unnecessary covert action--monkey business." Then Nixon nominated a new ambassador, Walter Ploeser, a defeated Republican congressman and a major political fund-raiser. Suddenly the red threat loomed. "For some time Costa Rica had been planning to permit the Soviet Union to establish an embassy," Ambassador Boonstra said. "That's what Costa Rica stood for, democracy and openness to everyone."
The new envoy and his station chief were under the misimpression that there was "a great communist scheme establishing Costa Rica as a central point for subversion in the hemisphere," Ambassador Boonstra said. "And they began all types of actions, carrying on a crusade." They worked to subvert the newly reinstalled president of Costa Rica, but they failed miserably. The station chief, deep into a drinking bout with his Costa Rican friends, proclaimed that Don Pepe's days in power were dwindling. Word got back to the president quickly. He publicly denounced a plot to overthrow him, publicly identified the CIA station chief, publicly declared him persona non grata, and very publicly expelled him from the country.
The "monkey business" of CIA station chiefs like Earl Williamson was hardly covert action. "There is throughout Latin America a growing sensitivity...to allegations of CIA intervention in Latin affairs," wrote a State Department intelligence analyst in March 1970. "The sensitivity is especially acute in Chile."
If the agency delivered money, guns, and intelligence into the hands of coup plotters throughout the cold war, so did the Soviets. If the agency mounted covert operations that led to the death, imprisonment, and torture of innocent civilians, the enemy did it too. American cash bought elections all over the world, and the Kremlin had its own black bags. But America's backyard was tough terrain for Moscow. "Latin America is a sphere of special U.S. interests," the KGB chief and future Soviet leader Yuri Andropov wrote during the Nixon administration. "We must remember this. Our policy in Latin America must be cautious." Andropov quoted in Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World(New York: Basic Books, 2005), p .77.

One of the few was Chile, where the CIA saw a red threat rising: Unless otherwise noted, citations and quotations about the operation in this chapter are taken from a collection of CIA records declassified between 1999 and 2003, available online at http://foia.state.gov/SearchColls/CIA.asp. See also Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: New Press, 2004).

a political-warfare program: The CIA's files give the flavor of part of the covert campaign to swing the 1964 election. In a July 21, 1964, memo to the 303 Committee, the CIA proposed an additional $500,000 to defeat Allende. The money would permit Eduardo Frei Montalva, the Christian Democrat, to "maintain the pace and rhythm of his campaign effort"--and allow the CIA to meet any "last minute contingencies." On July 23, 1964, the 303 Committee approved the proposal. In a memo to McGeorge Bundy, the CIA's Peter Jessup said, "We can't afford to lose this one, so I don't think there should be any economy shaving in this instance. We assume the Commies are pouring in dough, we have no proofs. They must assume we are pouring in dough; they have no proofs. Let's pour it on and in." Secretary of State Rusk briefed LBJ on the Chilean election at an NSC meeting on September 1: "It looked as if a victory for the non-Communist forces in Chile would come up in the election 4 September, partly as a result of the good work of CIA; and this development would be a triumph for democracy and a blow to Communism in Latin America." With $300,000 allocated for the defeat of Allende in 1970, the CIA was probably outspending the KGB two-to-one in Chile. Soviet intelligence archives suggest that Allende got at least $50,000 from Moscow and $100,000 in Soviet funds laundered through the Chilean Communist Party. The trouble with Allende, in the Kremlin's eyes, was that he was a bourgeois socialist, a parlor pink, not a real communist.

senior representatives of the Vatican: The relationship between the CIA and the Holy See has been profound since 1947, but it remains deeply obscured. The singular "Report on CIA Chilean Task Force Activities, 15 September to 3 November 1970," slipped out and illuminated this small facet.

"posters were printed, news stories planted": Richard Helms with Williamv Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 400. Helms in his memoir calls Chile (before 1970) "a small democratic country." An old joke in British journalism (before 1970) proposed that the world's most boring headline would be: "Small Earthquake in Chile, Not Many Dead."

"I had never seen such dreadful propaganda": Edward M. Korry remarks, Centro de Estudios Publicos, Santiago, Chile, October 16, 1996. Published in Estudios Publicos, Spring 1998.

"Kendall went to Nixon": Helms interview with Stanley I. Kutler, July 14, 1988, Wisconsin Historical Archives, box 15, folder 16, cited with the kind permission of Professor Kutler.

"Mr. Helms, he said, "you already have your Vietnam": Polgar interview with author.

Track One was political warfare: And it was supplemented by hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American multinational ITT, which had vast holdings in Chile. The money was delivered with the guidance of the CIA and at the suggestion of a member of ITT's board of directors--John McCone.

"Anyone who had lived in Chile": Phillips testimony, Church Committee, July 13, 1975, declassified 1994.

"flavor their final assessments": Haig to Kissinger, December 7, 1970, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. II, document 220.

"the key left-wing dominated slots under Helms": Nixon to Kissinger, November 30, 1970 [Haig cited in footnote], FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. II, document 216, declassified December 21, 2006.

"a major overhauling": Haig to Kissinger, December 7, 1970, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. II, document 220.

"Nixon railed against the CIA": Shultz oral history in Gerald S. Strober and Deborah Hart Strober, Nixon: An Oral History of His Presidency (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 83. This book is an invaluable resource, as is the Strobers' oral history of the Reagan administration.

"A meat-ax approach could be disastrous": K. Wayne Smith to Kissinger, "Presidential Meeting with OMB on Intelligence Budget," December 21, 1970, FRUS, Vol. II, document 221. Nixon continued to press for deep cuts and radical changes at the agency. "I want a real shakeup in CIA, not just symbolism," he told Kissinger on January 21, 1971, in a written note. FRUS, Vol. II, document 224.

He had made his reputation at the Nixon White House: Schlesinger was one of a quartet of men who rose to power by slashing the government at Nixon's bidding: Thus ran the path to power for the four Nixon men who led the Pentagon for twenty-two of the thirty-three years from 1973 to 2006. All four came to share the president's contempt for the Central Intelligence Agency.

 

* Caspar Weinberger, Schlesinger's boss at the budget office, went after the welfare state under Nixon. A decade later he doubled the Pentagon's spending as Ronald Reagan's defense secretary.

* Donald Rumsfeld whacked at the war on poverty for Nixon at the Office of Economic Opportunity. In 1975, he succeeded Schlesinger at the Pentagon, becoming the youngest secretary of defense in history.

* Dick Cheney, a budget-cutting congressman in his day, succeeded Rumsfeld as President Ford's White House chief of staff, then succeeded Weinberger as secretary of defense in 1989. He is at this writing the vice president of the United States and the viceroy of secret government operations.

* Rumsfeld returned as secretary of defense under the second Bush administration--the oldest secretary of defense in history, presiding over an establishment that spent half a trillion dollars a year.

 

ending the Vietnam War on American terms: A typical Nixon review of the CIA's performance in that role followed his command for a worldwide propaganda campaign in support of the renewed bombing of North Vietnam. The agency's "performance in the psychological warfare field is nothing short of disgraceful," Nixon wrote in a memo to Kissinger and Haig on May 19, 1972. "It produced not much more than a mouse. Or to put it more honestly, it produced a rat.... I do not simply blame Helms and the CIA. After all, they do not support my policies.

"There is no evidence that the intelligence community": James R. Schlesinger, "A Review of the Intelligence Community," Top Secret, March 10, 1971, declassified with deletions in 1998, CIA/NARA. The report stressed ideas that were central to the abolition of the office of the director of central intelligence after 9/11: the DCI presided over warring republics, not a confederation of states. His authority over the empire of intelligence beyond the CIA was nonexistent. Schlesinger suggested the creation of a new office: a director of national intelligence, with real authority over all the tribes and fiefs. The time was not ripe for open debate about the CIA. It would be thirty-three years before the idea was embraced and enacted.

"the most controversial gutfight": Haig to Kissinger, with attachment from Kissinger and Shultz to Nixon, "Review of the Intelligence Community," March 27, 1971, FRUS, Vol. II, document 229. The fight led to the creation of a National Security Council Intelligence Committee--led, of course, by Kissinger--that was supposed to take over the management of American intelligence. The committee met for the first time on December 3, 1971. It did not reconvene in 1971 or 1972.

The president directly ordered Helms to hand over control: Memorandum by President Nixon, "Organization and Management of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Community," November 5, 1971, FRUS, Vol. II, document 242. Helms forced Deputy Director Cushman out for two reasons. First, to protect the agency from Richard Nixon; second, because of the untoward support Cushman had given to the CIA veteran and soon-to-be-incarcerated Watergate plumber E. Howard Hunt. Helms sent a frosty note to Nixon on December 3, 1971, the day that the aforementioned NSC Intelligence Committee convened. "I attach hereto a copy of the kind of delegation of authority to the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence which would seem to be in keeping with your directive," it said. "When General Cushman's replacement is sufficiently indoctrinated, I will sign such a paper for him." That replacement, General Vernon Walters, entered on duty six months later--May 2, 1972. The issue soon was overtaken by events set in motion by Howard Hunt and the Watergate affair.

"The CIA isn't worth a damn": Nixon comments at July 23, 1971, White House budget meeting, cited in The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House, The Complete Multimedia Edition, CD-ROM, Sony Electronic Publishing, 1994, entry for July 25, 1971. Nixon kept up the pressure for a purge over the next year. "One department which particularly needs a housecleaning is the CIA," he wrote to Haldeman on May 18, 1972. "The problem in the CIA is muscle-bound bureaucracy which has completely paralyzed its brain and the other is the fact that its personnel, just like the personnel in State, is primarily Ivy League and the Georgetown set rather than the type of people that we get into the services and the FBI. I want a study made immediately as to how many people in CIA could be removed by Presidential action.... I want action begun immediately, through [budget director Caspar] Weinberger, for a reduction in force of all positions in the CIA in the executive groups of 50 percent. This reduction in force should be accomplished by the end of the year so that we can then move to get in some better people. Of course, the reduction in force should be accomplished solely on the ground of its being necessary for budget reasons, but you will both know the real reason and I want some action to deal with the problem.

"placing stop and go buttons on the machinery": Phillips testimony, Church Committee.

 

Chapter Thirty

Nixon...bugged the White House: Between February 16, 1971, and July 12, 1973, President Nixon secretly recorded more than 3,700 hours of his meetings and conversations with voice-activated hidden microphones at the White House and Camp David. He made the decision, in part, to preserve a record to protect him against the inevitable memoirs of Henry Kissinger.
Nixon blamed Kissinger for the decision to wiretap White House aides to stop press leaks. "Henry ordered the whole goddamn thing," the president told his press secretary, Ronald L. Ziegler, on May 14, 1973. "He ordered it all, believe you me. He was the one who was in my office jumping up and down about, 'This and that got out.' I said, all right, investigate the sons of bitches," the president said, his voice rising to a shout. "And he read every one of those taps. He reveled in it, he groveled in it, he wallowed in it."

trying to stop leaks to the press: Of course, no president was above a little leaking when it suited him, as the following conversation shows. The topic of the "Helms report" was India's prime minister, Indira Gandhi, whom Nixon referred to as "that bitch," and whose leadership was the subject of a top secret study Helms had delivered to the White House:
Transcript of conversation, December 6, 1971, 6:14-6:38 p.m., FRUS, 1969-1972, Vol. E-7, declassified June 2005.

 

Nixon: Incidentally, that Helms report--give me a copy of that. I'm going to put it out to the press. Put the whole goddamn thing out.... I want that report of Helms put into the hands of acolumnist who will print the whole thing. Now I want you to get it out.... Now that's the way they play it. That's the way we gotto play it. You don't agree?

Kissinger: Yes, I agree....

Nixon: Just be sure to get it yards away from the White House.

Kissinger: Right. I'll get that done today.

 

"a unique character": Sam Hart oral history, FAOH.

"He described the mission as national security": Barker oral history in Gerald S. Strober and Deborah Hart Strober, Nixon, An Oral History of His Presidency (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 217.

"he was in fact doing some things for the President": The conversation was recorded at CIA headquarters; the tape was later obtained by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and the transcript is in the National Archives. 319-20 "an operation which the CIA knew nothing about": Walters oral history in Strober and Strober, Nixon: An Oral History, p. 60. Walters, who spoke nine languages, had served as a staff assistant to President Eisenhower and an interpreter for Ike, Vice President Nixon, and senior State Department and Defense Department officials in the 1950s. He had been the army attache and liaison to the CIA in Italy from 1960 to 1962 and in Brazil, where he helped foment a military coup, from 1962 to 1967. As defense attache in France from 1967 to 1972, he was instrumental in the negotiations before and during the Paris peace talks. Nixon had been an admirer ever since Walters helped save him from an angry mob during a trip to Caracas in 1958.

"Dick, are you still up?": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 3-5.

"We are going to catch a lot of hell": Colby quoted in Strober and Strober, Nixon: An Oral History, p. 312.

"We could get money anyplace in the world": Helms interview with Stanley I. Kutler, July 14, 1988, Wisconsin Historical Archives, box 15, folder 16, cited with the kind permission of Professor Kutler. In this interview, Helms recounted a conversation illustrating how close his new deputy director came to cooperating with the demand for hush money. Before his third and final meeting with Dean at the White House, Vernon Walters turned to Helms and said, "Look, suppose I give in. The worst that can happen is that I get fired, or I have to resign." Walters had no understanding of the situation, no grasp of the fact that the agency was in the utmost danger. "He had been around for six weeks. He didn't know what was going on," Helms said. "He probably didn't even know that the Agency had unvouchered funds.
" Helms's biographer, Thomas Powers, wrote at the end of the 1970s that "the CIA's role in Watergate is going to be a subject of debate for the rest of time." Watergate's leading chronicler, Stanley Kutler, wrote at the start of the 1990s that the agency's role "seems destined to remain shadowy." The record now is far clearer. The employment of six former CIA men in the Watergate break-in was part of the Nixon administration's habit of running clandestine operations out of the White House. Nixon tried to use the CIA to contain the FBI. He succeeded, very briefly. Helms and Walters complied with the president's order to go along with the cover-up for sixteen days at most. The cover-up would have worked if Helms had risked all. It failed because he valued the CIA more than he valued Richard Nixon.

Kissinger proposed replacing Helms with James Schlesinger: FRUS, Vol. II, document 284, editorial note.

"Very good idea": November 10, 1972, entry in The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House, The Complete Multimedia Edition, CD-ROM, Sony Electronic Publishing, 1994.

"to ruin the Foreign Service": White House Tapes, conversation between Nixon and Kissinger, Oval Office, November 13, 1972, National Archives.

"to tear up the Department": November 21, 1972, entry in The Haldeman Diaries.

"Look, Mr. President": Helms interview with Kutler.

"a CIA conspiracy to remove you from office?": Transcript of Nixon interview with Frank Gannon, Walter J. Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia, available online at http://www.libs.uga.edu/media/collections/ nixon. Gannon interviewed Nixon for nine days in 1983; full transcripts were published in 2002.

"one that really had R.N. tattooed on him": Helms interview with Kutler.

"They've got 40,000 people over there reading newspapers": John L. Helgerson,

Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952-1992 (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA, 1995). Nixon had more than doubled the actual personnel at headquarters..

"Schlesinger must be the man in charge": White House Tapes, Oval Office, December 27, 1972. In this taped memo, Nixon emphasized "the need to improve quality as well as reduce quantity of top intelligence people in the CIA itself. The CIA, like the State Department, is basically a liberal establishment bureaucracy. I want the personnel there cut in at least half--no, at least by thirty-five to forty percent--and I want a definite improvement insofar as attitudes of those in CIA with regard to our foreign policy."

"There wasn't a dry eye in the house": Halpern oral history in Ralph E. Weber, ed., Spymasters: Ten CIA Officers in Their Own Words (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), p. 128.

 

Chapter Thirty-one

"to change the concept of a 'secret service'": William Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978). My portrayal of this passage in the history of the CIA is influenced by interviews with Bill Colby conducted in person and by telephone between 1988 and the week before his death in 1996.

the enemy had breached the CIA's defenses: There were, we now know, some low-level penetrations of the CIA at the time. An analyst named Larry Wu-tai Chin had been spying for China for twenty years undetected. The best evidence we have today suggests that none of the moles were Soviet. But in Angleton's view, absence of evidence was not evidence of absence.

"the central intelligence agency--small 'c,' small 'i,' small 'a'": Schlesinger quoted in Douglas F. Garthoff, "Directors of Central Intelligence as Leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community, 1946-2005," 2006, CIA/CSI.

one of the most dangerous decisions a director of central intelligence had ever made: Schlesinger says today that he did not mean for people to take his order to tell all literally, and that it had never occurred to him that anyone would actually comply. But it is inconceivable that the officers of the CIA would ignore a legal order from a director.

The CIA's exceedingly vague charter: The legal basis for the agency to conduct covert action depended on lawful direction from the National Security Council, a clear understanding between the president and the director of central intelligence, and a modicum of oversight from Congress. That tripartite relationship was entirely dysfunctional in 1973. The powers of the national security adviser--a purely administrative position that had no basis in law or statute--were by then whatever he could get away with in secret.

Colby locked them up: He did confide in the four members of Congress to whom he had to report, the chairmen of the Senate and House subcommittees who handled the CIA's budget. He had nothing to fear from them. The Senate subcommittee had convened exactly once since the fall of 1970.

"We did not cover ourselves with glory": Colby statement, House Select Committee on Intelligence, August 4, 1975. The CIA had reported "no military or political indicators of Egyptian intentions or preparation to resume hostilities with Israel."

"But there will be no war": Cited in Mary O. McCarthy, "The Mission to Warn: Disaster Looms," Defense Intelligence Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1998. At the time of publication, McCarthy was senior director for intelligence programs on the National Security Council Staff

 

Chapter Thirty-two

Pappas had delivered $549,000 in cash to the 1968 Nixon campaign: The following statement was placed in the Congressional Record in 1993 by Representative Don Edwards, a member of the House Judiciary Committee that approved articles of impeachment against President Nixon: "The Greek dictatorship, through its intelligence agency, KYP, (which had been founded and subsequently subsidized by the CIA), transferred three cash payments totalling $549,000 to the Nixon campaign fund in 1968. The conduit was Thomas Pappas, a prominent Greek-American businessman with close links to the CIA, the colonels, and the Nixon campaign."

"I am aware of what you're doing": Nixon White House tapes, March 7, 1973, declassified and transcribed in 1998, National Archives. Nixon told his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, to make sure there would be no record of the Pappas visit. "I don't want to have anything indicating that I was thanking him for raising money for the Watergate defendants," he said. To this day, no one knows why the White House sent burglars to the Watergate. The team might well have been looking for proof that the chief of the Democratic National Committee, Larry O'Brien, had evidence about the Nixon-Pappas connection--which he did. Pappas was instrumental in the selection of Vice President Spiro Agnew as Nixon's running mate in 1968, and he had personally contributed at least $100,000 to Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign. In exchange for the latter donation, Pappas wanted Ambassador Henry Tasca to remain in Greece. Tasca was perhaps the only American outside the inner Nixon circle who knew that Pappas had been the courier for Nixon campaign funds from the Greek junta. Pappas never was charged in the Watergate scandal: congressional investigations of the Greek connection were quashed on national-security grounds. He died at his Palm Beach, Florida, estate in 1988.

"These colonels had been plotting for years and years": Keeley oral history, FAOH. 330 seven successive station chiefs: They included Al Ulmer, John Richardson, and Tom Karamessines, chief of the clandestine service under Richard Helms, who first came to Athens in 1947. Throughout the 1950s, Allen Dulles personally tended to the king and queen of Greece and their palace guard while his station chiefs bought the services of Greek soldiers and spies. "We were running Greece," said Herbert Daniel Brewster, an American diplomat who devoted his career to the country from the early 1950s onward. "It was full control."

"the Central Intelligence Agency": Anschutz oral history, FAOH.

"The only time I saw Helms really angry": Lehman oral history interview,

"Mr. Current Intelligence," Studies in Intelligence, Summer 2000, CIA/CSI.

"the CIA would explode in anger": Blood oral history, FAOH.

"The CIA station chief": Kennedy oral history, FAOH.

"a major asset in Athens": Boyatt oral history, FAOH.

"I went up to Athens": Crawford oral history, FAOH. The Greek colonels had reasons for hating Archbishop Makarios. Crawford explained that Makarios had "aided a young man, a mainland Greek, who subsequently tried to assassinate the prime minister of Greece. Makarios had given him safe haven, the use of the Cyprus diplomatic pouch, and a fake passport to enable him to get back into Greece after a year of clandestine planning in Cyprus."

"the terrible price": Kubisch oral history, FAOH.

 

Chapter Thirty-three

"concerning the use of classified material": Ford in National Security Council meeting minutes, October 7, 1974, GRFL.

"We don't have the tools we need": Schlesinger in ibid.

"everything the President knew": Colby quoted in John L. Helgerson, Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952-1992, CIA/CSI.

"It is inconceivable": Angleton testimony, Church Committee hearings, September 23, 1975.

"Ford asked me to come into the White House": Silberman oral history, FAOH.

"Mr. Helms may have committed perjury": Helms had been torn between truth and secrecy. Testifying before Congress before his posting as the American ambassador to Iran in 1973, he had lied about what the CIA had and had not done to overthrow the elected government of Chile. During his four years as an ambassador, he had been ordered back to Washington continually by congressional committees, criminal investigators, and the high councils of the White House. Humiliated but defiant, Helms stood before a federal judge in Washington on November 4, 1977, and received a two-year suspended sentence and a $2,000 fine in lieu of an eight-count felony indictment. He accepted a misdemeanor charge of failing to testify fully to Congress--a white lie, a sin of omission. Helms had argued that he had sworn a higher oath as director to protect the nation's secrets. The Carter administration had weighed the prosecution and decided to let it proceed. The court said the dictates of the Constitution and the laws of the United States were stronger than the power of secrecy.

"the CIA would be destroyed": Memorandum of conversation, January 3, 1975, GRFL.

"Frankly, we are in a mess": Memorandum of conversation, January 4, 1975, GRFL. Notes from this meeting were declassified in December 2002:

 

Ford: Colby has gone to Silberman not only with his report but numerous other allegations.

Rockefeller: At your request?

Ford: Without my knowledge...[Dr. Kissinger described the "horrors" book.]

Ford: We are concerned that the CIA would be destroyed.... And Helms thinks Colby shafted him; Helms made it clear if there were any dead cats to be thrown out he would throw some of his own.

Kissinger: And Colby has taken to Justice the question of possible perjury by Helms.

Rockefeller: This raises real questions on his judgment.

Ford: We debated this and decided we could not move him out now.

 

The CIA "made a mistake": Gerald R. Ford oral history, July 8, 2003, JFKL.

"the investigation of the CIA": Memorandum of conversation, February 21, 1975, GRFL.

"Within the CIA there is bitter dissension": Memorandum of conversation, March 28, 1975, GRFL.

 

Chapter Thirty-four

"Let me get a grasp on the situation": Minutes of the Washington Special Actions Group, April 2, 1975, declassified September 7, 2004. Days after this conversation, Cambodia fell. The American ambassador, John Gunther Dean, and the CIA station chief, David Whipple, had a better grasp on the situation surrounding them than their colleagues in Saigon. "The CIA had a good idea of the makeup and leadership of the Khmer Rouge," Dean recounted. "David Whipple...gave us documentation of some of the barbarous acts being committed by the Khmer Rouge before April 1975." Dean oral history, FAOH.

Polgar awoke to the sound of rockets: Polgar interview with author. When he took over in January 1972 from Ted Shackley, Polgar commanded 550 CIA officers, 200 of them covert operators. His instructions from Nixon and Kissinger remained constant after the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 were signed: "Continue the war by other means to preserve a non-communist Vietnam." Polgar had witnessed firsthand some of the diplomacy for which Henry Kissinger had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The grand strategist had negotiated terms of a peace accord and a cease-fire with North Vietnam weeks before the 1972 American presidential election--without the approval of the president of South Vietnam, the corrupt Nguyen Van Thieu. In Saigon, at a dinner attended by Kissinger, the American ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, and Kissinger's aide John Negroponte, Kissinger had personally instructed Polgar to "put pressure on Thieu" through CIA assets among the South Vietnamese military. Polgar replied that Kissinger's order made no sense; that was not how things worked in Saigon anymore. It made even less sense after Kissinger leaked the story of his secret negotiations to a favorite reporter at Newsweek. The reporter filed his story by cable from Saigon, and South Vietnam's intelligence service intercepted it and gave copies to both President Thieu and Tom Polgar. The station chief showed it to Kissinger, who replied: "This has the unpleasant smell of truth."
The CIA station's budget stayed at an even $30 million a year as the American military presence dwindled in 1973 and 1974. Polgar ran intelligence-gathering operations, not paramilitary missions. CIA interrogators grilled captured communist troops and suspected spies. CIA analysts combed through piles of reports from the field. CIA branch chiefs in each of South Vietnam's four military sectors coordinated hundreds of American and South Vietnamese officers. And the enemy marched on.
The CIA kept trying to locate an enemy field headquarters--the Bamboo Pentagon was what the American military called it--but there was nothing out in the jungle but tents and tunnels and a determined foe. After the fall of Richard Nixon in August 1974, Congress revolted against the war and began cutting hundreds of millions of dollars out of the effort to keep the South Vietnamese military afloat. By March 1975, North Vietnamese troops were wiping out South Vietnamese divisions and advancing on Saigon. The failure to create a coherent plan for the evacuation of Saigon led to the death or the imprisonment of thousands of Vietnamese who had worked for the United States. Ambassador Martin returned to Washington and became a special assistant to Henry Kissinger.

"imperative that the evacuation proceed without delay": Arnold oral history, recorded by Gayle L. Morrison. Morrison, an ethnographer, spent nine years recording first-person eyewitness accounts of Hmong and Americans who remembered the fall of Long Tieng. Her extraordinary book is Sky Is Falling: An Oral History of the CIA's Evacuation of the Hmong from Laos (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999). My reconstruction relies on her work, including her oral histories of General Aderholt and Captain Knotts.

forced a political arrangement: Richard L. Holm, "No Drums, No Bugles: Recollections of a Case Officer in Laos, 1962-1965," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 47, No. 1, Spring 2003, CIA/CSI.

 

Chapter Thirty-five

"Bury Bush"..."a graveyard for politics"..."the total end of any political future": George Bush, All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings (New York: Scribner, 1999), pp. 195-196, 239-240; Herbert S. Parmet, George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee (New York: Scribner, 1999), pp. 189-194.

"This is the most interesting job I've ever had": Bush, All the Best, p. 255.

Bush ran headlong into Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld: Douglas F. Garthoff, "Directors of Central Intelligence as Leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community, 1946-2005," 2006, CIA/CSI. 347 Rumsfeld was "paranoid": Carver oral history interview, May 13, 1982, CIA/CSI.

"a turbulent and troublesome period": George Bush letter to the president, June 1, 1976, declassified August 9, 2001, CIA.

"We had been forced out of Vietnam": Frank G. Wisner, Jr., oral history, FAOH. He recounted at the outset, "I grew up in World War II and have vivid memories of a father going to war.... As a child I had met General Marshall, Allen Dulles, and had known many Secretaries of State and Defense in passing as a little boy.... I have very, very strong memories of the end of the war, the emergence of the post-War period, the onset of the Cold War itself, sharp reflections born of the time.... My father was for a number of years the head of the clandestine services of CIA. I remember the outbreak of the Korean War, its passage, the crisis in Washington during the McCarthy years, the emergence of NATO, and the Suez War. I was in England at school and felt almost as if I were on the battlefront.... When I arrived in Washington at the beginning of the Kennedy Administration to join the Foreign Service, I had in a very real sense already lived a life of foreign affairs."

Bush prepared to meet the governor of Georgia: The Bush-Carter briefings are detailed in CREST documents and in John L. Helgerson, Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952-1992, CIA/CSI.

the Church Committee, the Senate panel that investigated the CIA: The committee went down blind alleys trying to investigate the "alleged assassination plots" without coming to grips with the fact that presidents had authorized them. Its lasting contributions were a highly competent history of the CIA and the transcripts of the depositions it took, most of which were not declassified until after the end of the cold war. The House committee dissolved into rancor; a final draft of its report was leaked but never formally published. The first real attempt at congressional oversight was not a success. "When we got through with it, what did it amount to but a media circus?" John Horton, a forty-year veteran of the CIA and a very open-minded man, said of the Church Committee in 1987. "Who did the CIA ever assassinate? Nobody, as far as I can tell. But you would have thought that was all we were up to."

"Bush wanted to be kept on": Helgerson, Getting to Know the President. 351 he revealed a handful of ongoing operations: George Bush, "Subject: Meeting in Plains, Georgia, 19 November 1976," CIA/FOIA. Bush told Carter about "warrantless electronic surveillance" of American citizens, the CIA's contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the unresolved case of Nicholas Shadrin, a Soviet defector working for the CIA--or perhaps a double agent--who had been murdered in Vienna eleven months before. There was another aspect to the CIA's operations in Vienna that Bush did not mention. After the December 1975 murder of Richard Welch in Athens, Bill Colby, in one of his last acts as director, had ordered that direct talks be held in secret between the CIA and Soviet intelligence officers in Vienna. He wanted to know if Moscow had had a hand in the killing, which would have been a violation of the unwritten rules of the cold war. He also wanted to talk for the sake of talking. The two sides had never had an official channel of communication at the highest levels. Each found the conversation useful. The line stayed open for the rest of the cold war.

"howling right-wingers": Lehman oral history interview, "Mr. Current Intelligence," Studies in Intelligence, Summer 2000, CIA/CSI.

"Let her fly!!": Bush notation, George Carver memo, May 26, 1976, CIA/ CREST.

the agency put Team B's findings to the test: Raymond L. Garthoff, "Estimating Soviet Military Intentions and Capabilities," Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett (eds.), Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union, CIA/CSI.

In retrospect, you see: Robert M. Hathaway and Russell Jack Smith, "Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence," 1993, CIA/CSI, declassified February 2007.

"the greatness that is CIA": Bush address, CIA headquarters, January 19, 1977.

 

Chapter Thirty-six

Carter...wound up signing almost as many covert-action orders as Nixon and Ford: While no precise number has been declassified, "the Carter administration...availed itself frequently of covert-action programs," said Carter's deputy director of central intelligence, Frank Carlucci. Carlucci oral history, FAOH.

"I had a brother who had worked for CIA undercover": Sorensen interview with author. His brother Thomas Sorensen worked for the CIA during the 1950s. Thomas served as the number-three man at the United States Information Agency under JFK and Edward R. Murrow; he was the USIA's liaison with Richard Helms, merging news and propaganda, while Ted wrote speeches at the Kennedy White House.

"President Carter called me in": Turner interview with author.

"I was in charge of human intelligence collection": Holdridge oral history, FAOH.

"he sought to overthrow their system": Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 95.

a long hard look: Brzezinski said, "Colonel Kuklinski volunteered to collaborate with the U.S., emphasizing that he would like to collaborate with the U.S. military as a Polish officer. He was very instrumental in providing the United States with a much better understanding than it theretofore had regarding the war plans of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet plans for a sudden massive onslaught against Western Europe--including, incidentally, a little-known plan to use nuclear weapons from day one of the attack on Western Europe. I'll give you one specific example. On day two of the attack on Western Europe the Soviet war plans provided for the use of forty tactical nuclear weapons against Hamburg alone, in West Germany. So this was an extremely important contribution to filling major gaps in our understanding of Soviet war planning. And to the extent that the agency was the channel that provided the communication link with him, it was a success for the agency even though Colonel Kuklinski was himself never in a strict sense a CIA agent. He volunteered. He operated on his own. He didn't actually receive instructions." Brzezinski interview with author.

"By God": Smith interview with author. Drafted out of Dartmouth at the start of the Korean War and trained in the Russian language by the army, Smith had focused on the Soviet target in the CIA stations in Prague, Berlin, and Beirut throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s. He had personally recruited and run six Eastern Europeans and trained hundreds of young CIA officers on the basics of spying in cold-war capitals without getting caught. By 1975, when Angleton was forced into retirement, Smith and his colleagues started recruiting their first Soviets.
His biggest recruitment was Sergei Federenko, a diplomat assigned to arms control issues at the United Nations secretariat in New York. An engineer by training and a member of the Soviet elite by birth, Federenko was young and ambitious. He liked to drink. He had a beautiful wife and a girlfriend on the side in the suburbs north of New York.
"Now, I'm a con man," Smith said. "That's my nature and my training. You don't 'recruit' a Soviet. The Soviet has to recruit himself. It's like when you set your cap for a female. Each of you has to find something in the other that's attractive. It is in many respects a seduction.... So I recruited the guy. And--guess what? He had been educated as a scientist and he had worked on Soviet rocketry." Federenko provided a who's who of the Soviet delegation at the United Nations in New York, including a rundown of the names and foibles of the KGB officers posing as diplomats. For his stellar work, Smith was promoted to chief of a CIA division focused on counterterrorism. But when it came to selecting a case officer to handle Federenko in New York, the CIA had very few to choose from. The ranks of fluent Russian speakers in the Soviet/Eastern European division of the clandestine service were very thin. Headquarters selected a thirty-four-year-old alcoholic who became a traitor to the CIA. In 1954, he had been a boy floating down the Irrawaddy River in Burma with his father when he found out that the old man worked for the agency. He had been a file clerk at the CIA for five years in the 1960s while he tried to finish a college degree. He had finally become a member of the clandestine service in 1967. He was married to a CIA officer and, in every sense, married to the CIA. His name was Aldrich Ames.

"The possibilities are there to change this from a black-white conflict into a red-white conflict": "Subject: South Africa and Rhodesia," Special Coordination Committee Meeting, February 8, 1977, and National Security Council meeting minutes, March 3, 1977, JCL.

"nobody wanted to pay attention to Africa": Carlucci oral history, FAOH.

Gerry Gossens, a station chief: Gossens interview with author. Born in Texas and reared in Beirut, Gossens joined the CIA in 1960 and worked through the Middle East under deep cover as an Evinrude outboard-motor salesman before joining the Africa division. Hundreds of young and ambitious CIA men--and a few women--scrambled for advantage against Soviet, Chinese, and East German spies in Africa throughout the '60s and '70s. "We were young people willing to go to hellholes," Gossens said. "We were espionage-oriented well before the rest of the Agency came around. Our branch chief used to say: 'Give me $25,000 and I can rent any African president.' But that was not what we were in business to do. We were in business to conduct espionage. And Africa was still a place that was so fluid you were in on history being made. You could start an operation by accident. You go with the Ambassador to see the President. A member of the President's staff says, 'You know, I have a broken Pentax camera. I can't get spare parts.' You do him a favor. You wind up looking at the Presidential archives."

"My greatest single crisis": Wisner oral history, FAOH.

"I asked my station chief if it were true": Eagleburger oral history, FAOH. 364 "one of their basic skills": Stansfield Turner, Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence (New York: Hyperion, 2005), p. 187.

"They're a unique culture": McMahon interview with author.

"Talk about apoplexy--they went bonkers": McMahon interview with author.

"In spite of its current (and worsening) morale": Memorandum for Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Subject: Covert Action Possibilities in Selected [Deleted] Areas," February 5, 1979, NSC, JCL. There was, however, one other covert operation that started under Carter and bore fruit fifteen years later. Itwas aimed at uncovering the connections between cocaine traffickers and the government of Colombia. In 1977, "the CIA station chief came to me with a plan for CIA involvement in anti-narcotics work," said Robert W. Drexler, then the deputy chief of mission at the American embassy in Bogota. "This was not to be made known to the DEA. So I approved it, and we started it. It was, in essence, a fine operation in which we used a very small number of trusted Colombian law enforcement officials, who we could monitor closely so as to ensure that they weren't being turned against us or corrupted, or that we would see it when they were; and in which we collected intelligence on the contacts between the drug traffickers and high-level Colombian officials. The idea was to pass this on in Washington. The program worked very well. The intelligence it gathered was horrifying, because it detailed the rapid spread of corruption." In 1994 and 1995, this operation climaxed with a CIA-backed takedown of one of the major Colombian cocaine rings, the Cali cartel, achieved in conjunction with the DEA.

the CIA failed to warn the president of the United States: Though almost all the records of the failure to warn of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan remain classified, Douglas MacEachin, the deputy director of intelligence from 1993 to 1995, published an appraisal of the CIA's performance in 2002, basing his work on the secret record as well as his own firsthand experience as one of the agency's best Soviet analysts. Douglas MacEachin, "Predicting the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: The Intelligence Community's Record," Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2002, CIA/CSI. My account of the failure relies in large part on his work, as well as interviews with Brzezinski and Gates.

"the deteriorating situation": Gates, From the Shadows, p. 132. Though Gates does not say so, this passage evidently appeared in the president's daily brief.

"CIA does not see this as a crash buildup": "Subject: Iran," Special Coordination Committee, December 17, 1979, National Security Archive collection.

"The pace of Soviet deployments": The December 19, 1979, report to the president is cited in The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, a classified CIA history cited in MacEachin's "Predicting the Soviet Invasion."

"a spectator sport": MacEachin, "Predicting the Soviet Invasion."

 

Chapter Thirty-seven

"a virtual dictatorship": Nixon to Haig and Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II, April 8, 1971, FRUS 1969-1976, Vol. E-4, Documents on Iran and Iraq, declassified September 12, 2006.

"to confirm that the Shah was our puppet": Precht oral history, FAOH. In September 1979 Precht was in a Washington hospital awaiting surgery: "Before going into the operating room, I looked over and there was another person lying there, waiting his turn. It was Loy Henderson, who had been Ambassador in 1953 when Mossadegh was overthrown. I thought, 'present at the creation and present at the destruction.' After I was able to walk around, I went to his room.... I asked him what [the Shah] was like in his time in Iran. He said, 'He didn't count. He was insignificant. He was a weak person. And yet, we had to deal with him.' So, he confirmed what I had suspected--that the Shah had been inflated by the power that had come to Iran with the jump in oil income plus the adulation of Nixon and Kissinger and other foreign leaders.

"an island of stability": The phrase President Carter used had an Iranian provenance. Kissinger told Nixon in an October 1969 memo that the shah "is genuinely committed to the West and feels the good job he is doing in Iran--'an island of stability,' he calls it--is an important service to the Free World." Kissinger to Nixon, October 21, 1968, FRUS,

1969-1976, Vol. E-4, declassified September 12, 2006.

Howard Hart's view from the streets: Hart remarks, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, September 7, 2005.

"very, very sensitive classified conversations": Laingen oral history, FAOH.

"We paid for t": Laingen oral history, FAOH.

"We were just plain asleep": Turner, Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence (New York: Hyperion, 2005), p. 180.

"We haven't a clue as a nation": Hart remarks, Miller Center, September 7, 2005. Greg Miller, "In from the Cold, to a Cold Shoulder," Los Angeles Times, May 19, 2005.

"I knew little about Iran": William J. Daugherty, "A First Tour Like No Other," Studies in Intelligence, Spring 1998, CIA/CSI.

"Don't worry about another embassy attack": William J. Daugherty, In the Shadow of the Ayatollah: A CIA Hostage in Iran (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001), p. 3.

" Blank the Shah!": Jimmy Carter interview, Jimmy Carter Oral History Project, Miller Center, November 29, 1982.

"ignorant of the local culture and language": Daugherty, "A First Tour Like No Other."

the brainchild of the CIA's Tony Mendez: Mendez interview with author; Tim Weiner, "Master Creator of Ghosts Is Honored by C.I.A.," The New York Times, September 19, 1997. See also Antonio J. Mendez, "A Classic Case of Deception," Studies in Intelligence, Winter 1999-2000, CIA/CSI.

"The effort relied very heavily on the CIA": Quainton oral history, FAOH.

"an unsmiling cadaver": Daugherty, "A First Tour Like No Other."

"an act of vengeance": Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 128-180.

 

Chapter Thirty-eight

"His view of how you fight a war": Gates interview with author.

"I don't think he meant to say 'scrap the Constitution'": Webster interview with author.

"not qualified to be the head of the CIA": Ford oral history in Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober, Reagan: The Man and His Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 72.

"Casey was an inappropriate choice": Bush quoted in John Helgerson, "CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates," May 1996, CIA/CSI. Two other views of the man and the job: Laurence Silberman--the federal judge who led the 2005 investigation of the CIA's work on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq--was co-chair of Reagan's foreign policy group in 1980. "I truthfully would have agreed to be CIA director, which was being discussed," Silberman said. "But Casey...had a greater claim, although I thought it unwise to put a campaign chairman in that job." Lawrence Eagleburger, who served as secretary of state under President Bush in 1992, put it more directly: "Either you do away with the clandestine side of the CIA, which I would not like to see happen, or you simply have to be very, very careful about the kind of person you make CIA director, and that means you don't appoint Bill Casey." FAOH interviews.

"Who was going to be in charge of foreign policy?": Poindexter oral history in Strober and Strober, Reagan: The Man and His Presidency, p. 111.

"It was a hare-brained idea": George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Scribner, 1993), pp. 294-297.

"a hog on ice": Ibid., p. 84.

"a freelance buccaneer": Inman interview with author.

"he did not want to be the traditional Director of Central Intelligence": Inman testimony, Nomination of Robert M. Gates to Be Director of Central Intelligence, U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence, 102nd Congress, 1st Session, September 20, 1991, Vol. I, p. 926.

"a blindered fraternity": Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 209.

"I didn't have that fire in the belly": McMahon interview with author. When McMahon was assigned to shake up the analysts at the directorate of intelligence, he found that the entire structure needed reshaping. "If I wanted to know what was going on in a country, I had to ask three different offices," McMahon said. "There was an office for military intelligence, an office for economic intelligence, an office for political intelligence. So if I said, 'What's going on in Mexico?' I had input from three different offices, and I had to do the integration and come up with the analysis."

"CIA is slowly turning into the Department of Agriculture": Gates, From the Shadows, pp. 223-224. 379 "close-minded, smug, arrogant"..."flat out wrong"..."pretending to be experts": Nomination of Robert M. Gates, 1991, Vol. III, pp. 7-23.

"Working for Casey was a trial for everybody": Lehman oral history interview, "Mr. Current Intelligence," Studies in Intelligence, Summer 2000, CIA/CSI.

"The CIA's intelligence": Shultz interview with author. In the summer of 1982, Secretary of State Shultz set up a weekly lunch with Bill Casey. After the better part of a year, Casey and Shultz, who had been friendly for a decade, discovered that they could not stand one another. "He had too much of an agenda," Shultz said. "It's a mistake for the CIA to have an agenda. They're supposed to produce intelligence. If they have an agenda, the intelligence can get slanted." From 1985 to 1987, Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead and the CIA's Bob Gates carried on these meetings. Whitehead was appalled at "how little help I got from the CIA in knowing what was going on in countries where we had interests and where there were problems.... The analyses were shallow, contained very little of what I would call hard information, and often were incorrect.... I thought that the organization itself somehow had deteriorated, so that the information that it was receiving and the system of gathering information was not very productive anymore." Whitehead oral history, FAOH. Gaping holes were growing in the agency's map of the globe. "The principal worry I have at this point has to do with the adequacy of our intelligence effort...all over the world," Admiral Inman said, presciently, just before joining Casey at CIA headquarters in 1981. "We lack a data base on the areas of the world which were overlooked in the 1960's, when we were focused totally on Southeast Asia. There wasn't a lot of worry about countries in Central America, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa. I believe the odds are very high that in this decade we will face a lot of challenges in those areas." Bobby R. Inman, "Managing Intelligence for Effective Use," Center for Information Policy Research, Harvard University, December 1980.

"Sometime in the dark of night": Clair George testimony, Nomination of Robert M. Gates, 1991, Vol. II, p. 96.

a calculated ruse: The American ambassador to Nicaragua from 1982 to 1984, Anthony Quainton, knew the operation was a sham. "The White House had given up on the prospects of any dialogue. Egged on by Bill Casey of the CIA, it believed that the only way to solve the problem was to get the Sandinistas out. The means for doing that was an elaborate covert action program. At first, it was presented to the Congress in an extremely disingenuous way. The administration argued that harassment would make life uncomfortable for the Sandinistas, would keep them from consolidating their power, and would bring them to the negotiating table. They would see that there were unacceptable costs to their economy if they did not negotiate. The CIA argued that this was the only way to persuade them to change their policies. As with other covert operations elsewhere in the world, it didn't seem to have the promised immediate effect." Quainton oral history, FAOH.

"raised hell with Casey": Gates, From the Shadows, pp. 242-248.

"'figure out what to do about Central America'": Clarridge interview for the CNN Cold War series, 1998. National Security Archive transcript available online at http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode 18/clarridge1.html. "The Latin American division had always been an isolated division within the Agency; it was almost like a little barony," Clarridge said in another oral history. "So the main thing was to carry the division within me. After a couple of weeks I went back up and told Casey, 'This is what we ought to do: Why don't we take the war to Nicaragua...?' This was exactly what Casey wanted to hear." Strober and Strober, Reagan: The Man and His Presidency, p. 165.

"The secret war began" and "The CIA had a planning process of their own": Quainton oral history, FAOH. In the Reagan years, ambassadors very rarely spoke up in public when the CIA created foreign-policy snafus. In one of many examples of the public-relations disasters of the war in Central America, the CIA quietly offered the State Department a public-relations bonanza. The agency had debriefed a nineteen-year-old Nicaraguan captured in El Salvador. He said he had been trained in insurrection by Cuban soldiers in Ethiopia. He had a great story to tell. Was State interested in presenting him to the public in Washington? At the CIA's behest, the State Department organized a private briefing for four trusted reporters. A press spokesman escorted the reporters into a little room and then brought in the captured Nicaraguan, who said, in so many words: "I've been tortured by the CIA. They tried to force me to say that I was sent into El Salvador. I'm a patriotic Nicaraguan. I've never been to Ethiopia." The CIA had been stung by a slick teenager.
The agency's unique "planning process" almost ended the careers of Senator Gary Hart and Senator William Cohen, the latter a future secretary of defense. They came close to being killed on a fact-finding mission in Nicaraguan when a CIA plane that had just unleashed two five-hundred-pound bombs crashed into the VIP lounge at Managua's international airport. "This created a very negative attitude in those two senators about the quality of the covert operations of the CIA," Ambassador Quainton aid.

The secret war did not stay secret: The CIA could not have won that war, whether or not Congress had approved it. "We never had the ability to build back the paramilitary capability that we needed to conduct a war in Nicaragua," said John McMahon. "The agency was not prepared--in personnel particularly--to fight a war or train others to fight a war." McMahon interview with author.

"yuppie spies": Duane R. Clarridge with Digby Diehl, A Spy for All Seasons: My Life in the CIA (New York: Scribner, 1997), pp. 303-318.

Congress strongly supported a bigger, better, stronger, smarter CIA: The Senate had confirmed Casey 95-0 and the Congress gave him hundreds of millions of dollars in new funds at the end of 1981. "They wanted us to have a worldwide clandestine capability so we could provide intelligence on intentions and warning," said John McMahon. "They wanted us to have a good covert-action infrastructure. Now the beauty of having a good clandestine operation is that often the individual that you have recruited to provide you intelligence of what's going on in their government is also influential--and you can use him as a covert-action asset. If he's the foreign minister, you can subtly influence that country to support a UN vote or to say good things about the United States. So our covert-action capability began to come back very strongly." McMahon interview with author.

"guilty of contempt of Congress from the day he was sworn in": Gates, From the Shadows, p. 213. 382 "I hope that will hold the bastards!": Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the defeated Republican candidate for president in 1964, was the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee from 1981 to 1984. Casey was so stingy with the truth that Goldwater demanded chaperones from the State Department to accompany him to the witness table to serve as custodians of fact. One of those chaperones, Ambassador Dennis Kux, heard Casey muttering this line as he left the hearing room. Kux oral history, FAOH.

"specifically evasive": Fiers testimony, Joint Hearings, Iran-Contra Investigation, Washington, D.C., 1988.

"'I caught him lying to me'": Inman interview in Stansfield Turner, Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence (New York: Hyperion, 2005), pp. 196-201.

"If Congress would not finance the CIA's operations in Central America": In 1984, when Congress cut off funds for the CIA's contras, the war stalled, and elections were held. The CIA provided money and propaganda for Arturo Cruz, Sr., a former ambassador to the United States and the legitimate leader of the political opposition to the Sandinistas. But the Sandinistas' leader, Daniel Ortega, trounced him two-to-one. At this writing, Ortega has been re-elected and Nicaragua remains one of the poorest and most benighted nations in the Western Hemisphere. "The war was unnecessary, inhuman, and unwise," Cruz said after Reagan and Casey were dead and departed. "We have to say that we all make tremendous mistakes.

Despite Casey's open disdain: Kux oral history, FAOH.

"The CIA was deeply involved": Norland oral history, FAOH.

The official foreign policy of the United States: "We would like to see a peaceful resolution of Chadian factional fighting," a November 17, 1981, State Department briefing paper said. It was hard to see how the CIA's arming one faction to the teeth promoted that goal. "Libyan Threat to Sudan," Department of State, declassified July 30, 2002.

"'Fuck the Congress'": Blakemore oral history, FAOH.

"What the hell did we give Stinger missiles to Chad for?": Richard Bogosian oral history, FAOH. Bogosian, the American ambassador to Sudan during the 1991 Gulf War, witnessed Baker's query. The answer, said James K. Bishop, the principal State Department officer for military and intelligence affairs in Africa, was that Habre was "the enemy of our enemy.... We didn't know his full history until later." Bishop oral history, FAOH. "Our intelligence on the parts of Africa which were of principal concern to us was not good" throughout the 1980s, Bishop said. "Intelligence from human sources was not particularly good throughout Africa. Intelligence assets were principally employed against the 'main enemy'--the Soviets--in cat-and-mouse recruitment games of dubious national interest."

The CIA's biggest gunrunning mission: A few Americans--very few--foresaw the Soviet invasion. "I remember writing reports for Brzezinski as early as August 1979 saying that the level of Soviet military advisory personnel in Afghanistan at the time portended some kind of major military involvement there," said William Odom, then the senior White House military aide, in an interview with the author (Odom would later be a three-star general who ran the National Security Agency under President Reagan). "Now, as for the exact timing and the exact day that it happened, that's another issue. It did come as a surprise to the world and to a lot of people in the Carter administration." The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began during Christmas week of 1979, and the CIA gave the president of the United States next to no warning. Carter, helpless to free the Americans trapped in Iran, approved a plan to help the Afghans fighting against the brutal Soviet invasion. In January 1980 he ordered the CIA to ship Soviet-bloc weapons out of the arms stockpiles of American allies into Pakistan. The Pakistani intelligence service would transship them to a handful of Afghan rebel leaders. "Two days after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan I gave a memo to the President of the United States which, if I recall correctly, started with the words, 'We now have the opportunity to give the Soviet Union its Vietnam,'" Brzezinski said in an interview with the author. "And it then went on to argue that this was an act of aggression that posed a threat to the stability of that region, and potentially to our position even in the Persian Gulf, and that we should do what we can to bog the Soviets down by aiding the mujahedin. And the President approved that. A quiet coalition was created involving us, the Pakistanis, the Saudis, the Chinese, the Egyptians, the British to provide support. And the purpose of that was essentially in keeping with the first words of that memo to the President." Howard Hart's remarks are from his speech at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, September 7, 2005.

"you always have to think of the endgame": McMahon interview with author.

"the growing desperation of the men in the Kremlin": Gates, From the Shadows, p. 258. What was really happening in Moscow? Casey wanted to deliver intelligence on the players at the Politburo, on the Soviet people, on Soviet minorities and dissidents, on day-to-day existence inside the evil empire. But when the CIA could not provide it through espionage, he clung to his preconceptions. Ambassador Warren Zimmerman was the deputy chief of mission at the American embassy in Moscow from 1981 to 1984, and for those four years Casey and the CIA junked his unvarnished reporting of a collapsing Soviet empire. When he arrived, Zimmerman recounted, the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, "was in his dotage, he was slurring his words, he was falling asleep, he was getting drunk." When Brezhnev died, the nation was led briefly by Yuri Andropov, the chief of Soviet intelligence, who was dying, too, and then by Konstantin Chernenko, another leader at death's door. The Politburo, the decision-making machine in Moscow, was "an absolutely paralyzed, ineffective political apparatus" led by "a bunch of 70-and 80-year-olds, some of whom had never been out of the Soviet Union," Zimmerman said. "Their view of the United States was entirely stereotyped, based on what they read in their horrible newspapers and magazines." They had "only the most rudimentary knowledge and understanding of the United States." The American understanding of what was going on in the Soviet Union was not much better. Geriatric generals and corrupt old-guard Communist Party apparatchiks doddered through their last days, the Soviet economy crumbled under the costs of sustaining a world-class military, harvests rotted in the fields for want of fuel to truck the food from farms to markets--and few of these facts entered the collective consciousness of the CIA. Nor did the agency grasp the calculus of the balance of terror.Every single national intelligence estimate on Soviet strategic forces sent to the White House from 1974 to 1986 would overstate the rate at which Moscow was modernizing its nuclear firepower.
The peak of the unseen nuclear crisis of 1982 and 1983 came when Reagan announced that the United States would build a missile defense system--"Star Wars"--that would strike and destroy Soviet nuclear weapons in midair. America did not have--and twenty-five years later still does not have--the technology that Reagan envisioned. The Reagan administration bolstered the Strategic Defense Initiative with a rigorous counterpropaganda campaign, to convince the Soviets that "Star Wars" was based on real science and to blunt world criticism of the visionary plan. The information-warfare program gave the Soviets shivers. "They were genuinely scared," Zimmerman said. "They assumed, funnily enough, that we could build it. As it turned out, we faked our tests, and they believed it." In turn, the Soviets faked their own strength--in political lies to their people, in the public pronouncements of the Politburo--and the CIA believed it. Zimmerman oral history, FAOH.
The agency's line on Soviet nuclear weaponry and weapons research was at the time enhanced by an operation run by Jim Olson, later the CIA's counterintelligence chief. During the Carter administration, as Olson recounted, the new Keyhole photoreconnaissance satellites looked down as the Soviets dug a trench alongside a highway outside Moscow and laid telecommunications cables in it. The line ran to a nuclear-weapons research and development center outside Moscow. Manhole covers marked the line. Olson went to Moscow after elaborate training on an underground mock-up, shook off his KGB surveillance team, put on a disguise, opened a manhole, went underground, and tapped the line. The take ran for almost five years--and then the tapes went blank. James M. Olson, Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying (Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2006), pp. 9-11.

the Farewell dossier: Gus W. Weiss, "The Farewell Dossier," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 39, No. 5, 1996, CSA/CSI. Weiss was the National Security Council staffer who devised key elements of the plan of attack.

"It was a brilliant plan": Richard Allen, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Ronald Reagan Oral History Project, May 28, 2002.

 

Chapter Thirty-nine

"After a couple of jelly beans, the President dozed off": Quainton oral history, FAOH.

"the Soviets were secretly directing the dirty work of the world's worst terrorists": After the cold war, evidence emerged of direct Soviet support for Wadi Had dad, a renegade Palestinian terrorist who died in 1978. Haig's charge remains unproven.

Ali Hassan Salameh, chief of intelligence for the Palestine Liberation Organization: On March 2, 1973--the day Bill Colby took over the CIA's clandestine service--the PLO, which had burst into Americans' consciousness six months before by murdering eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, kidnapped the American ambassador to the Sudan and his second-in-command. The Americans were seized at a reception at the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. The attack was a consequence of a coup against the prime minister of the Sudan, whose paid relationship with the CIA had just been exposed. "Putting the prime minister on our payroll was just an invitation for trouble and totally unnecessary," said the State Department's Robert Oakley, Reagan's counterterrorism coordinator. "By putting him on the CIA payroll we corrupted him politically and made him extremely vulnerable." The kidnappers in Khartoum demanded that the United States free the convicted murderer of Bobby Kennedy, a Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan. President Nixon, responding off the top of his head to a reporter's question that day, said the United States would not negotiate with terrorists. The Palestinians, on orders from Yasser Arafat, murdered the two American diplomats in cold blood.
The CIA could not respond because the U.S. government had no policy to guide it. The PLO had been in action for nine years, financed chiefly by the government of Saudi Arabia and the emirs of Kuwait. The fixation at the CIA and throughout the U.S. government with the idea of state-sponsored terrorism continued after the cold war. It made it much harder, twenty years later, for Americans to understand the rise of a rich Saudi who had lived in the Sudan, a self-anointed prince named Osama bin Laden--not a state-sponsored terrorist, but a terrorist who sponsored a state.
The first stirrings of a Middle East peace process after the 1973 Yom Kippur war led the CIA into a new and uncharted territory. In secret, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Vernon Walters flew to Morocco to meet Ali Hassan Salameh. The meeting was initiated by Yasser Arafat; he was sending a signal that he wanted to be treated as a national leader, not a stateless terrorist. He wanted the PLO to negotiate for the West Bank after the Yom Kippur war. He wanted to establish a Palestinian National Authority. He was trying to establish himself as the moderate voice of Palestinian aspirations. Walters remembered: "Kissinger said, 'I can't send anyone else, because that would be negotiation, and the American Jewish community would go crazy. But you are an intelligence contact.' I said, 'Dr. Kissinger, I'm deputy director of the CIA. I'm probably number six or seven on their hit list.' He replied: 'I'm number one. That's why you're going.'" The meeting bore fruit. The CIA opened up a channel of high-level communications with the PLO. After Salameh returned from Morocco to his base in Lebanon and made contact with the CIA station in Beirut, the PLO intelligence chief began to meet on a regular basis with the CIA's Bob Ames. Walters oral history, FAOH.
Not everybody believed the information that the CIA was buying in Beirut. "They were prisoners of their lousy reports," said Talcott Seelye, who arrived as the American ambassador in Lebanon after his predecessor, Francis Meloy, was murdered while attempting to present his diplomatic credentials in 1976. The Salameh channel lasted for five years, until he was assassinated by Israeli intelligence in 1978. It represented a high-water mark in the CIA's understanding of the roots of rage in the Arab world, a glimmer of insight into who the Palestinians were and what they wanted--the sole and signal triumph of Bill Colby's time as director of central intelligence. Seelye oral history; FAOH; Colby interview with author.

His case officer was Bob Ames: Ames was "uniquely talented," Bob Gates said in an interview with the author. "I always considered my greatest recruit in my whole life at the agency was recruiting Bob Ames out of the clandestine service to be the head of the CIA analytical office working on the Middle East. And ironically after all of his years in the agency, working in the Middle East in dangerous operations, putting his life on the line, he was in Beirut as chief of the analytical office, visiting the embassy, when he was killed. So he was working for me when he was killed, not the clandestine service. I have often thought that if Bob Ames had lived, the United States might not have intervened in Lebanon and the course of history there might have been changed somewhat."

"the wave of the future": Timothy Naftali, Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism (New York: Basic, 2005), p. 85.

"the Agency people were busy": Dillon oral history, FAOH.

"He was exhilarated to be back": Susan M. Morgan, "Beirut Diary," Studies in Intelligence, Summer 1983, CIA/CSI. Morgan's recently declassified firsthand account conclusively contradicts several published versions of the Beirut embassy bombing, notably that of the CIA's Bob Baer, who describes Ames's hand being recovered hundreds of yards out in the harbor of Beirut.

"leaving us with too little intelligence": Lewis oral history, FAOH.

"Our intelligence about Grenada was lousy": Clarridge interview for the CNN Cold War Series, 1998, National Security Archive transcript available online at http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-18/ clarridge1.html.

"The CIA had a plan to form a government": Gillespie oral history, FAOH.

 

Chapter Forty

"There was a presidential finding signed by Ronald Reagan": Wells interview with author.

"To save his own ass": O'Neill oral history, FAOH.

"The Reagan Administration took a covert operation": Korn interview with author and oral history, FAOH.

"Casey's recommendation to kidnap Mughniyah": Oakley oral history, FAOH.

"Reagan was preoccupied with the fate of the hostages and could not understand why CIA could not locate and rescue them": Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows : The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the ColdWar (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 397.

"the Agency had to reach outside itself": McMahon interview with author.

"the mines has got to be the solution!": Clarridge interview for the CNN Cold War Series, 1998, National Security Archive transcript available online at http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-18/clarridge1.html. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, described the CIA's defamation of Senator Goldwater in an interview with the author. In 1984, while cutting off funds for the contras, Congress approved a CIA covert operation to spend more than $2 million to ensure the election of the Christian Democrat Jose Napoleon Duarte as president of El Salvador, while blunting the candidacy of the death-squad leader Roberto d'Aubuisson.

"He was running a great risk": Gates, From the Shadows, p. 315.

 

Chapter Forty-one

"It could be a breakthrough": Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), pp. 501-502. Unless otherwise noted, the facts, figures, and quotations concerning the Iran-contra affair in this chapter are taken from the records of the joint congressional committee and the final report of the independent counsel team that investigated the fiasco.

"We received a draft secret executive order telling us to go knock off terrorists in pre-emptive strikes": McMahon interview with author.

"North's rationale": Kelly oral history, FAOH.

"the CIA was corrupted": Wilcox oral history, FAOH.

"get that plane the hell out of Costa Rica!": CIA interview with Joseph Fernandez, CIA Office of the Inspector General, January 24, 1987.

"The intelligence we passed to them": Oakley oral history, FAOH.

"The person who managed this whole affair was Casey": Sofaer oral history in Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober, Reagan: The Man and His Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 500.

"The meeting was an unmitigated disaster": James McCullough, "Personal Reflections on Bill Casey's Last Month at CIA," Studies in Intelligence, Summer 1995, commentary by David Gries, CIA/CSI.

"No scandal and a good many solid successes": Casey's remarkable talking points are cited in Douglas F. Garthoff, "Directors of Central Intelligence as Leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community, 1946-2005," 2006, CIA/CSI. These words are part of the strong body of circumstantial evidence suggesting that Casey's brain tumor sparked otherwise inexplicable conduct during his last eighteen months as director of central intelligence. His divorce from reality in those days was exemplified by his romance with Renamo, the Mozambique National Resistance Movement. Renamo was a black guerrilla army created by the white racists of South Africa and Rhodesia and the most vicious rebel force afoot in the region. Trained, armed, and financed by BOSS, the South African intelligence service, Renamo used tactics including "the cutting off of ears, the severing of limbs and breasts, and general mutilation," said Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., who oversaw African affairs under President Reagan. "This mutilation became the norm, and perhaps half a million people perished." Renamo was "reminiscent of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia," said James Bishop, the principal State Department officer for African political and military affairs, "vicious and excessive in its use of terrorism."
Casey told President Reagan that Renamo deserved the CIA's support as freedom fighters in the global war on communism. His tactics included the "cooking of intelligence to magnify the impact of Renamo," said Ambassador Freeman. Barred from direct support to the rebels, Casey took another tack. In 1986, after a ten-year ban, Congress took his word and revived covert military aid to the CIA's favored armies in Angola, including Stinger missiles, antitank weapons, and tons of automatic weapons. The agency had been backing one Angolan faction or another off and on for thirty years. The renewal of the Angola program opened an arms pipeline from the agency that ran through South Africa and depended on the apartheid regime's support. The most powerful American diplomats involved in the region strongly suspected that Casey opened up a back channel of lethal aid to the renegades of Renamo. "Casey, who was prone to follow his own foreign policy, indeed did become, to some extent, involved with Renamo, against the declared policy, and indeed the strongly held internal policy of the administration," Ambassador Freeman said.
"Casey set out to destroy our diplomacy" in southern Africa, said Frank G. Wisner, Jr. "And he almost succeeded." FAOH interviews.

"Bill Casey had a lot to answer for": McCullough, "Personal Reflections."

"a job no one else seemed to want": Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 414. Gates had to go to Capitol Hill to answer for his nomination. "How do you like the job so far?" a newspaper photographer asked. Gates replied with the twangy title of a country-and-western hit: "Take This Job and Shove it." An open microphone caught him. Everyone knew the next line of the song: "I ain't working here no more."

"It quickly became clear that he was too close": Webster interview with author.

"The clandestine service is the heart and soul of the agency": Gates interview with author.

 

Chapter Forty-two

"It took me months to get a clear understanding": Webster interview with author.

"No one else can understand it": Thompson interview with author.

"We probably could have overcome Webster's ego": Duane R. Clarridge with Digby Diehl, A Spy for All Seasons: My Life in the CIA (New York: Scribner, 1997), p. 371.

"A point Dick Helms made": Webster interview with author.

"Congress doesn't believe you": Webster interview with author.

Clarridge briefly considered fighting back: Clarridge, A Spy for All Seasons, pp. 381-386.

"American intelligence was generous with him," Gorbachev remarked: Politburo minutes, September 28, 1986, Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson Center.

"an exercise, nothing more": Webster interview with author.

Florentino Aspillaga Lombard: It is hard to overstate how devastating was the realization that Castro's intelligence service had outsmarted the CIA for twenty straight years. Nor was Aspillaga's 1987 defection the end of it. On September 21, 2001, the FBI arrested Ana Belen Montes, the senior Cuba analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, who confessed six months later that she had been spying for Cuba since 1985. Hundreds of spies from Cuba's Direccion General de Inteligencia, the DGI, have lived and worked in the United States ever since the Bay of Pigs, according to former members of the Cuban service who have defected. They operate as diplomats and cab drivers, dealers of guns and drugs and information. The Cuban intelligence service, which reports to Defense Minister Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, has infiltrated Cuban exile groups and U.S. government agencies with notable success. Take the case of Jose Rafael Fernandez Brenes, who jumped ship from a Cuban merchant vessel in 1988. Embraced by American intelligence, he helped set up and run TV Marti, the U.S. government-financed station that beamed anti-Castro information and propaganda at Cuba, from 1988 to 1991. The Cuban government jammed TV Marti's signal the moment it went on the air in March 1990--thanks to the data supplied by Fernandez Brenes. Then there was Francisco Avila Azcuy, who ran operations for Alpha 66, one of the most violent anti-Castro exile groups, all the while reporting secretly to the FBI--and Cuban intelligence. Avila planned a 1981 raid on Cuba, telling both the FBI and the DGI all about it. His information helped convict seven members of Alpha 66 for violating the Neutrality Act by planning an attack on a foreign nation from U.S. soil. Tim Weiner, "Castro's Moles Dig Deep, Not Just into Exiles," The New York Times, March 1, 1996.

"they actually did something right": Lilley interview with author.

a brilliant plot against the Abu Nidal Organization: Tom Twetten interview with author. The best summary of the operation is Timothy Naftali, Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism (New York: Basic, 2005), pp. 196-198.

half-baked insurgency: John H. Kelly oral history, FAOH. Kelly became assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs in June 1989.

grudge match: In a May 1, 1987, letter to President Reagan, Son Sann, the president of the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, the intended recipient of the CIA's aid, warned against "improved US-Vietnam relations" and cautioned Reagan against "moderation" toward "the main Soviet proxy in Southeast Asia." Son Sann's letter and Powell's memo to Reagan warning against a resurgent Khmer Rouge were both declassified May 28, 1999.

"One by one we killed them": Howard Hart remarks, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, September 7, 2005.

"we don't have any plan": Twetten interview with author.

"drastically reduce our assistance to the real radicals": Oakley oral history, FAOH.

 

Chapter Forty-three

"Casey saw him as a protege": Davis oral history, FAOH.

"The CIA, who had dealt with him for so long": Pastorino oral history, FAOH.

"As a former deputy director of the CIA": Dachi oral history, FAOH.

The CIA's Don Winters testified: Trial transcripts of United States v. Manuel Noriega.

"Saddam Hussein was known to be a brutal dictator": Wilcox oral history, FAOH.

"The arrested agents were tortured to death": Giraldi interview, Balkananaly sis.com, July 30, 2006. The author interviewed Giraldi in 1994 and 1995. Leaving aside the human tragedy of the agents' deaths, the CIA's reporting and analysis on Iran was consistently off the mark during this period. In the summer of 1987, during the final agonies of the Iran-Iraq War, Iran was harassing Kuwaiti oil tankers at sea. The ships then were placed under the American flag and protected by navy warships. The CIA assessed the situation in the Persian Gulf and strongly advised an end to the reflagging operation. The question went to the national security adviser, Frank Carlucci, the former deputy director of central intelligence. "The Agency produced a report which essentially said no military confrontation with Iran would work," Carlucci said. "The Iranians provoked us and we sank half their Navy in twenty-four hours. They went back and put their ships in the harbor, so we were able to sail with impunity in the Gulf. The CIA was wrong." Carlucci oral history, FAOH.

"Is Iraq Bluffing?": Richard L. Russell, "CIA's Strategic Intelligence in Iraq," Political Science Quarterly, Summer 2002. Russell served for seventeen years as a political-military analyst at CIA.

"I did sound the warning bell": Charles Allen remarks, "Intelligence: Cult, Craft, or Business?" Program on Information Resources Policy, Harvard University, April 6, 2000.

King Hussein of Jordan told the president: Memorandum of telephone conversation, with King Hussein, July 31, 1990, HWBL.

"there wasn't much intelligence": James A. Baker III with Thomas M. DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989-1992 (New York: Putnam, 1995), p. 7.

"an unfortunately quite typical pattern": Freeman oral history, FAOH. On January 10, 1991, the CIA warned the White House and the Pentagon that "Saddam Hussein almost certainly will unleash a major terrorist campaign against Western--particularly U.S.--interests. Multiple, simultaneous attacks are likely to occur in several geographic regions--possibly including the United States--in an effort to capture maximum publicity and sow widespread panic." There was never any evidence that Iraqi intelligence cells had penetrated the United States, but the CIA and the FBI did track at least three groups of Iraqi military officers in the Middle East and Asia and captured them in the days immediately before the American attack on Iraq. CIA, "Terrorism Review," January 10, 1991, CIA/FOIA.

"'CIA hadn't a clue'": Clarke interview, Frontline, "The Dark Side," January 23, 2006, edited transcript available online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/interviews/clarke.html.

"a tidal wave of history": Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 449. Gates oversaw a National Security Council staff under Bush filled with experts who disdained the work of the analysts Gates had led at the CIA. Ambassador Robert D. Blackwill was the NSC staff man for Soviet and European affairs in 1989 and 1990. "The Agency was still putting out gobs of analytic products that I never read," he said. "During the two years I did not read a single [National Intelligence] Estimate. Not one. And except for Gates, I do not know of anyone at the NSC who did." Blackwill quoted in Jack Davis, "A Policymaker's Perspective on Intelligence Analysis,"Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 38, No. 5, 1995, CIA/CSI.

"the basic elements of Soviet defense policy": NIE 11-3/8-88, "Soviet Forces and Capabilities for Strategic Nuclear Conflict Through the Late 1990s," December 1, 1988, CIA/CSI.

"people would have been calling for my head": MacEachin cited in Kirsten Lundberg, "CIA and the Fall of the Soviet Empire: The Politics of 'Getting It Right,'" Case Study C16-94-1251.0, Harvard University, 1994, pp. 30-31.

"He'd never once been there": Palmer oral history, FAOH.

"They talked about the Soviet Union": Crowe oral history, FAOH.

"What are we going to do when the Wall comes down?": Walters quoted in David Fischer oral history, FAOH.

"there were no Soviet spies": If there was ever a time for the CIA to press hard to understand why those spies had died, it was during the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1990 and 1991. "When I was [first] nominated to be director in 1987 I had lunch with Dick Helms," Bob Gates told me. "And I remember Helms wagging his finger at me at the lunch in the Director's dining room, it was just the two of us, we were all by ourselves, and him telling me, never go home at night without wondering where the mole is." In 1992, in the last months of Bob Gates's short turn as director of central intelligence, the case began to be resolved. Aldrich Ames was arrested in February 1994. Gates interview with author.

"It was easy, once upon a time, for the CIA to be unique": Bearden interview with author.

"The ultimate tragedy is spiritual": Giraldi interview with author.

"this was rapidly evolving into a very bad situation": Arnold Donahue, "Perspectives on U.S. Intelligence," Program on Information Resources, Harvard University, April 1998.

"Sitting alone in the vice president's office was surrealistic": Michael J. Sulick, "As the USSR Collapsed: A CIA Officer in Lithuania," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 50, No. 2, 2006, CIA/CSI.

"Adjust or die": Gates note and announcement to CIA employees cited in Douglas F. Garthoff, "Directors of Central Intelligence as Leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community, 1946-2005," 2006, CIA/CSI. Garthoff worked at CIA from 1972 to 1999, serving many years as an analyst of Soviet affairs under Gates.

"We have lost": Richard Kerr, "The Evolution of the U.S. Intelligence System in the Post-Soviet Era," Program on Information Resources, Harvard University, Spring 1992.

"19-year-olds on two-year rotations": MacEachin cited in Robert Steele, "Private Enterprise Intelligence: Its Potential Contribution to National Security," paper delivered at conference on Intelligence Analysis and Assessment, Ottawa, Canada, October 22-29, 1994. Steele is a CIA veteran who champions open-source analysis.

"Tensions rising as budget pinches": Gates note cited in Garthoff, "Directors of Central Intelligence."

 

Chapter Forty-four

"immense democratic and entrepreneurial opportunity": Anthony Lake, "From Containment to Enlargment," Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, September 21, 1993.

he would be the next director of central intelligence: Bill Clinton charmed most of the CIA briefers, who came to Little Rock, holed up in $38.50-a-night motel rooms at the Comfort Inn by the airport, and drove out to the governor's mansion to school him. But they were never quite sure how much he was really taking in. John L. Helgerson. Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952-1992, CIA/CSI.

"Admiral, I didn't know" and "I didn't have a bad relationship": Woolsey remarks, Council on Foreign Relations, May 12, 2004; Woolsey interview with author.

"nobody's seen the president": Twetten interview with author.

dozens of covert-action proposals during his first two years in office: While the precise number remains classified, "the Clinton administration requested a remarkable number of covert action proposals to deal with the increasingly troublesome array of problems it faced in the early 1990s, only to conclude that covert action could not save the United States from overt military intervention," in the words of John MacGaffin, the number-two man in the clandestine service under Clinton and the author's downstairs neighbor after he left the CIA. By the way, MacGaffin never leaked. See his "Spies, Counterspies, and Covert Action," in Jennifer E. Sims and Burton Gerber (eds.) Transforming U.S. Intelligence (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005), pp. 79-95.

"No harsher test was there than Somalia": Wisner oral history, FAOH.

"the intelligence failure in Somalia": Crowe oral history, FAOH. Before the admiral took over the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, he had to tell President Clinton what it was: "Early in the Administration, the President and I talked about what I would like to do," Crowe recalled. "I said, 'PFIAB,' and he said, 'What's PFIAB?' So I had to tell him what it was."

Not long after dawn on January 25: The events of January 25, 1993, are reconstructed from a report that Nick Starr filed for the CIA's in-house newsletter and from court records. Four and a half years later, the killer, Mir Amal Kansi, was arrested in Pakistan in a rendition operation coordinated by the CIA and backed by a $2 million reward. He said the murders were an act of vengeance for American foreign policy in the Middle East. The state of Virginia convicted him of murder and put him to death by lethal injection.

"a member of the Central Intelligence Agency in Khartoum": O'Neill oral history, FAOH.

"But the CIA eventually concluded": Intelligence memorandum, "Iraq: Baghdad Attempts to Assassinate Former President Bush," CIA Counterterrorist Center, July 12, 1993, CIA/FOIA.

"proportionate to the attack on President Bush": Tim Weiner, "Attack Is Aimed at the Heart of Iraq's Spy Network," The New York Times, June 27, 1993.

"Saddam tries to assassinate": Woolsey remarks, Restoration Weekend, Palm Beach, Florida, November 16, 2002.

Many of its leaders had been on the CIA's payroll for years: Tim Weiner with Steve Engelberg and Howard French, "CIA Formed Haitian Unit Later Tied to Narcotics Trade," The New York Times, November 14, 1993. A brief portrait of one of the CIA's men in Haiti, taken from that article: Among the military officers who took the agency's cash and led the Haitian intelligence service was Colonel Ernst Prudhomme, a member of the anti-Aristide junta that seized power in Haiti. On November 2, 1989, while he held the title of chief of national security and received the CIA's largesse, he led a brutal interrogation of Evans Paul, the mayor of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. The interrogation left the mayor with five broken ribs and internal injuries. "Prudhomme himself never touched me," Paul said. "He played the role of the intellectual, the man who searched carefully for contradictions in your account--the man who seemed to give direction to the whole enterprise. He wanted to present me to the world as a terrorist.... He seemed to have so much information about my life, all the way from my childhood. It was if he had been following me step by step."

"the Thomas Jefferson of Haiti": Woolsey remarks, Council on Foreign Relations, May 12, 2004.

a CIA study saying half a million people might die: Tim Weiner, "Critics Say U.S. Ignored C.I.A. Warnings of Genocide in Rwanda," The New York Times, March 26, 1998. It was hard to see what the CIA could have done to prevent the slaughter even if the White House had the will, for it had no one stationed in Rwanda. "The CIA was not very helpful in terms of internal African politics. Never had been," said Clinton's ambassador in Rwanda, Robert E. Gribbin III, a professional diplomat with long service on the continent. "They weren't particularly interested in it."

The president's response to Rwanda: That response came in a major foreign policy order called Presidential Decision Directive 25. Dated May 3, 1994, and still largely classified, it aimed to make the United Nations take the lead in peacekeeping operations.

"Frankenstein's creature": James Monnier Simon, Jr., "Managing Domestic, Military, and Foreign Policy Requirements: Correcting Frankenstein's Blunder," in Sims and Gerber, Transforming U.S. Intelligence, pp. 149-161.

 

Chapter Forty-five

"I know what the Soviet Union is really all about": Ames interview with author.

"Their names were given to the Soviet intelligence service": Hitz interview with author.

"You have to wonder whether the CIA has become no different from any other bureaucracy": Glickman interview with author.

"I would disembowel the CIA": Odom interview with author.

"The place just needs a total overhaul": Specter interview with author.

"What does it all mean now?": Aspin interview with author.

"Our goal is to sell intelligence": Snider quoted in Loch K. Johnson, "The Aspin-Brown Intelligence Inquiry: Behind the Closed Doors of a Blue Ribbon Commission," Studies in Intelligence, Fall 2004, CIA/CSI.

"Counterterrorism received little attention": Johnson, "The Aspin-Brown Intelligence Inquiry."

"inadequote numbers of people on the front line": Hitz interview with the author.

 

Chapter Forty-six

"The president asked me whether I was interested in being the director of central intelligence": Deutch interview with author.

"Plagued by poor leadership, the Agency is adrift": John A. Gentry, "A Framework for Reform of the U.S. Intelligence Community," available online at http://www.fas.org/irp/gentry/. Gentry had been a CIA analyst for twelve years.

"seeing it as nothing but trouble": Helms interview with author.

Eight thousand people were dead, and the agency had missed it: Stephen Engelberg and Tim Weiner with Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez, "Srebrenica: The Days of Slaughter," The New York Times, October 29, 1995.

the CIA's Paris station had run an elaborate operation: Tim Weiner, "C.I.A. Confirms Blunders During Economic Spying on France," The New York Times, March 13, 1996.

The division was a world apart at the CIA: Tim Weiner, "More Is Told About C.I.A. in Guatemala," The New York Times, April 25, 1995.

"The CIA station in Guatemala was about twice the size it needed to be": Stroock interview with author.

"The chief of station came into my office": McAfee interview with author.

"Let me explain life to you": Tenet interview with author.

"Dick Clarke came to me and said, 'They're going to blow you up'": Lake interview with author.

the agency conspired with an Iraqi exile named Ayad Alawi: In May 2004, a year into the American occupation of Iraq, the United States propelled Alawi into the post of prime minister. Despite his articulateness and ambition, he was not a political success. The near-universal knowledge of his long-standing ties to the CIA was not counted in his favor.

an old and troubled romance: In the summer of 1972, the agency delivered a $5.38 million package of aid and arms personally approved by Nixon and Kissinger "to assist...the Iraqi Kurds in their resistance against the Ba'athi Iraqi regime," in Kissinger's words. Kissinger then sold the Kurds down the river two years later, abandoning American support for their cause in order to pacify the shah of Iran, who had grown fearful of an independent Kurdish state. Kissinger memo, undated but on or about July 31, 1971, in FRUS, 1969-1972. Vol. E-4, document 322, declassified September 2006.

"The Saddam case was an interesting case": Lowenthal interview with author.

"It would have been a great challenge": Lake interview with author.

"a dancing bear in a political circus": Lake interview with author.

"It is impossible to overstate the turbulence": Hitz interview with author.

Its ability to collect and analyze secrets was falling apart: A strong encryption program called PGP, for Pretty Good Privacy, had been available for free on the World Wide Web since the end of the cold war. On March 20, 1997, the deputy director of the National Security Agency, William Crowell, told Congress: "If all the personal computers in the world--260 million computers--were put to work on a single PGP-encrypted message, it would still take an estimated 12 million times the age of the universe, on average, to break a single message." How was American intelligence going to unscramble that? Crowell testimony, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, March 20, 1997.

"great successes are rare and failure is routine": "IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century," Staff Study, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 1996.

The careers of three years' worth of CIA trainees were blighted: Completion of the CIA's training course was no guarantee of success when stationed overseas. Jim Olson, who served as chief of station in Moscow, Vienna, and Mexico City, told the story of a bright young couple who reported to him as newly minted case officers. She was a lawyer, he was an engineer. "I had high hopes for them," he recounted. But after less than a week, they told him that they had ethical qualms about recruiting agents "under false pretenses. They said they simply could not bring themselves to mislead and manipulate innocent people that way." Of course, that is what CIA officers overseas do for a living. The couple could not be salvaged. They quit, and wound up driving a long-haul tractor trailer in tandem. Olson was "very curious why their moral reservations had not turned up in training." It turned out that they had indeed expressed their fears, but their instructors told them not to worry--that "everything would be fine once they got to their first assignment." Everything was not fine. Olson, Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying (Washington, DC: Potomac, 2006), pp. 251-252. A 2003 graduate of the CIA's training school., T. J. Waters, has reported similar misfeasance by his instructors. There seems to be a problem down on the Farm. T. J. Waters, Class 11: Inside the Largest Spy Class in CIA History (New York: Dutton, 2006).

"depth, breadth, and expertise": Report of House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Representative Porter J. Goss, Chairman, June 18, 1997.

"From the vantage point of 2001...intelligence failure is inevitable": Russ Travers, "The Coming Intelligence Failure," Studies in Intelligence, 1997, CIA/CSI. Travers wrote: "Failure may be of the traditional variety: we fail to predict the fall of a friendly government; we do not provide sufficient warning of a surprise attack against one of our allies or interests; we are completely surprised by a state-sponsored terrorist attack; or we fail to detect an unexpected country acquiring a weapon of mass destruction. Or it may take a more nontraditional form: we overstate numerous threats leading to tens of billions of dollars of unnecessary expenditures; database errors lead to a politically unacceptable number of casualties in a peaceenforcement operation; or an operation does not go well.... In the end, we may not suffer a Pearl Harbor, but simply succumb to a series of mistakes that raises questions about an intelligence budget that dwarfs the entire defense budget of most countries. The Community will try to explain the failure(s) away, and it will legitimately point to extenuating circumstances. But we are going to begin making more and bigger mistakes more often. It is only a matter of time before the results rise to the level of acknowledged intelligence failure.... The reasons will be simple: we have gotten away from basics--the collection and unbiased analysis of facts."

 

Chapter Forty-seven

"We were nearly bankrupt": Tenet testimony, 9/11 Commission, April 14, 2004; Tenet remarks, Kutztown University, April 27, 2005. Tenet testified that he inherited a CIA "whose dollars were declining and whose expertise was ebbing.... The infrastructure to recruit, train, and sustain officers for our clandestine service--the nation's human intelligence capability--was in disarray.... Our information systems were becoming obsolescent during the greatest information technology change in our lifetimes."

the fifty greatest: The list of the CIA's "Trailblazers" included Robert Ames, lost in the Beirut embassy bombing of 1983; Dick Bissell, progenitor of the U-2 and the Bay of Pigs; Jamie Critchfield, who had run the Gehlen organization; Allen Dulles, the Great White Case Officer; Richard Lehman, whose briefings Dulles had judged by their heft; Art Lundahl, the photo interpreter in the Cuban missile crisis; Tony Mendez, the master of disguise; and, of course, Frank Wisner, the avatar of covert action.

"The only remaining superpower": Helms interview with author.

"The trust that was reposed in the CIA has faded": Schlesinger interview with author.

"Intelligence isn't just something for the cold war": Goss interview with author.

"a very disturbing event": Charles Allen remarks, "Intelligence: Cult, Craft, or Business?" Program on Information Resources Policy, Harvard University, April 6, 2000.

"The likelihood of a cataclysmic warning failure is growing": Mary O. McCarthy, "The Mission to Warn: Disaster Looms," Defense Intelligence Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1998.

Tenet decided to cancel the operation: The blow-by-blow is in the 9/11 Commission report.

"We will need much better intelligence on this facility": McCarthy quoted in 9/11 Commission report.

"It was a mistake": Petterson oral history, FAOH.

"The decision to target al Shifa": Carney interview with author. I covered the Nairobi bombings and the al Shifa aftermath for The New York Times; interviews for the latter story included senior CIA, NSC, State, and Defense officials. They were conducted on background and sadly must re-main there, but two were with members of the "Small Group," the highest national-security circle, whose six members included the national security adviser and the director of central intelligence. Clinton's sexual dalliances with an intern had just become public, and the officials I interviewed were not quite sure what they believed anymore. But they put up a good show.

"a catastrophic systemic intelligence failure": Cited in "Counterterrorism Intelligence Capabilities and Performance Prior to 9/11," House intelligence committee hearing, September 5, 2002. The sense that something terrible was about to happen was unbearable for some members of the intelligence community. Three weeks after that September 11, 1998, warning, John Millis, a veteran clandestine service officer who was the staff director for chairman Porter Goss at the House intelligence committee, gave a speech to CIA retirees. Millis said the agency was drowning in meaningless data, short on brainpower, approaching collapse. "People used to come to us and brag that CIA is the 911 of the government," he mused. "Well, if you're dialing 911, intelligence has already lost." Millis blew his head off with a shotgun in a seedy motel outside Washington on June 4, 2000.

"in ten years we won't be relevant": Tenet interview with author.

"to use deception, to use manipulation, to use, frankly, dishonesty": Smith interview with author.

"people that are a little different": Gates interview with author.

gung-ho became go slow: Gary Schroen's accounts of the misfires against bin Laden are in his 9/11 Commission testimony. He summed it up years later: "We didn't do enough. We didn't penetrate bin Laden's inner circle; we still haven't. So, yeah, there was a failure." Schroen interview, Frontline, "The Dark Side," January 20, 2006, edited transcript available online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/ interviews/schroen.html.

"the United States had the capability to remove Osama bin Laden": MacGaffin, "Spies, Counterspies, and Covert Action," in Jennifer E. Sims and Burton Gerber (eds.), Transforming U.S. Intelligence (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005).

The Afghans kept tracking bin Laden's travels: The pursuit of bin Laden and the hesitation of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House are detailed in the 9/11 Commission report.

"The bombing of the Chinese embassy": Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, Harvard Seminar on Intelligence, Command, and Control, Program on Information Resources Policy, November 2001.

"You Americans are crazy": 9/11 Commission report, "Intelligence Policy," Staff Statement No. 7.

"The threat could not be more real": Tenet cited in 9/11 Commission report.

"a lot of money": Clarke testimony in 9/11 Commission report.

Al Qaeda was the obvious suspect: The pre-and post-election briefings of George Bush by the CIA and Bill Clinton are in the 9/11 Commission report. The bombing of the USS Cole brought an unusually vehement attack from John Lehman, the secretary of the navy during the Reagan administration. He raged at "the obscene failure of intelligence" in the attack in an opinion article published in the Washington Post three days afterward. "But of course, no one could be surprised by intelligence failure. In 14 years of government service in three administrations I observed many historic crises, and in every one the consolidated product of the intelligence bureaucracy either failed to provide warning, as in Kuwait, or was grossly wrong in its assessment.... But nothing is ever done. Cole is the latest victim of a $30 billion jobs program that takes the most wondrous products of space and electronic technology and turns them into useless mush."

 

Chapter Forty-eight

"why a foreseeable disaster went unforeseen": James Monnier Simon, Jr., Seminar on Intelligence, Command, and Control, Program of Information Resources Policy, Harvard University, July 2001.

"cut off from the realities of the outside world by their antiquated information technologies": I had heard tales of how bad the CIA's work stations and information technologies were, but I never fully understood them until Bruce Berkowitz, a former CIA officer and a highly respected consultant to the agency, published the hard facts in Studies in Intelligence in 2003. "Analysts know far less about new information technology and services than do their counterparts in the private sector and other government organizations," he wrote after spending a year at the agency as a CIA scholar in residence. "On average, they seem about five years or more behind. Many analysts seem unaware of data that are available on the Internet and from other non-CIA sources." He said the message from CIA managers was: "that technology is a threat, not a benefit; that the CIA does not put a high priority on analysts using IT easily or creatively; and, worst of all, that data outside the CIA's own network are secondary to the intelligence mission." Bruce Berkowitz, "Failing to Keep Up with the Information Revolution," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2003, CIA/CSI.

"When these attacks occur, as they likely will": Clarke e-mail cited in 9/11 Commission report.

"Either al Qaeda is a threat worth acting against or it is not": Clark cited in 9/11 Commission report.

"One hopes they won't be fatal": Garrett Jones, "Working with the CIA," Parameters (U.S. Army War College Quarterly), Vol. 31, No. 4, Winter 2001-2002. Among the fatal consequences of 9/11, little noticed in the civilian world, was this: by blind chance, the plane that struck the Pentagon killed most if not all of the naval intelligence staff of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

"the dark side": Speaking from Camp David on Meet the Press on Sunday, September 16, 2001, Cheney said, "We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful."

President Bush issued a fourteen-page top secret directive to Tenet and the CIA: On January 10, 2007, the existence of the directive was acknowledged in a court filing by the CIA. The secret order authorized the CIA "to detain terrorists" and "to set up detention facilities outside the United States." Declaration of Marilyn A. Dorn, ACLU v. Department of Defense.

"What would it have? Well, a thumbprint": James M. Simon, Jr., "Analysis, Analysts, and Their Role in Government and Intelligence," Harvard seminar, Program on Information Resources Policy, July 2003.

"I could not not do this": Hayden testimony, Senate intelligence committee, May 18, 2006. At this writing, Hayden is running the CIA. He has been articulate about how close to the edge of the law he is willing to go. "We're going to live on the edge," he has said. "My spikes will have chalk on them."

"Not everyone arrested was a terrorist": Tenet remarks, Nixon Center Distinguished Service Award Banquet, December 11, 2002. The agency acknowledged in December 2006 that it had been holding fourteen "high-value" prisoners in its secret jails and was transferring them to Guantanamo.

 

Chapter Forty-nine

He based that statement on the confessions of a single source: "Postwar Findings," Senate intelligence committee, September 8, 2006.

"It was the wrong thing to do": Tenet testimony, July 26, 2006, cited in "Postwar Findings," September 8, 2006.

"We did not have many Iraqi sources": James L. Pavitt remarks, Foreign Policy Association, June 21, 2004. The best source the CIA had was provided by the French intelligence service, which had cultivated Naji Sabri, Iraq's foreign minister, as its agent. Sabri said that Saddam did not have an active nuclear or biological weapons program. Evidently his reporting was rejected. Sabri was the man to whom Tenet referred in a February 5, 2004, speech, when he said the CIA had had "a source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle." The CIA had almost no ability to analyze accurately what little intelligence it had. Its experts were few and far between, and they were supported by scores of rookies. After 9/11, "analysts unfamiliar with terrorism, al-Qaida, or Southwest Asia were scrambling to get up to speed on their new assignments," noted the CIA veteran Bruce Berkowitz. "Months later, people were still rearranging furniture, remodeling offices, and rewiring computers." Berkowitz, "Failing to Keep Up with the Information Revolution," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2003, CIA/CSI.

"If we are not believed, we have no purpose": Richard Helms, "Intelligence in American Society," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer 1967, CIA/CSI. The article was adapted from a speech Helms gave to the Council on Foreign Relations on April 17, 1967.

"Ultimately, I think, the Iraqis were right": Duelfer remarks, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, April 22, 2005.

"We were bereft of any human intelligence": David Kay, "Weapons of Mass Destruction: Lessons Learned and Unlearned," Miller Center Report, Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring/Summer 2004.

Tenet looked him in the eye: Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's top military assistant, was there when it happened. "I can still hear George Tenet telling me, and telling my boss in the bowels of the CIA" that the intelligence was rock solid, said Colonel Wilkerson. "I sat in the room looking into his eyes, as did the Secretary of State, and heard it with the firmness that only George could give it.... George Tenet assuring Colin Powell that the information he was presenting at the U.N. was ironclad, only to have that same individual call the Secretary on more than one occasion in the ensuing months after the presentation and tell him that central pillars of his presentation were indeed false." Wilkerson remarks, New American Foundation, October 19, 2005; Wilkerson interview, Frontline, "The Dark Side," December 13, 2005, edited transcript available online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/inter views/wilkerson.html.

"I think we did get Saddam Hussein": Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq, Human Rights Watch, December 2003. The report concluded: "The intelligence for 50 strikes aimed at 55 members of the Iraqi leadership was perfect: not one leader was killed but dozens of civilians died."

The agency had predicted that thousands of Iraqi soldiers and their commanders would surrender: That was the last word on the eve of the ground attack, said army major general James Thurman, the overall operations director for the invasion. "We were told that by the CIA," said General Thurman. "And that isn't what happened. We had to fight our way through every town." Thurman quoted in Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 118.

Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who...had turned himself in voluntarily to American forces: Command's Responsibility: Detainee Deaths in U.S. Custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, Human Rights First, February 22, 2006.

"the cause celebre for jihadists": declassified excerpt in "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States," April 2006, CIA.

"Every Army of liberation": Lieutenant General David H. Petraeus, "Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq," Military Review, January-February 2006. The article is posted in the U.S. Army Professional Writing Collection, available online at http://www.army.mil/ professionalwriting/volumes/volume4/april_2006/.

"As Iraq transitions from tyranny to self-determination": Pavitt remarks, Foreign Policy Association, June 21, 2004.

too many hours drinking at the Babylon bar: Lindsay Moran, who quit the clandestine service in 2003 and based her statement on reports from friends and colleagues at the Baghdad station, said: "The climate there is such that you simply cannot conduct standard case officer operations. A male colleague has described it to me as a kind of relentless overage frat party in Baghdad; that is, the case officers, without being able to conduct operations, are just sort of forced to stay on the compound and party." Moran remarks, "U.S. Intelligence Reform and the WMD Commission Report," American Enterprise Institute, May 4, 2005. 493-94 "They had grave, grave difficulty finding a competent individual": Crandall oral history, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Iraq Experience Project, September 20, 2004.

"misinformed, misleading, and just plain wrong": Tenet statement, CIA Office of Public Affairs, August 11, 2003.

it no longer mattered much to the White House: By 2004, it was clear that intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, wrote Paul Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005. "What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence is not that it got things wrong and misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in recent decades." Paul Pillar, "Unheeded Intelligence,"Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006.

"just guessing": Bush news conference, September 21, 2004. The president dismissed pessimistic reports from the Baghdad station chief as defeatist drivel.

"We're at war": Silberman remarks, "U.S. Intelligence Reform and the WMD Commission Report," American Enterprise Institute, May 4, 2005.

"even more misleading": Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, March 31, 2005.

"Those were the two dumbest words I ever said": Tenet remarks, Kutztown University, April 27, 2005.

"the meteor strikes on the dinosaurs": Richard Kerr, Thomas Wolfe, Rebecca Donegan, and Aris Pappas, "Collection and Analysis on Iraq: Issues for the US Intelligence Community," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 49, No. 3, 2005, CIA/CSI.

"We didn't get the job done": Tenet remarks, Kutztown University, April 27, 2005.

"We think intelligence is important to win wars": Kay, "Weapons of Mass Destruction."

 

Chapter Fifty

In his farewell at CIA headquarters: Tenet remarks, CIA Office of Public Affairs, July 8, 2004. Unlike Tenet, Nixon in his own farewell speech had the good grace to quote the full passage about the man in the arena, "whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is not effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deed, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievements and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly."

a painful personal memoir: George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). The cited passages are on pages 110 and 232. Tenet did himself no favors by opening the book with a dramatic story about confronting the neoconservative mandarin Richard Perle outside the West Wing of the White House on September 12, 2001, and Perle saying: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday." Perle was in France on that day; the quotation was at best a howling error. Tenet's owning up to the CIA's mistakes was admirable as far as it went. But he called himself "a member of a Greek chorus" and "a prop on the set" at Colin Powell's United Nations speech--every passage of which he had defended. He tried to explain away "slam dunk," but he could not. Tenet's book was attacked upon publication from right, left, and center. Among its few defenders were six senior officers who had served Tenet. They wrote an open letter calling him a man with "the courage to acknowledge errors that were made and accept the responsibility that belongs to him and the intelligence community he led."

"I couldn't get a job with CIA today": Goss told an interviewer, on camera, in a clip transcribed and posted by the leftist filmmaker Michael Moore. "I was in CIA from approximately the late 50's to approximately the early 70's. And it's true I was a case officer, clandestine service officer, and yes, I do understand the core mission of the business. I couldn't get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified. I don't have the language skills. I, you know, my language skills were romance languages and stuff. We're looking for Arabists today. I don't have the cultural background probably. And I certainly don't have the technical skills."

"a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success": Goss printed statement, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, June 21, 2004.

"it will take us another five years of work to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs": Tenet statement for the record, 9/11 Commission, April 14, 2004.

"We haven't done strategic intelligence for so long": Ford interview with author.

"It is an organization that thrives through deception": Hamre interview with author.

"Can CIA meet the ongoing threat?" Hart remarks, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, December 3, 2004.

"We can't get qualified people": Smith quoted in CIA Support Functions: Organization and Accomplishments of the DDA-DDS Group, 1953-1956, Vol. 2, Chap. 3, p. 128, Director of Central Intelligence Historical Services, declassified March 6, 2001, CIA/CREST.

"I don't want to give aid and comfort to the enemy by telling you how bad I think the problem is": Goss testimony, Senate intelligence committee, September 14, 2004.

"I never in my wildest dreams expected I'd be back here": Goss transcript, CIA Office of Public Affairs, September 24, 2004, declassified July 2005.

He would not wear two hats, like his predecessors. He would wear five: Within a few months, Goss, who preferred not to work a five-day week, was complaining that he was exhausted: "The jobs I'm being asked to do, the five hats I wear, are too much for this mortal," he said in remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on March 2, 2005.

He forced almost every one of the CIA's most senior officers out the door: Goss sacked the number-two man, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence John McLaughlin; the number-three man, Executive Director Buzzy Krongard; the chief and the deputy chief of the clandestine service, Stephen Kappes and Michael Sulick; the chief of intelligence analysis, Jami Miscik; the chief of the counterterrorist center, Robert Grenier; and the barons who ran operations in Europe, the Near East, and Asia. In all, Goss got rid of three dozen of the CIA's top people in a matter of months.

John D. Negroponte: Born in London in 1939, the son of a Greek shipping magnate, Negroponte had gone to Yale with Goss but gravitated toward the State Department instead of the CIA. After a tour in Saigon, he landed on Henry Kissinger's National Security Council staff, in charge of the Vietnam portfolio. He had been President Reagan's ambassador to Honduras, where he worked closely with the CIA and the brutal Honduran military. Negroponte served for nineteen months as director of national intelligence before stepping down to take the number-two post at the State Department. He left little visible progress behind.

"That sent seismic shudders through the intelligence community": Joan A. Dempsey, "The Limitations of Recent Intelligence Reforms," Harvard seminar, Program on Information Resources Policy, February 23, 2006. "We're fighting the last war," Dempsey said. The men and women of American intelligence "spin a lot of wheels trying to deliver on what is expected of them, but in my opinion they just don't have the capabilities surrounding them that really allow them to succeed."

"nobody had any idea of who was doing what where": Fingar interview with author.

"And we do not live in the best of worlds": Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, March 31, 2005.

"the burial ceremony": Goss interview with Mark K. Matthews, Orlando Sentinel, September 8, 2006.

"the Ethic's Guy": U.S. v. Kyle Dustin Foggo, United States District Court, San Diego, February 13, 2007.

"The distrust of the Americans increased": U.S. vs. David Passaro, United States District Court, Raleigh, North Carolina, February 13, 2007.

Arar, who had been seized by the CIA: In 2003, during the months of Arar's ordeal, President Bush noted in passing that Syria's rulers had left "a legacy of torture" to its people.

"The only remaining superpower": Helms interview with author.