The Family Jewels (37 page)

The CIA's fight to avoid accountability has had the effect of producing a fractured history populated by books that resemble Victor Marchetti's—pages littered with black ink that obscure known facts, embarrassing incidents, and outright illegalities, along with literally stupid deletions, all with a combination of real and fraudulent claims to secrecy, now to be enforced by criminal sanction. The net result will ultimately drain CIA history of any credibility, if not worse. Yet the agency behaviors that have moved former intelligence officers to write, even when excised from their books, do not disappear simply because censors succeed in suppressing their mention. And as often as not, the controversies leave a paper trail that will one day furnish guideposts to investigators. Rather than avoid flap potential, actions like these
create time bombs that will one day explode with the greater force of pent-up pressure.

Meanwhile, in its own terms—and despite the pious affirmations of agency practitioners—the CIA publications review process has exceeded its mandate. In fact, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the Publications Review Board has run wild. Designed simply to ensure the secrecy of properly classified national security information, the system operates in knee-jerk fashion with the arrogance of a star chamber. The shadow warriors have profited from the reluctance of U.S. courts to interfere in matters of national security, but they risk putting the entire system into bankruptcy the moment its excesses become so blatant they can no longer be denied. When that happens the loser will be the Central Intelligence Agency. And even if the break never comes, the distortions in the record of U.S. intelligence induced by this approach will ultimately rebound to the detriment of the CIA.

Had it then existed, the CIA's publications review apparatus would not have prevented the Year of Intelligence, because government actions, not the mention of them, are the key determinant. Secrecy can be counterproductive, as in the case of the Family Jewels, increasing pressures toward revelation and magnifying the public's horror when transgressions are revealed. Secrecy did not contain the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s—and the resulting political crisis sapped the power of the Reagan administration. Secrecy did not prevent the revelation of the CIA's cozy relationship with Central American torturers in the 1990s, with detrimental consequences to the agency even though it succeeded in avoiding a full-blown disaster. With the tip of another iceberg of malefaction already evident today, and Americans themselves in the role of kidnappers and torturers—and, with the drone war, executioners—the agency erred in resisting a full airing of these allegations in 2009, and President Barack
Obama made a serious misstep in acceding to CIA demands. When it comes, the efforts of the Publications Review Board will not avert this flap. Better would have been to blow off the steam, take the public's reprimand, and move on. As the secret warriors know better than anyone, there are
always
Family Jewels. When the next crisis arrives, the unanswered charges that have been so cleverly suppressed will arise anew and add their force to the flap of the moment, ensuring spooks' misery.

9

CIRCLING THE WAGONS

Presidents and spies. Responsibility, loyalty—and calculation—flow both up and down the chain of command. There is a kind of symbiotic relationship between the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency. Presidents who demand questionable sorts of operations have some responsibility to defend the agency once it comes under fire. Even where the issue is activities carried out under previous chief executives, the president who wishes to protect his prerogatives has an incentive to rise to the CIA's defense. Agency directors seeking to maintain their freedom to act in the face of mounting criticism have an analogous inducement to call upon White House protection. “While the heat from the Church committee was on the CIA, the White House told us not to cooperate,” Bill Colby would recall, “but when the heat began to move toward the White House, they began to give up papers.”
¹

Gerald Ford's responses during the Year of Intelligence are good examples. The president sought to get ahead of the controversy and preserve his political position, calculating that he could protect capabilities by making certain interventions. Creation of the Rockefeller Commission had been one
such measure. Richard Cheney held the reins as long as he could, but later, when Donald Rumsfeld moved to the Pentagon and Cheney rose from deputy to chief of staff to the president, he no longer had the time to ride herd on the proliferating aspects of the intelligence crisis. Cheney took a hand in creating the basic system and then watched the paper flow, jumping in where he saw a need to do so.

Once the Senate and House established panels for independent looks at intelligence, President Ford knew his strategy of limiting damage through the Rockefeller Commission had failed. The administration needed a new approach. Cheney was on board in late February, when Henry Kissinger told Ford they needed a White House “CIA steering committee.” The good doctor even suggested that the president appoint Lawrence Silberman to replace Colby at the CIA, but Ford was not prepared to go that far then (he would fire Colby, bringing in George H. W. Bush, but not until November). The steering group indeed formed, headed by White House counsel Philip C. Buchen. A week later President Ford met the ranking members of the Church Committee in the Oval Office. His talking points were to promise full cooperation but emphasize the sensitivity of the matters under investigation. Disclosures would be disastrous. Ford's aides cautioned him to
promise
cooperation but not
commit
to it. Everything would be done on a case-by-case basis, which effectively meant that Phil Buchen took a look at every request before the CIA, or any other agency, was permitted to respond to it.

Over the long year that followed, it was the White House, not necessarily CIA, that stood at the center of the storm. The White House approved the CIA's basic arrangement for dealing with the congressional committees, as well as the schema for how Langley would provide documents to the investigators. The Church Committee, encouraged to put its requests in writing, sent them to the White House, where Phil Buchen reviewed them for political sensitivity
and Robert C. McFarlane, then a junior NSC staffer, did the same for substantive content. Richard Cheney wanted a more coherent approach for responding to Church Committee requests. Buchen provided it. It was Buchen who signed off on the document lists, Buchen who considered committee requests for access to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, he again who wrote talking points for Henry Kissinger's meeting with Bill Colby in May. Phil Buchen manipulated David Belin over the Rockefeller Commission's assassinations report, and got that key document to Kissinger for the NSC staff to “edit.” Later Buchen broke up Bella Abzug's effort to inquire into the National Security Agency's Project Shamrock by keeping General Lew Allen from testifying. Once it became a matter of legislative proposals for what became the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Phil Buchen took the lead there too.

When the Church Committee began looking into covert operations, the White House argued the subject was so sensitive that Colby should
only
meet with the committee leadership, and
brief
only, not
testify
. There would be no questions. In the face of public outrage over CIA domestic covert activity, that gambit could only fail. The fallback would be that CIA compiled testimony for Colby that was approved by the White House. President Ford's talking points for the meeting where that happened—written by Phil Buchen—suggested that Colby say the least amount possible and when getting down to the nitty-gritty demand to go into executive session with only the committee's ranking members. That attempt to revive the failed gambit also did not fly.

In the middle of this controversy the public learned that Richard Ober, the CIA officer who had notoriously run Project Chaos, was at the White House on the NSC staff. Dick Cheney was furious. He demanded a rundown on all CIA people working at the White House. When Cheney got the list Ober's name was on it—and he had been at the White House
since March 18, 1974—earning over $150,000 a year (2012 dollars) at a civil service grade of GS-16.

Richard Cheney was also instrumental in Ford's decision to bring John Marsh onto the team. Marsh participated regularly in White House discussions on the CIA quagmire. Anticipating that the congressional investigations would lead to reform proposals, the White House sought to head off the stampede by implementing its own reorganization first. Marsh led the group that created the plan for this, completed and announced in early 1976.

Gerald Ford's actions illustrate the tension that exists between a president's political interests and her or his management of the CIA. There is a temptation for presidents to call upon the agency for extraordinary services, or to hide White House adventures behind the cloak of CIA secrecy. Gerald Ford avoided the adventures, but watched over his interests like a hawk. But an exemplar of the opposite sort is his predecessor, Richard Milhous Nixon, who summoned the Central Intelligence Agency to assist his political machinations. Nixon's maneuvers led to the Watergate scandal. The political storm that followed the unraveling of Watergate conditioned the atmosphere in which the Family Jewels revelation took place. The agency's participation in Nixon's Watergate plots, however limited, injected an element of vulnerability into its position from the outset, and colored it sinister to the public. Watergate is a good place to start.

The Watergate scandal began on a June night in 1972 when the security man on duty, making his rounds, found access doors taped open. A check of the Watergate office building, in downtown Washington, led to the discovery of intruders inside the Democratic Party's national headquarters. Police were summoned and the men arrested. Within days of the June 17 incident, the burglars were
revealed to be hires of Richard Nixon's electoral campaign staff and their bosses, Nixon campaign intelligence officials, former White House employees. Worse, two of the key Nixon staffers, E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, were former CIA officers, and the Watergate burglars themselves were anti-Castro Cubans who had worked for the agency.

Though Watergate in those early days aroused little public concern—nothing resembling the huge political crisis it became—the Nixon White House was immediately aware of its vulnerabilities, and the president initiated a plan to cover up the scandal. The early disclosures pointed at least some suspicions toward the CIA. Nixon, worried that he could not control the FBI investigation, sought to use the CIA to quash it. The most important single piece of evidence in the Watergate saga was what President Nixon told his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, on the morning of June 23, 1972. Recorded on an audiotape system the president had secretly installed in his office, the chronicle of that conversation became known as the “Smoking Gun Tape,” and its forcible disclosure through a Supreme Court decision led to Nixon's resignation before he could be impeached. In their actual talk, Nixon and Haldeman discussed how to stop the FBI. Haldeman suggested they have CIA chiefs call the FBI director and tell him to drop lines of inquiry that were uncovering White House involvement. The president not only agreed, he suggested directions they might take with the CIA, and wanted Langley to put it on the basis that the FBI investigation would blow open the whole Bay of Pigs affair. Mr. Nixon's celebrated comment that “we protected Helms from a hell of a lot of things” was likely an allusion to his help in suppressing the Victor Marchetti–John Marks book
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
.
²

Armed with the president's instructions, Haldeman summoned Director Helms and his deputy, General Vernon Walters. They met with Haldeman and colleague John D.
Ehrlichman early that afternoon. Richard Helms repeated what he had already told the FBI—the agency had had nothing to do with Watergate—and added that the Bureau knew this as a result of his telephone call. Haldeman persisted and declared it was the president's wish that General Walters inform acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray that CIA wanted the Bureau to drop its inquiries in Mexico, ostensibly because they might touch on CIA activities. Helms stood his ground, repeating that no CIA operations were implicated. Ehrlichman piled on. General Walters finally agreed to talk to the FBI, and did so later that day.
³
Walters saw Gray alone at FBI headquarters afterwards, saying he had come from the White House. While he was aware of Director Helms's affirmation of noninvolvement, Walters added that FBI inquiries “might lead to some [CIA] projects.” Gray responded he would have to think about that, but he looked forward to cooperating with the agency.
⁴
Walters exceeded his boss's instruction by reminding the FBI that under a long-standing agreement the Bureau had to inform Langley whenever its inquiries uncovered CIA operations. The general did so, he recounted, because he suspected the president's chief of staff must be privy to information not available at the agency, thus Haldeman's message should be passed along as given.
⁵
Equally possible was that Walters, who had worked closely with Nixon on Vietnam over several years, was not as yet fully aware of its implications and therefore willing to go along with his scheme.

President Nixon's attempt to use the Central Intelligence Agency to cover up the Watergate scandal unraveled over the next ten days. Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Walters had second thoughts about his careless entry into the conspiracy, while FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, seeking ironclad evidence he had been ordered to stand down, demanded a written affirmation the CIA was calling him off. Meanwhile, the White House escalated its demands. Presidential
counsel John Dean had Walters back on June 26 and fished for a clear admission that the Watergate break-in could not have occurred without Langley's knowledge. Dean pressed for the CIA to bail out the burglars. General Walters refused and pointed out the scandal would get ten times worse if such an act were revealed. On June 28 John Dean tried again, and Walters, not budging, reassured the White House aide that scandals in Washington blew over quickly, soon to be replaced by spicier ones. Walters counseled patience, but returned to Langley to offer his resignation. Helms refused to accept it. The CIA, if not the White House, would ride out the storm. Mr. Helms now put to paper orders that there was to be “no freewheeling exposition of hypotheses or any effort made to conjecture about responsibility or likely objectives of the Watergate intrusion.”
⁶