Shadow Warrior (57 page)

A day later, K. Barton Osborn, a US Army intelligence operative, testified that he had witnessed widespread abuses, including beatings, electrocution, and both the threat and reality of dropping an accused Viet Cong member out of a helicopter. The Colby and Barton testimony made frontpage headlines all across the country. “My refusal to say under oath that no one had been wrongly killed in Vietnam,” Colby later wrote, “was headlined as an admission of assassinations.”
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Colby's failure to get into what “wrongly killed” meant in a guerrilla conflict was puzzling, especially for a lawyer. Perhaps he realized that in their disenchantment with the war, Congress and the American people were unwilling or unable to differentiate between what Julian Ewell was doing in Operation Speedy Express and what the SEALs and PRUs were doing in their Phoenix operations. Much less could they differentiate between Phoenix operations and the terrorist activities of the Banh-anh-ninh. Colby's operatives were targeting Viet Cong based on received intelligence and either killed or captured them. Like Ewell, the Banh-anh-ninh killed combatants along with noncombatants just to terrorize the population.

The Phoenix hearings, along with My Lai, leaks of the Pentagon Papers in the press, ongoing Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the war, Cambodia, and Kent State, were grist for the antiwar mill. Mocking a technique used by Phoenix personnel early on, opponents of the war tacked up “Wanted” posters all around Washington, with Colby's face superimposed on the ace of spades. The former Jedburgh was harassed on the streets, jeered at public venues, and peppered with death threats. “There was one guy who would call regularly at 5:00
A.M
.,” Gage McAfee recalled, “calling him a murderer, a war criminal, and other things.” Instead
of getting upset about it, Colby used the jangling phone as an alarm clock.
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The overriding problem Colby faced upon his return from Vietnam was finding a job. He made an appointment to see DCI Richard Helms; the Director received Colby at his regular table at the Occidental and expressed sympathy for an old comrade-in-arms. “In my heart,” Colby wrote in
Honorable Men
, “what I had been secretly hoping for was the post of Deputy Director for Plans, to complete my career as the head of CIA's clandestine operations. But, in my head, I was perfectly aware that that was a vain hope for now.” The deputy for plans was Thomas Karamessines, an able spy and a Helms loyalist. The job the DCI offered Colby was that of executive director/comptroller. Colby, until days ago one of the three most powerful Americans in Vietnam, was crestfallen. On the organizational chart, the executive director was the third-ranking officer in the CIA, just below the DCI and the deputy director of central intelligence. But in reality it was a staff position, a glorified clerical job. No one got between the director and his four division heads, the deputy directors for plans, analysis, technology, and supply. Colby told Helms that he would have to think about it. During the next few days, he consulted associates and had a brief chat with Barbara. In the end, he decided to accept Helms's offer. Intelligence was what he knew; the CIA was his home. He looked up the definition of “comptroller” in the dictionary and asked Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Elliott Richardson to allow his budget team to educate him on the complexities of fiscal management.
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The Agency he returned to had changed, Colby soon discovered. Technology reigned supreme. The U-2 spy plane, radar, electronic sensors, infrared photography, and especially the Key Hole 11 spy satellite just then coming online gave the Agency an unparalleled ability to spy on enemies and allies alike. These new devices “produced exquisitely detailed reports of secret test centers and experiments deep in Asia; of truck parks and barracks for armored divisions in Eastern Europe, permitting a stunningly accurate reading of foreign military forces,” Colby said. The intelligence community could monitor virtually any type of communication, learning about everything from coup plots to plans for ever more advanced missile systems. The second change that Colby noticed was an acceleration of a trend that had begun following the Bay of Pigs and that had continued
under the Helms directorate: a de-emphasis on covert and political action. Whereas covert action had consumed up to 50 percent of the CIA's budget in the 1950s and 1960s, it absorbed only around 5 percent in 1971. Ever since the 1967
Ramparts
article exposing the CIA's role in the National Students Association had appeared, the Agency had been withdrawing from it and other front organizations such as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. Colby decided that, for the time being, he would just have to accommodate.

As he familiarized himself with the ins and outs of his new position, Colby came to realize what his colleagues at Langley already knew—Richard Nixon did not like or trust the CIA. Kissinger later wrote that the president believed that the Agency was “a refuge for Ivy League intellectuals opposed to him.”
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Aside from the fact that Nixon thought the CIA, like the State Department, consisted of men and women who considered him their educational and social inferior, he blamed Langley for his defeat in the 1960 presidential election. The CIA, he was convinced, had created false data showing that the Soviet Union had gained strategic nuclear superiority over the United States—the so-called “missile gap.” In addition, Nixon and his men believed that the analytical branch's consistently pessimistic reports on the course of the war in Vietnam—the bombing was not working; pacification was largely an illusion; the military governments in Saigon were incorrigible; enemy strength would grow no matter what the United States did, short of annihilating North Vietnam—proved that the Agency was full of antiwar liberals. Despite all this, however, Nixon had asked Helms to stay on as DCI. LBJ had recommended him as nonpartisan and disinterested, and Nixon was aware of the respect Helms commanded in Congress on both sides of the aisle.

Helms had heard rumors of Nixon's attitude toward the Agency, and his suspicions were soon confirmed. Word came to him that the president did not like and therefore did not read the “Daily Briefings” that had provided primary intelligence sustenance to presidents since Harry Truman. Shortly after it was announced that Helms would stay on, Kissinger called him in and told him that all intelligence would pass through the national security adviser to the president. Moreover, in a break with precedent, Helms was to present the Agency's summary report to the National Security Council and then retire. Melvin Laird subsequently intervened to bring the DCI back into the inner circle, but Helms would continue to feel like an outsider. And in truth, he was.

The struggle between the White House and the CIA's analytical branch that had developed in the wake of
Sputnik
—
Nixon blamed his loss in 1960 on the “missile gap” that he believed the CIA had fabricated—continued after Nixon became president, but this time, ironically, he charged the Agency's brain trust with underestimating rather than overestimating Soviet strategic capability. By 1969 the Soviet Union had developed a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the SS-9, whose payload, American intelligence suspected, was equipped with the first multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs). The Defense Department and the White House declared that the ability of the enemy to unleash up to sixty warheads per rocket, independently targeted, gave Moscow strategic superiority and the ability to deliver a “first strike,” a knockout blow that would leave the United States defenseless. Nixon and Kissinger had Laird go to Congress and request billions of dollars for an antiballistic missile (ABM) system. In the hearings that followed, the CIA refused to back the administration. The Agency said the Soviets clearly did not possess the technology to provide each warhead with a guidance system. Moscow was not planning a first strike; the enemy's so-called “hardened silos” were not, as the Pentagon claimed, impervious to existing US missiles. Laird was furious. “Where,” he demanded, “did CIA get off contradicting Nixon's policy?” Kissinger was equally outraged. The Agency was undercutting his efforts to create a giant bargaining chip—an ABM system—for use in the forthcoming Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) negotiations with Moscow. Helms recalled of Nixon, “He would constantly, in National Security Council meetings, pick on the Agency for not having properly judged what the Soviets were going to do with various kinds of weaponry. He would make nasty remarks about this and say this had to be sharpened up.”
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Nixon and Kissinger denigrated covert operations—unless they were operations that they initiated and controlled. Soon after his return from Vietnam, Colby began to hear rumors of a major top-secret campaign controlled and directed by the White House but carried out by the CIA to prevent the election of Salvador Allende Gossens to the presidency of Chile. Many of Colby's friends and colleagues were involved in the operation, and the situation in Chile seemed in some ways to parallel that of Italy during the 1950s. Fearing the spread of Castro-style communism to the mineral-rich Andean nation, the United States had funneled aid to noncommunist political parties throughout the 1960s. In 1964, the Agency
provided some $3 million to secure the election of President Eduardo Frei and his fellow Christian Democrats. Unlike many other Latin American nations, Chile's modern history was characterized by respect for constitutional processes and an apolitical military.

During his generally successful six years in office, Frei worked to ameliorate the plight of the poor and bring about a greater degree of economic and social justice. Nevertheless, by 1970 there was still a wide gap between rich and poor, and Chile's economy continued to be dominated by US corporations such as International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), Anaconda Copper, and General Motors. Chile's 1970 presidential election, with Frei ineligible for another term, evolved into a three-cornered affair featuring National Party candidate Jorge Alessandri Rodriguez on the right, Radomiro Tomic Romero representing the left wing of the Christian Democrats, and Salvador Allende, the candidate of the Marxists and similar factions, on the left. In the midst of the campaign, the Agency produced a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Chile warning that if Allende was elected, he could “take Chile a long way down the Marxist-Socialist road . . . [creating] a Chilean version of a Soviet-style East European state.”
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His opposition to capitalism was implacable, and his regime would certainly move to nationalize major foreign businesses. There were, in addition, rumors that Allende would consider leasing a Chilean port to Cuba as a base for its navy. Helms warned Kissinger, who as national security adviser chaired the 303 Committee, that if Allende was going to be stopped, the Agency would have to be given the green light to aid noncommunist candidates. The DCI recalled that neither Kissinger nor Nixon displayed much interest at that point.

On September 4, Allende won the election with a razor-thin margin—39,000 out of 3 million votes cast. He garnered 36.3 percent of the vote, with his nearest rival, Alessandri, polling 34.9 percent.
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Suddenly Chile had the White House's attention. Nixon was angry and a bit frightened, Helms recalled. It was all the CIA's fault, he groused to Kissinger, who agreed with him but argued that there was still time. Because Allende had received a plurality rather than a majority, he would have to have the approval of the Chilean Congress.

On September 15, Nixon summoned Helms. “In a conversation lasting less than 15 minutes,” Kissinger recalled, “Nixon told Helms that he wanted a major effort to see what could be done to prevent Allende's accession to
power. If there were one chance in ten of getting rid of Allende, we should try it; if Helms needed $10 million he would approve it. Aid programs to Chile should be cut; its economy should be squeezed until it ‘screamed.' Helms should bypass [US ambassador Edward] Kory and report directly to the White House.” The no-holds-barred effort to prevent Allende from taking and holding office—known as Track II—was to be kept secret not only from the State Department but also from the Defense Department and the 40 Committee (the new name for the 303 Committee). Helms later claimed that he was dubious all along about the chances of stopping Allende—and the wisdom of even trying. The record shows little hesitancy, however. “If I ever carried a marshal's baton in my knapsack out of the Oval Office, it was that day,” Colby remembered him saying. “All of us were aware,” one participant later observed, “that in such a short period of time, no matter what other techniques we might try, what we were talking about, basically, was a military coup.” There was not a moment to be lost. The Chilean Congress would vote on October 24.
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Helms set up a Track II task force at Langley. Agency-generated propaganda subsequently appeared throughout Latin America and in a number of European countries comparing the situation in Chile with the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948. A Track II team member journeyed to New York to enlist ITT's aid in destabilizing the Chilean economy. Four undercover agents arrived in Santiago and established contact with known anti-Allende officers in the military. Chief among these was Brigadier General Roberto Viaux, who had been retired following an abortive coup attempt against Frei in 1969. He asked for money and guns, receiving some of both, and a coup was scheduled for October 9 and 10. The takeover was called off by the Agency, however, because it seemed to have no prospect of success. It is clear that the United States dissociated itself from Viaux not because it considered him unfit, which he probably was, but because it thought he could not succeed. “It is a firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup,” Deputy Director of Plans Tom Karamessines cabled Henry Hecksher, chief of station in Santiago.
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