Shadow Warrior (58 page)

Increasingly, anti-Allende forces within Chile saw General René Schneider, army chief of staff, as the principal obstacle to a successful coup. The men around Viaux informed Agency operatives that they intended to kidnap Schneider. On October 22, Viaux's men tried to seize the army
chief; he was wounded trying to escape. On October 24, Salvador Allende received 153 of the 195 votes cast in the Chilean Congress. Schneider died the next day, and on the day after that, President Frei and president-elect Allende stood side by side at the general's funeral. Allende assumed office on November 3, but the CIA would continue its efforts to undermine him.
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“Track II, of course, was well in the past by the time I became Executive Director,” Colby later wrote, “and indeed for a considerable time I knew nothing of it in accordance with the President's directive that it be handled in the utmost secrecy.”
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But Colby, as comptroller, oversaw the budget, and it was hard to keep secrets in the gossip-ridden halls of Langley. Eventually Colby learned of the Chilean operation, and in general he approved. He would later write that Agency money went overwhelmingly to centrist parties, and that Allende's faction was clearly Marxist-Leninist and pro-Castro. He passed over Schneider's death as a casualty of war, collateral damage that the CIA would have avoided if it could have. Colby and the CIA as a whole had become supersensitive to the charge of assassination. In 1967, in the wake of the
Ramparts
article, Jack Anderson had reported rumors of a CIA plot against Castro's life. Colby, as Far East Division chief, had been part of the internal investigation ordered by the White House into rumors that the Agency had been complicit in the deaths of the Ngo brothers. He had duly certified that the Agency had had no role in the killing of Diem and Nhu. When Colby returned from Vietnam to become executive director in 1971, assassination was again a hot topic, something he learned firsthand during the Phoenix hearings. Despite the fact that the killing of enemy operatives, political and military, lay at the very heart of terrorism and counterterrorism, Colby had convinced himself that no component of CORDS, including the CIA-run PRUs, had engaged in assassination as a policy.

In late 1971,
Parade
magazine, read by millions of Americans as an insert in their Sunday newspaper, declared that the CIA was the only agency of the US government authorized to carry out assassinations. Colby was incensed. “I knew from personal experience that the Agency was not engaged in assassinations in Vietnam,” he wrote in his memoir. “Indeed, quite to the contrary, it had been my specific directive as head of CORDS that, for both moral and practical reasons, assassinations were strictly prohibited.”
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He decided to write a sweeping rebuttal, but then hesitated. Perhaps there
were activities that he was not aware of. Angleton's counterintelligence division was a little shop of horrors, and there might be others in the highly compartmentalized CIA. He began to check around. Castro was still alive, but that did not mean that there had not been a conspiracy to eliminate him. Gradually, the details of Operation Mongoose began to emerge. A compatriot on the African desk assured Colby that the Agency was not involved in the killing of Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba, at least not directly. Colby learned that the Kennedy administration had very much wanted Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo out of the way, but his death in 1962, like General Schneider's in 1970, had not been at the hands of CIA agents. Instead of issuing the flat denial to
Parade
that he originally planned, Colby decided to slam the proverbial barn door. He prepared a directive to all CIA personnel stating that “CIA would not now or in the future engage in, stimulate or support assassinations in any way.” Helms duly signed it.
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In the fall of 1971, White House aide John Ehrlichman asked the DCI for documents on the Bay of Pigs, the Diem assassination, and the death of Trujillo. President Nixon, it seemed, wanted to use them to smear the Democratic Party in general and the Kennedy administration in particular. In October, Helms duly delivered the material, but he warned that its publication could open a can of worms that would gnaw away at more than one administration. The White House held off, but in the meantime Colby and Helms issued their backside-covering directive.
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According to Colby's memoir, by late 1971 younger officers in the CIA were increasingly concerned about the reputation of the Agency. The CIA had become the whipping boy of not only the antiwar left but also the mainstream media. Every conceivable evil was laid at Langley's door. In 1964, investigative journalist David Wise had published his widely read
Invisible Government
. Thus was born what would become America's favorite conspiracy theory: the comings and goings of presidents and congressmen, the nominating conventions and their platforms, the public debates over foreign and domestic policy, the very edifice of national government was just a front behind which a coterie of powerful and unscrupulous men pulled the levers of power, manipulating politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists at will. They protected their secrets at all costs, Wise wrote. The young men and women who came to Bill Colby in confidence told
him that the notion of a secret surveillance state run by the CIA and FBI might not be so far from the truth. “Young analysts, computer operators and operations officers,” Colby recalled, “were all aware that a most secret project was lodged in that most secret of Agency crannies, the Counterintelligence Staff, and that it had a great deal to do with the antiwar movement.”
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When the CIA was established in 1947, its supporters had had to overcome widespread fears that the new Agency would become an American Gestapo, prying into the lives of American citizens. Consequently, the CIA's charter forbade it from “police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers or internal security functions.”
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But the Doolittle Report, commissioned by Eisenhower and issued in 1954, had warned that the United States faced a ruthless enemy that would stop at nothing to undermine the Western democracies. If Washington and its allies did not fight fire with fire, it would lose the Cold War.

In 1952, during the waning days of the Truman administration, the CIA had begun secretly opening and examining all mail postings between the United States and the Soviet Union. At La Guardia, and subsequently at a secure vault at Federal Building 111 at JFK International Airport in New York, every piece of mail passing between the two countries was examined for bits of information that would aid in the war on communism. The super-secret mail-intercept program was run first by the Directorate of Plans, but in 1955 was transferred to Angleton's CI shop. The move was a logical one, given Angleton's philosophy. Every Soviet citizen—whether student, scientist, journalist, or diplomat—was fully vetted by the KGB. Indeed, many Russian students who studied in the United States later returned as professional spies. Every Soviet citizen resident in or visiting the United States was, in the view of counterintelligence, a KGB agent by definition. In the beginning, that was true. In 1954, Allen Dulles and his deputy director for plans, Frank Wisner, briefed the incoming Eisenhower administration on the mail-intercept operation, and that process was repeated through the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon presidencies. Colby was aware of the existence of the program; he believed that the potential for revelation and scandal outweighed the program's value to intelligence and counterintelligence operations, and in his usual low-key manner he had said so. All to no avail.
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In 1967, the CIA got into the domestic spying business in a big way. The antiwar protests and urban rioting that wracked the country were driving
President Johnson to distraction. He could understand neither the Vietnam protest nor the Black Power movement. Didn't the nation's youth, both black and white, understand that he was one of them, the author of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts, federal aid to education, national health care, and the war on poverty? The violence sweeping the nation's ghettoes was indeed appalling. Between 1964 and 1967, 75 separate urban riots had erupted across the nation from Detroit to New York to Los Angeles, resulting in 88 deaths and property damage estimated at $664.5 million. This chaos had to be the work of subversive elements. “I'm not going to let the Communists take this government and they're doing it right now,” Johnson declared in one of his periodic rants. “I've got my belly full of seeing these people put on a Communist plane and shipped all over this country,” he exclaimed to Rusk, McNamara, and Helms at a White House meeting on November 4. Johnson directed the DCI to obtain proof positive that the violent antiwar protests and urban violence were the work of foreign agents. Helms warned the president that investigation of domestic dissident groups was a potential violation of the CIA's charter. “I'm quite aware of that,” Helms recalled LBJ saying. “What I want is for you to pursue this matter, and to do what is necessary to track down the foreign communists who are behind this intolerable interference in our domestic affairs.”
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Having expressed his reservations, Helms became an enthusiastic supporter of the operation code-named MH/Chaos. “I established the unit,” the DCI later told an interviewer, “because it seemed to me that since this was a high priority in the eyes of the President, it should be a high priority in the Agency.” In his view, the CIA was an instrument of the executive branch, a tool that the president could wield at his discretion. If challenged, Helms could quote the clause in the 1947 National Security Act that stated that the director of central intelligence could perform “such additional functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the national security council may direct.”
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In response to the president's order, Helms set up a Special Operations Group (SOG) with Richard Ober, one of Angleton's lieutenants, as its head. Ober was classic CIA, “a tall, levelheaded Harvard alumnus and third-generation oar on a winning crew,” as Helms described him. Helms put Operation MH/Chaos in counterintelligence, Colby later wrote, “so that it could be conducted with maximum compartmentation [
sic
] and secrecy.”
SOG was to be free of the normal processes of review of its finances, records, and methodology.
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Nixon proved no less desirous than Johnson of uncovering evidence of foreign influence on domestic dissent. By 1971, Ober's operation comprised 36 full-time staff members, which were housed not at Langley but in a Washington office complex situated some two blocks from the White House. Collaborating closely with J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, Ober's operation eventually opened files on some 7,200 American citizens and 6,000 organizations. In November 1967, SOG produced its first product, “International Connections of the U.S. Peace Movement.” Its findings were essentially that there were none. A second report, “Restless Youth,” was a thoroughgoing exploration of the roots of domestic dissent; it was clearly outside the Agency's purview but tended to prove again that the peace and Black Power movements were not extensions of the international communist conspiracy. So dissatisfied with the reports was the White House that it had Hoover dispatch a number of FBI agents overseas to find the missing link between domestic dissent and international communism.
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Whatever its intent, the activities of the SOG within counterintelligence at times crossed the line. In order to credential their recruits as peace activists, Agency case officers infiltrated them into domestic peace organizations before sending them abroad to gather evidence of foreign influence. They inevitably reported on activities of antiwar and Black Power activists that had nothing to do with foreign influence.
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With the accession of Richard Nixon to the presidency, the boundary between foreign and domestic subversive activities became even more blurred. In the summer of 1970, in the wake of the demonstrations against the incursion into Cambodia, an embittered President Nixon declared virtual war on those he considered his enemies: the “madmen” on Capitol Hill, the “liberal” press, and particularly antiwar peace activists. But he did more than rant. That spring, the Weathermen faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had bombed the New York headquarters of three major US corporations, including the Bank of America. White House aide Thomas Charles Huston subsequently told H. R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, that not only was the SDS determined to overthrow the government by force; it was also fully capable of doing so. In response to his aide's hysteria, the president authorized Huston to assemble a team of “counter-subversives” who would ferret out and neutralize enemies of the Republic
and of Nixon—and in Nixon's view, the two were interchangeable. In addition, under what became known as the “Huston Plan,” intelligence agencies were directed to install wiretaps, open mail, and even break and enter to gather information that could be used to thwart opponents of the administration. In December, White House counsel John Dean set up the Intelligence Evaluation Committee (IEC) to coordinate CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and FBI activates carried out under the Huston Plan.
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Affiliated with the interagency countersubversive team were the so-called “Plumbers,” a team of former FBI and CIA agents who would identify and stop “leaks” of information the White House considered damaging. It was the Plumbers, including former CIA operative G. Gordon Liddy, who broke into Daniel Ellsberg's office at the Rand Corporation following release of the Pentagon Papers. In late July 1971, E. Howard Hunt, another former CIA man who had become one of the Plumbers, suggested to White House aide Charles Colson that the administration put together a psychological profile of Ellsberg that would help “destroy his public image and credibility.” As part of this effort, Hunt suggested that the CIA be asked to prepare a psychological assessment-evaluation. David Young, White House assistant for security, told CIA representatives that “the Ellsberg study had the highest priority and had been requested by Mr. Ehrlichman and Dr. Kissinger.” On July 29, Helms approved the request, and the Agency's chief of medical services was directed to comply. Subsequently, a contingent of Plumbers, headed by Hunt, replete with a disguise furnished by the CIA, would break into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. In 1972, at the behest of the interagency task force, Richard Ober's staff at the CIA prepared a special report: “Potential Disruptions at the 1972 Republican National Convention.”
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