Shadow Warrior (66 page)

Alarmed, the Pentagon began leaking stories to the press to the effect that the Soviets were cheating on the first SALT agreements concluded in 1972. Schlesinger proposed a two- to three-year moratorium on arms control negotiations. “Schlesinger is the big problem,” Kissinger told Ford a month before the meeting with Brezhnev. “To go the Schlesinger route on SALT is I think impossible.” Time after time, the CIA came down on the side of a new arms agreement and Colby more broadly on the side of détente. To the enragement of hardliners, a CIA report declared that “it is extremely unlikely that during the next ten years the Soviets will conclude that they could launch an attack which would prevent devastating U.S. retaliation.” In various NSC meetings, Colby assured participants that if the Soviets cheated, American intelligence would catch them out. In one of his few departures from mere reporting, Colby urged decisionmakers in the Ford administration “to expand the subject under debate from narrow weapons counts to the politics of over-all Soviet policy.”
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If Henry Kissinger was Colby's chief external problem, James Jesus Angleton was his principal internal headache. Colby came to the top floor at
Langley initially determined to do what Schlesinger had not had the courage to do—either move the CI chief into a totally innocuous position or fire him. The new DCI's experiences with his old adversary only strengthened his convictions. “I spent several long sessions doing my best to follow his tortuous theories about the long arm of a powerful and wily KGB at work, over decades, placing its agents in the heart of allied and neutral nations and sending its false defectors to influence and undermine American policy,” Colby later recalled. The evidence did not support the theory. The DCI was not the only one who thought the CI chief somewhat removed from reality. “I watched Angleton as he shuffled down the hall,” wrote David Phillips, “6 feet tall, his shoulders stooped as if supporting an enormous incubus of secrets . . . extremely thin, he was once described as ‘A man who looks like his ectoplasm has run out.'”
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Not only was CI wasting its time, the new director believed, it continued to do positive harm to the clandestine services. Colby learned that on the unsubstantiated testimony of Angleton's favorite defector—Golitsin—an up-and-coming CIA officer had been transferred to a dead-end post. Shortly thereafter, while touring Agency stations abroad, Colby was taken aside and told by the head of the French intelligence service that counterintelligence had told him that the American chief of station in his country, David Murphy, was a Soviet agent. Colby checked and found that Murphy, who had previously run afoul of CI when he had been head of the Soviet desk in the Directorate of Plans, had been tarred with the same Golitsin/Angleton brush. Colby ordered that his record be expunged of all damaging material. To his later regret, he did not immediately fire Angleton; Schlesinger had already shrunk his empire, and CI had experienced enough turmoil, Colby decided. He later confided to friends and family his fear that, given what he believed to be Angleton's unstable mental condition, dismissal might compel him to take his own life.
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If he could not fire Angleton, Colby reasoned, at least he could take the Israeli account away from him. The Middle East had developed into a major US policy concern following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the nation's growing dependence on Arab oil. Angleton had developed deeply personal relationships with the founders of the state of Israel, and particularly with Mossad, its intelligence service. The Israeli account, Colby noted with disapproval, was among the most compartmentalized in the CIA. Informed that he was to turn over the account to the Middle East
Division, Angleton dug in his heels. He threatened and pleaded: the Israeli connection was too valuable, too sensitive to be handled by the normal CIA bureaucracy. Again, Colby relented, again to his immediate regret.
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What Henry Kissinger was good at was personal diplomacy, but he thought he was also a master of crisis management. In Kissinger's first major test in this area, Bill Colby let him down badly.

Most of the Arab world had severed formal ties with the United States in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, in which the Israelis, utilizing American arms and supplies, had crushed Soviet-supplied Egyptian and Syrian forces. During the fighting, the Israelis had seized and occupied portions of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, including the Sinai Desert, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. In 1970, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the founder of modern Egypt, had died, elevating his little-known vice president, Anwar Sadat, to the highest office in the land. Sadat seemed more pragmatic than his predecessor, tilting toward the West and evicting 15,000 Soviet advisers. By 1973, however, he had become totally frustrated with his inability to regain any of the ground lost in 1967. With the Syrian government of Hafez al-Assad—which assumed a position of implacable hostility toward Israel—threatening Cairo's leadership of the Arab world, Sadat appealed one last time to Washington to pressure Israel into concessions. Preoccupied with Great Power diplomacy and then Watergate, the Nixon administration did nothing. Aided by financial assistance from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on October 6, Yom Kippur, the highest of Jewish holy days. The Israelis were caught completely off guard, losing a thousand soldiers the first day and five hundred tanks the first week.
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Along with Israeli military intelligence, the CIA had completely missed the boat. Indeed, the Agency seemed amazingly uninformed, almost devoid of assets in the region. Colby recalled that earlier in the year a State Department analysis had warned that Sadat's patience was wearing thin; Arab nationalists in Egypt and Syria were demanding Israeli blood. There was also word of Egyptian troop movements into the Sinai and a high state of alert within the Egyptian and Syrian militaries. But, as Colby put it, “soothing words came from diplomatic circles.”
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A few hours before the outbreak of hostilities, the Agency had assured the White House: “Exercises are more realistic than usual. But there will
be no war.” Colby accepted full responsibility. “We predicted the day before the war broke out that it was not going to break out,” he subsequently told reporters. He did not say so, but the United States was deceived in part because, via Angleton, the CIA's intelligence was Tel Aviv's intelligence, and Cairo and Damascus had succeeded completely in deceiving Israel. “The mistake lay in the evaluation of the intelligence data and not in the absence of accurate and reliable information,” Lieutenant Israeli General Haim Bar-Lev stated. Perhaps if the allegedly “pro-Arab” Middle East Division had been in the loop, the CIA might not have missed the mark so badly. Finally, according to William Quandt, then an NSC staffer responsible for handling Arab-Israeli matters, Kissinger had been warned privately by Brezhnev that the Arabs were serious and that war was coming, but he had chosen not to share that information with Langley. “I fully understand the need for secrecy in our government on these delicate subjects,” Colby subsequently wrote Kissinger, “although it is clear that the back channel in many instances is becoming the main channel, causing lost and even counterproductive motion, aside from anguish, among many not in the circuit.” Kissinger and Angleton—birds of a feather, Colby must have thought.
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The Yom Kippur War quickly escalated into a Great Power confrontation. The conflict came at an especially critical point in the Watergate scandal, and a beleaguered, depressed, and often inebriated Nixon was frequently sidelined. Kissinger took charge. At first, the National Security Council hesitated, but then in the second week of the war it ordered a massive resupply of Israel's armed forces. The infusion of tanks and other equipment enabled the Israelis to regain lost ground in the Sinai and attack the Golan Heights. In response, the Arabs, led by Saudi Arabia, clapped a crippling oil embargo on the United States and its allies. Facing defeat, Egypt and Syria appealed to the Soviets to intervene. Moscow and Washington brokered a cease-fire agreement, but when Kissinger allowed the Israelis to drag their feet, Brezhnev threatened to send troops to the area.

On October 24, while he and Barbara were at dinner at a friend's house in Virginia, Colby's pocket vibrator went off. He called Langley and was told that Kissinger, who had just added secretary of state to his national security adviser title, wanted him to come to the State Department at once to consult on a matter of great urgency. The DCI arranged a ride home for Barbara and set out for the capital. At the State Department, he learned
that he was to go to the “situation room” in the basement of the White House. Together with Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he drove over.

Kissinger had assembled the national security team. Nixon was indisposed; rumor had it that he was so intoxicated that he could not get out of bed. Kissinger outlined the situation. The Soviets were threatening to send troops into the Middle East to enforce a cease-fire agreement. Colby, representing the intelligence community, was asked to say whether Moscow had the capability to intervene (yes), whether it would (possibly, but not likely, except in token numbers, which, however, would still raise the specter of Israelis fighting Soviets), and finally, whether it was in the process of doing so (Soviet transport aircraft were on alert but had not yet moved to pick up their assigned troop cargoes). Before the night had ended, Kissinger had US military forces worldwide placed on DefCon 3, an alert status two steps short of war. Colby was not asked his opinion about how to proceed with the Soviets. Brezhnev kept his cool, however, and the cease-fire went into effect.
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In the months that followed, Kissinger engaged in his famous “shuttle diplomacy,” flying back and forth between the Middle Eastern capitals. He helped negotiate permanent cease-fire lines between Israel and Egypt as well as between Israel and Syria. He subsequently persuaded Sadat to restore diplomatic relations with the United States, and in March 1974 he convinced the Arabs to lift their oil embargo.
Newsweek
's cover the week following featured Kissinger as a cartoon character clad in a Superman-style costume with the caption, “It's Super K!”
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With Super K flying high and the image of the CIA taking a beating, the Agency and Bill Colby needed a victory in the worst possible way. A prospective triumph appeared in the spring of 1974 in the guise of Project Azorian, a CIA-led effort to recover the remains of a sunken Soviet submarine equipped with nuclear missiles. It is a story straight out of “Mission Impossible,” but with a few more loose ends.

It all began on March 1, 1968, when a Soviet Golf-class submarine, the K-129, carrying three SS-N-4 nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, sailed from the Soviet naval base on the Kamchatka Peninsula to take up its patrol station northeast of Hawaii. If war broke out, the K-129 was under orders to launch its missiles, each carrying a 1-megaton nuclear warhead, at targets
on the West Coast of the United States. In mid-March, the K-129 suffered a catastrophic accident and sank 1,560 miles northwest of Hawaii with the loss of all hands. US naval vessels, relying on their sonar surveillance system (SOSUS), detected the underwater explosion that led to the submarine's demise, but waited to move in while a flotilla of Soviet salvage ships milled helplessly in the area. By June, the US Navy was able to report that the K-129, with its hull apparently intact, lay on the ocean floor some 16,500 feet below the surface of the Pacific.

Throughout late 1968 and early 1969, a task force consisting of DCI Helms, his science and technology director, and high-ranking Defense Department officials met to discuss the possibility of raising the Soviet submarine. If the United States could recover the vessel's nuclear warheads, and with it the SS-N-4 missile system and its accompanying documents and codes, intelligence would have a much improved baseline for estimating the current and future Soviet threat. There might be other treasures on board as well, documents, for example, that would provide important insights into Soviet command and control systems and certain aspects of the Kremlin's strategic attack doctrine.
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On July 1, 1969, the CIA established a Special Projects Staff within the Directorate of Science and Technology to manage “Project Azorian.” It was clear to all that security had to be airtight; leaks would surely lead to Soviet diplomatic and even physical interference. An elaborate security system, code-named Jennifer, encased the operation in absolute need-to-know secrecy. Helms informed both Nixon and Kissinger, and the president signed off on the project.

The first and most important task facing the CIA team was to come up with a feasible engineering scheme. The K-129 was huge—1,750 tons. The team considered and then discarded plans to refloat the vessel. Finally, in October 1970, CIA engineers and specially cleared private-sector contractors determined that the only feasible way to salvage the submarine was to lift it off the seafloor by slipping a custom-made sling composed of metal straps—called “pipe-strings”—around the vessel, then slowly raising it to the surface using heavy-duty winches mounted on a ship built specifically for this purpose.
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As the CIA team developed its concept, it also worked on a cover story—deep-sea mining. It just so happened that one of the state-of-the-art deep-sea mining vessels of the time was an American vessel, the
Glomar Challenger
, owned and operated by the Summa Corporation. The
Glomar Challenger
was of approximately the right size and shape for the job; moreover, the Summa Corporation was a subsidiary of Hughes Tool Company, which was owned by Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire, who had done work previously for the CIA. Indeed, Langley had for years viewed Hughes as one of its major assets. He may have been a paranoid schizophrenic and a crook, but he was a patriot, and that's what mattered.