Shadow Warrior (71 page)

In
Honorable Men
, Colby claimed that during the Christmas holidays, while he was cooling his heels at Langley, Larry Silberman called him in. The deputy attorney general, who had acted as a go-between for Colby with Hersh during the
Glomar Explorer
episode, said that he had read the original
New York Times
article. “What else have you boys got tucked away up your sleeves?” he is said to have asked the DCI. Colby told him what he had told the president. “Tell me, did you turn over that list [the family jewels] to the Justice Department?” Silberman asked. After Colby said no, Silberman advised him that in withholding information concerning possible illegal action, the DCI himself was open to prosecution for obstruction of justice.
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The meeting may or may not have taken place. What is certain is that on December 31, Colby and CIA general counsel John Warner paid a visit to Silberman's office. According to Silberman, it was Colby who contacted him, not vice versa. Colby began by describing the management style of Richard Helms—based on “compartmentation”—comparing it to spokes on a wheel with Helms as the hub. Much had transpired in the Agency without the left hand knowing what the right was doing. Colby then summarized the “family jewels,” including Operation MH/Chaos and other activities mandated by Ehrlichman, Huston, and their underlings; the Nosenko imprisonment; various wiretaps and break-ins; “personal surveillances” of Jack Anderson and other journalists; the mail-intercept program; the testing of experimental drugs on unwitting persons; and the fact that
the CIA had “plotted” the assassination of foreign leaders, including Castro, Trujillo, and Lumumba.
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By January 3, 1975, Ford, Kissinger, and their staffs were back from Vail and ready to move on the family jewels matter. By this point, the White House had in its collective hands a report from Silberman on his meeting with Colby. He informed the president that the Justice Department had not yet decided “whether any of the items are prosecutable or appropriate for prosecution.” The president should also be aware that as a result of another report from DCI Colby, former director Richard Helms might be indicted for perjury. Therefore, the White House should either avoid discussing possible CIA misdeeds with Helms or read him his rights if it did.
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At noon, President Ford, with Philip Buchen, counsel to the president, and Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger's deputy, met with former DCI and now secretary of defense James Schlesinger to discuss strategy. Schlesinger endorsed the decision to distance the White House from the Colby report and to appoint a blue-ribbon panel to investigate possible CIA wrongdoing. At 5:30
P.M
. it was finally Colby's turn to meet with Ford, Scowcroft, and Buchen. “I think we have a 25-year-old institution which has done some things it shouldn't have,” he began. He went over the charges in Hersh's article and then discussed some others, but not all the items on the “skeletons list,” as he termed the family jewels. “We have run operations to assassinate foreign leaders,” he declared. “We have never succeeded.” Then, “A defector we suspected of being a double agent we kept confined for three years.” The president pressed him to say who approved the various shady operations. Some occurred under the leadership of Dulles and Mc-Cone, but most were during Helms's watch and carried out by James Angleton and Richard Ober, the man in charge of Operation MH/Chaos, he said. Ford then instructed his DCI as to how the matter would be handled. First, the CIA would be told publicly to obey the law; second, the president would announce the formation of a panel of luminaries to investigate past misdeeds. And he would suggest that Congress establish a joint committee to carry out its own investigation. Meeting over.
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The following day found Kissinger in high dudgeon. “What is happening is worse than in the days of McCarthy,” he exclaimed to Ford and Scowcroft. “He [Colby] has turned over to the FBI the whole of his operation. Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg. If they come out, blood will flow. . . . What Colby has done is a disgrace.” It was
his own blood that Kissinger was worried about. “The Chilean thing—that is not in any report,” he noted, but that was because Colby was going to use it to “blackmail” him. Should he fire the DCI? Ford asked. Not until the investigation was over, Kissinger said, and then the president should move in someone of “towering integrity.”
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Shortly afterward, Ford met with Helms, who had flown back from Tehran. The president assured him of his admiration. “I automatically assume what you did was right, unless it's proved otherwise,” he told the man who kept the secrets. Helms declared that “a lot of dead cats will come out,” and if they did, he would sling some of his own. Still later in the day, Ford met with Rockefeller to discuss the makeup of the blue-ribbon panel. Kissinger, who had once advised Rockefeller when he was governor of New York and had benefited enormously from his patronage, was present at this meeting. “Colby has gone to Silberman not only with his report but with numerous other allegations,” Ford told Rockefeller. “At your request?” the latter asked. “Without my knowledge,” the president responded. “Colby must be brought under control,” Kissinger interjected.
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On January 6, the White House announced the formation of what became known as the Rockefeller Commission. The body included, in addition to the vice president, California governor Ronald Reagan; former secretary of commerce John T. Connor; retired army general Lyman Lemnitzer; Edgar F. Shannon Jr., a former president of the University of Virginia; former Treasury secretary Douglas Dillon; the AFL-CIO's Lane Kirkland; and former solicitor general Erwin A. Griswold. Ford, who had served on the Warren Commission to investigate the circumstances surrounding JFK's assassination, suggested David W. Belin, Warren's assistant counsel, as executive director of the commission's staff. It was a suggestion that he and Kissinger would live to regret.

The Rockefeller Commission's charge was carefully drawn, its charter limited to probing the CIA's alleged misdeeds in the domestic arena—Operation MH/Chaos, the mail-intercept program, and spying on journalists. Colby did not say so at the time, but he recognized that the Rockefeller Commission would not suffice. “The atmosphere in the nation had far too radically changed—in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate—for the Executive Branch to get away . . . with keeping the cloak-and-dagger world of intelligence strictly its own prerogative and affair,” he subsequently wrote.
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That President Ford seemed to be inept rather than Machiavellian did not lessen the general anxiety. Putting Rockefeller in charge of a body to investigate the CIA was just one of President Ford's “latest blunders,” columnist Nick Thimmesch wrote in the
Los Angeles Times
. The vice president was just “too, too close” to Henry Kissinger, who might very well be implicated in the scandal. Those reservations were reflected in a public opinion poll. Forty-nine percent of the people surveyed by Louis Harris believed that an executive commission would be too influenced by the White House, compared with 35 percent who supported Ford's action. Despite a reservoir of goodwill in Congress toward both Ford and Kissinger, the intelligence subcommittees of the Senate's Armed Services and Appropriations Committees announced that they, too, would hold hearings on Hersh's allegations against the Agency. Not to be outdone, the House announced it was launching its own probe. Over the course of the next year, Bill Colby would testify more than thirty-five times before various congressional bodies.
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As Colby recognized, the Ninety-fourth Congress, elected in 1974 in the wake of Richard Nixon's resignation, was not about to give way before claims of executive privilege. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) termed the House and Senate that convened in January 1975 “probably the most dangerous Congress the country had ever known.” Ten new senators were elected, and the House counted seventy-five freshmen, with the Democrats enjoying comfortable majorities in both chambers. In the House, the insurgents unseated four elderly committee chairmen, including longtime CIA friend and overseer Edward Hebert of Armed Services. The members of “the fighting Ninety-fourth,” according to one observer, seemed “exultant in the muscle that they had used to bring a President down, willing and able to challenge the Executive as well as its own Congressional hierarchy, intense over morality in government [and] extremely sensitive to press and public pressures.”
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More significant, by 1975 the Cold War consensus that had dominated US foreign policy for a quarter century was beginning to break apart. Within the anti–Vietnam War movement, doves had questioned the assumptions underlying the conflict in Southeast Asia—the monolithic communist threat, the Munich analogy, the domino theory—which were also the assumptions that underlay the broader Cold War. Hawks remained
unshaken in their belief in the existence of an “evil empire,” to anticipate a phrase made famous by a later president, but they began to recognize that there were limits on American power and to call for a more restrained foreign policy. Henry Kissinger seemed not to recognize the irony of his position. In urging détente, in engineering the openings to Beijing and Moscow, he, more than any other figure, had helped to undermine the Cold War consensus, thus making it politically possible to question the practicality and morality of institutions like the CIA.

In the wake of the publication of the Hersh article, Colby decided to attempt a preemptive strike that might head off a full-scale investigation. The senators before whom Colby had testified during his initial trip to Capitol Hill in January 1975 were comfortably familiar: Stennis, Symington, John McClellan of Arkansas, men who for years had listened to generalized reports delivered in executive session and then emerged not only to defend the CIA but to sing its praises. But these hoary-headed guardians of the nation's security were also aware of the nation's post-Watergate mood, and they asked Colby to give his testimony in open session. The DCI readily agreed. What he did was to lay before the committee and the public the report he had delivered to Ford on December 24. He saw it as a corrective to Hersh's sensationalized story, a refutation of the notion that the CIA had initiated a “massive” campaign of domestic spying. But the media chose to view his testimony, including information that the CIA had indeed sent out undercover agents to infiltrate dissident groups and had collected files on close to ten thousand American citizens, as confirmation of Hersh's story. The
New York Times
printed his statement verbatim beginning on the front page. The
Washington Post
and
Newsweek
noted that Colby had in fact confirmed much of what Hersh had reported. “On my way down from the Hill that afternoon,” Colby wrote in
Honorable Men
, “I realized that I had not told the White House what was coming in the press the next day, so I stopped there to give Scowcroft a copy of the statement the Committee had released.” Ford, Kissinger, and Helms continued to seethe.
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On January 27, 1975, the Senate voted 82–4 to establish the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield had intended to appoint Philip Hart chair, but had to look elsewhere after the Pennsylvanian was diagnosed with cancer. He turned finally to a man who had actively campaigned
for the post, Frank Church of Idaho. Not to be outdone, the House reconstituted its Select Committee on Intelligence with Lucien Nedzi as its chair, but the House body was much more divided than its Senate counterpart. Consequently, it was the Church Committee that would initially be the focus of the struggle between Congress and the executive branch over the family jewels.

The White House was deeply distrustful of Frank Church, viewing him as a man who intended to ride the investigation of CIA abuses—real and imagined—into the Oval Office. In Washington, the Idaho Democrat had a reputation as a straight arrow—and perhaps more. His penchant for moralizing speeches and his shunning of the Georgetown cocktail circuit earned him the sobriquets “Frank Sunday School” and “Frank Cathedral.” Initially a strong supporter of the Cold War consensus, he—like Fulbright, McGovern, and others—had grown disillusioned during the Vietnam War. By 1966, he had emerged as one of the leading critics of the Indochinese conflict and a crusader on behalf of congressional prerogatives in foreign policy. Church, along with Fulbright, had led the way in demanding greater congressional oversight of the CIA.
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As soon as he learned of the Senate probe into the family jewels, Colby phoned Church and John Tower (R-TX), the ranking minority member, to offer his cooperation. He confided in his memoir that he had dreaded the process that would inevitably follow—the Agency's secrets would be gradually revealed to the Church Committee and inevitably leaked to the press. He shuddered to think, he wrote, of “the sensations created by everybody and his brother engaging in cheap TV theatrics at the expense of the CIA's secrets.” And then there were the politics of the matter. The White House did not seem to understand that the center of power had shifted in Washington. Gone was the time when those who investigated the national security state would be labeled unpatriotic and turned out of office. Colby was determined to reverse the growing tendency to portray US intelligence as unconstitutional and improper. If those myths took root, he observed, “we can make our own mistaken Aztec sacrifice—American intelligence—in the belief that only thus can the democratic sun of our free society rise.”
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