Shadow Warrior (72 page)

On February 20, Schlesinger, Colby, and Silberman met with Kissinger to discuss how best to handle the looming inquiry. The national security adviser wanted to stonewall; it was especially dangerous to allow congressional
investigators to delve into covert operations. “But we are doing so little in covert activities it is not too damaging,” Colby declared. “Then disclosing them will show us to the world as a cream puff,” Kissinger replied. Silberman backed Colby. Congress had the power of subpoena. The Justice Department had already announced that it was investigating possible illegal activity. Silberman, like David Belin of the Rockefeller Commission and Colby, thought that the White House was blowing the family jewels thing all out of proportion. For an intelligence agency of a major power that had functioned for twenty-five years at the height of the Cold War, the list of misdeeds was surprisingly mild, Colby again observed. Protect names and sources, ensure that America's sister services were not dragged into the affair. It wasn't going to be that simple, the stonewallers replied. Once the elephant got its nose under the tent . . . John Marsh, counselor to the president, subsequently told the CIA legislative liaison that the White House staff, “including the President,” was afraid that the congressional probes would result in the disclosure of the links between the
Glomar Explorer
operation and the Hughes Corporation, and between covert US activities in Cuba and Robert Maheu of the Hughes Corporation, as well as Maheu's involvement in Watergate and the plots to kill Castro.
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Shortly thereafter, the White House attempted to co-opt the Justice Department. “Obviously, we need someone to corral this Silberman,” Marsh told Ford.
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“During the family jewels crisis,” the deputy attorney general later recalled, “the President and Rumsfeld called me to the White House three days in a row and tried to persuade me to take the position of assistant to the President for intelligence. It would be my responsibility to deal with the exploding bombs.” Each time he refused. On the third day, Ford said, “Would you at least talk to Henry?” The president was even weaker than he believed, Silberman thought at the time, but he went to see Kissinger. Kissinger pleaded with him:

In truth, Kissinger wanted to kill two birds with one stone. “Colby [is] . . . scared and out of control,” he told Ford. “You should consider Silberman
for Colby,” he said. The president's other advisers scotched that idea. Firing Colby just as the congressional probe was getting underway would surely evoke memories of Watergate.
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The second week in March, Colby established a mechanism within the Agency to screen requests for classified and unclassified documents. Walter N. Elder, a twenty-four-year CIA veteran, headed the Church Committee team, and Donald Gregg, who had worked for Colby in Vietnam, was in charge of the Nedzi group. To his credit, Colby listened to all comers when it came to ground rules for releasing sensitive material. “Many long-time professionals in the Agency were anything but happy with my approach,” he later observed. Angleton loyalists were for absolute secrecy. Helms's partisans continued to insist that intelligence was the prerogative of the executive and the executive alone. Both groups recalled the Doolittle Report and the directives of the early 1950s, when the CIA had been called upon to fight the Soviets on their own terms. They invoked Allen Dulles, who had once observed that it was absurd to argue that the CIA should be constrained by international law “or domestic law for that matter.” Another group eschewed these extreme positions but argued that the Agency and the White House should contest each item requested by the congressional committees and that they be turned over only when there was no other option.
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Both George Carver and Deputy Director of Operations William Nelson, close colleagues of Colby, warned him that his commitment to openness was incompatible with the central mission of the Agency. “I believe it is almost impossible for the DCI to discuss operational matters including covert arrangements,” Nelson wrote to him in a memo, “without inviting headlines and stories which seriously degrade the fabric of our security and no matter what the original intent, lead inevitably to a further exposure of intelligence sources and methods by persons inside and outside the Agency who take their cue from the man directly charged with this responsibility.” Carver told his old friend from Vietnam days that he—Colby—was trying to educate people who did not understand the issues and who were not CIA's friends anyway.
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Colby directed the CIA's general counsel to employ a lawyer experienced in criminal and civil practice who could provide advice to any employee faced with questions of criminal liability. Some comfort! Langley's denizens thought; the very fact that such a step was necessary was demoralizing.
Most found the process of congressional investigation demeaning. Those in the Directorate of Operations “suffered the trauma of having total strangers from Congressional staffs ask for some of the Directorate's innermost secrets,” Donald Gregg later recalled, “with the full expectation of receiving comprehensive replies. This experience ran counter to all that had been ingrained in Directorate personnel throughout their careers.” Still others resented that everyone was being tarred with the same brush. “People on the clandestine side would come to me and say, ‘How can I face my kids?'” Jenonne Walker remembered. “‘For years I have told them that these stories were not true. As a senior official in the Agency, I would know.'”
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“I could not and would not agree [with those who wanted him to relent],” Colby wrote in
Honorable Men
. The guidelines he released on March 4 divided materials into four categories. Unclassified material, which dealt primarily with historical, organizational, and budget data, would be given to the committee staffs freely and could be retained in their files. More sensitive data would be “sanitized,” that is, portions would be redacted, and rendered up. A third category would comprise material that could only be viewed by committee members and staff at Langley. Colby termed these “fondling” files. The last category, including 40 Committee documents and memoranda to the president, would not be revealed at all but used only to prepare briefs. At the same time, the DCI ordered Nelson to have his staff scour the records to ensure that there were no additional “surprises.”
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To some, Colby's approach seemed reasonable under the circumstances, but not to the Agency diehards and the White House. David Atlee Phillips, a prominent operations officer who had played a large role in the Chilean affair, resigned in order to speak out publicly. On March 20, he and others formed the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers and launched a campaign to compel the CIA to keep its secrets. There were those who blamed Schlesinger. According to Ray Rocca, Angleton's deputy and no friend of Colby's, Schlesinger was guilty of “the most absurd act in completely losing his head in the ‘tell me everything' matter of what became known as the ‘family jewels.'” According to former CIA officer Ray Cline, Schlesinger had ordered the original search that unearthed the CIA's deepest secrets to “cover his ass. I've always seen this experience of Colby's as something of a Greek fate overcoming Bill, because, when he became DCI he couldn't get out from under, and because this caused him to run afoul
of Dick Helms—who represented an entirely different world and a different time.”
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Whatever the division of opinion within the Agency, Kissinger, Ford, and their staffs viewed Colby's guidelines as nothing less than a betrayal. “Bill Colby got off the reservation,” Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger's factotum as deputy national security adviser, declared. “He wanted to open the files and I said no. These are executive files.” Scowcroft told the DCI to respond only to specific requests for specific documents, an old catch-22 stratagem that had worked many times in the past. “What he did was to allow the committee staff to come down and look at the files and then go back and request specific documents they had seen and could identify. It defeated the whole purpose.”
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While Colby and the Ford White House sparred over tactics for dealing with current and future congressional investigations, the issue of CIA involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders—long rumored—hit the front pages. On September 16, 1975, the president had granted an off-the-record interview to the editorial board of the
New York Times
. During lunch at the White House, the journalists observed that the composition of the blue-ribbon panel raised questions as to its credibility. The members had been carefully chosen, the president retorted, because if it was not careful, the Rockefeller panel would trip over matters—a “cesspool,” Ford termed it—that might ruin America's image around the world. Like what? they asked. Like assassinations. Stunned, the
Times
people pleaded with the president to allow them to go on the record. Ford refused, but within days rumors began to circulate.
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Daniel Schorr, who had termed the flap over the Hersh article “Son of Watergate,” got wind of Ford's admission to the
Times
editors and arranged an interview with Colby. After a half-hour chitchat about Watergate, E. Howard Hunt, and other matters, Schorr asked, “Has the CIA ever killed anybody?” Colby recalled that he was completely taken off guard. He did not know how specific the president had been.

“Not in this country,” the DCI replied.

“Who?”

“I can't talk about it.”
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Colby then volunteered the information that assassination plots had been banned since 1973 when they were uncovered by the inspector general and that the whole matter had been kept from President Ford.
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When
Schorr subsequently published the meat of the interview, Kissinger and Helms cringed. Colby's response implied that the CIA had in fact conducted assassination operations against foreign citizens.

The evening following his interview with Colby at the director's Langley office, Daniel Schorr appeared in the middle of the
CBS Evening News
broadcast. He told viewers that President Ford had “reportedly warned associates that if current investigations go too far, they could uncover several assassinations of foreign officials in which the CIA was involved.” He concluded with a delicious irony. “Colby is on the record saying, ‘I think that family skeletons are best left where they are, in the closet.' He apparently had some literal skeletons in mind.” “There was no stopping the press or Congress now,” Colby later wrote in
Honorable Men
. “A hysteria seized Washington: sensation came to rule the day.” “Abolish the CIA!” editorialized A. J. Langguth in
Newsweek
. Jim Garrison, that conspiracy theorist of yesteryear, emerged from the sidelines to pitch in. “John Kennedy, the murder of Robert Kennedy, the murder of Martin Luther King. . . . Each of them bears consistent earmarks of the involvement of government intelligence operations,” he told the
Washington Star
.
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A
s it happened, the siege of the CIA coincided with the siege of Saigon and the fall of South Vietnam to the communists. For Colby, who would become deeply involved in the final stages of that debacle, it was a tragedy almost beyond comprehension. Because of his long experience in Southeast Asia, Colby had remained a member of the Agency's Vietnam team even when he served as executive director and deputy director for operations. As DCI, he could only watch as Nixon and Kissinger proceeded with their plan to exit Vietnam posthaste. When the final collapse began in the spring of 1975, Colby was on the foreign policy team that worked frantically to secure a negotiated settlement that would allow the United States a dignified withdrawal and preserve the lives of those Vietnamese who had cooperated with America.

By 1972, it had become clear that time was running out for those waging the “other war” in Vietnam. The US presidential election was approaching, and both Nixon and Kissinger wanted to put the last nail in the Democrats' coffin by announcing a peace settlement. In the wake of the Soviet-American arms control summit that had unfolded without a hitch in Moscow in May, Kissinger for the first time indicated the administration's willingness to allow North Vietnamese troops to remain in South Vietnam following a cease-fire. CORDS personnel, those engaged in the day-to-day work of community-building, corruption-fighting, and counterinsurgency—Colby's people—began to receive signals to cease and desist, or at least indications that the US Mission Council in Saigon and Washington did not care whether they did anything or not. Said CIA analyst Frank Snepp, “I saw no indication from directives and so forth
that Kissinger placed any importance on pacification, on security in the countryside.” And he had no patience with efforts to reform the Thieu regime. “At that point something registered with me,” Snepp later recalled. “They were really distant from the reality you could document with intelligence, and they were trying to remake reality to fit their own favorite vision.”
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