Shadow Warrior (76 page)

Colby made his first appearance before the Church Committee on May 21. “All the questions were on assassination and it was like ‘when did you stop beating your wife,'” he subsequently reported to the White House. He tried to put covert action in historical context, he said, and pointed out how little the Agency had been involved in would-be assassinations. He had pressed the committee to acknowledge “the delicacy of the problem,” but had had no luck. One of the members had asked Colby if the Agency killed its own, referring to the Green Beret incident in Vietnam in which a double agent had been murdered in cold blood. No, the DCI had replied, noting that President Ford had given strict orders to the federal government to have nothing to do with assassinations. Church had wound up the proceedings by observing that what was needed was a law prohibiting the killing of foreign leaders in peacetime. Those in the Oval Office were stunned. “It is an act of insanity and national humiliation,” Kissinger interjected during a meeting with Scowcroft and Schlesinger, “to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassinations.”
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As the Church Committee hearings got underway, the CIA's reputation was approaching its nadir. A 1975 Gallup Poll registered an approval rating for the Agency of only 14 percent. Among college students, who constituted the Agency's prime recruiting pool, the figure stood at 7 percent.
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But the US Senate was far from unanimous in its views on America's spies and their handlers. There were conservatives on both sides of the congressional aisle, such as Barry Goldwater and John Stennis, who continued to see the CIA as one of the nation's primary weapons in the ongoing struggle against international communism. Once they recognized that both Democratic and Republican presidents would be tarred with the assassination brush, mainstream politicians like Howard Baker (R-TN) and Church himself began to advocate restraint.

In addition, many of the most strident antiwar activists—those who had previously denounced the CIA as an instrument of the imperial
presidency—were enthusiastic supporters of détente. Some, such as J. William Fulbright, had been captivated by Henry Kissinger and the openings to Moscow and Beijing. The two men developed what Fulbright thought was a personal as well as a professional relationship. Early on, Kissinger had cultivated the Foreign Relations Committee chair by showing deference to his views and appearing to confide in him. Thus it was that Fulbright, the author of
The Arrogance of Power
, published a 1975 article in the
Columbia Journalism Review
urging journalists to abandon what he called their “inquisition psychology.” What the American people required, he wrote, was “restored stability and confidence.” The accusations against the CIA might be true, “but I have come to feel of late that these are not the kind of truths we most need now,” he added.
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In contrast to the Senate, the House was not interested in reform but rather sought a “thorough housecleaning” of agencies that had violated the law. The House Select Committee on Intelligence (different from the permanent subcommittee that Lucien Nedzi chaired) included five harsh critics of the CIA, including the ubiquitous Michael Harrington, three hardline defenders, and only one moderate. House Speaker Carl Albert named as chairman of the committee Otis Pike, a conservative Democrat and longtime representative of his Long Island district. Rather than being sanctimonious like Church, Pike was irreverent; he was also abrasive and confrontational. There was in him, however, a genuine concern that over the years Congress had gradually ceded its prerogatives to the executive branch, thus making abuses such as Watergate possible. Under his leadership, the House committee decided to focus on the answers to three questions: How much did the intelligence community cost the taxpayer? How effective was it? And what risks did its activities pose to the constitutional and political health of the country? Colby would view the Pike Committee with deep suspicion, sensing, as he later wrote, that the majority was determined to do a “hatchet job on the Agency.”
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Harrington and Pike were not the only openly hostile House members that Colby had to deal with. Twice, on March 5 and then again on June 25, the DCI was called before the Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights, chaired by the flamboyant and iconoclastic congresswoman from New York, Bella Abzug. Abzug had discovered that the CIA had included her name in its reports from Paris about visitors to the Vietnamese communist delegation, and she was furious. Colby had to
endure a “day-long tongue-lashing,” he later recalled, but kept his composure and held his ground. At one point he told Abzug “that if she visited such people abroad [North Vietnamese], such enemies of the United States, there was no way that I was going to keep her name out of our records.” When Abzug declared at the second session that she had the right to call and compel testimony from anyone she chose, Colby quietly responded that she did not, and he would fight any effort to compromise the Agency's sources and methods.
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During the summer and fall of 1975, the DCI was forced to visit the Hill several times a week to testify. His colleagues marveled at his equanimity. “He looked like he had just been home for lunch and a nap,” Deputy Director Vernon Walters remarked after one particularly contentious session. “Bill Colby could be doing a talk show on television with a mad dog chewing his leg off under the table and you would never know it,” remarked longtime friend Stan Temko. In a 1976 interview with Colby, Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci asked, “What could shake your icy imperturbability? You never do show your emotions, do you?”

“I am not emotional,” he replied. “I admit it. Just a few things bother me. For instance . . . when I was nominated and some people put posters around Washington. . . . They called me a murderer. And my children had to live with that. But it didn't really bother me. Oh, don't watch me like that. You're looking for something underneath which isn't there. It's all here on the surface, believe me.”
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While the House tried to get itself in order, the Church Committee honed in on the assassination issue. It was the most sensational of the family jewels and the one most certain to garner headlines day after day. But the members of the committee immediately sensed a minefield. Both Democratic and Republican administrations were implicated. Idealists worried that the public's faith in the presidency and the federal government in general—already weakened by Vietnam and Watergate—would be further eroded. The simplest thing to do was to blame the Agency rather than the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon White Houses.

The concept of plausible deniability proved convenient to the task. This was a catch-22 that allowed the leaders of the intelligence community to shield political leaders from potentially embarrassing operations. Plausible deniability was one of the reasons why Eisenhower had set up the 5412 Group in 1955. That body, which morphed into the 303 Committee and
then the 40 Committee in 1970, served the purpose of preserving the president's deniability while maintaining some White House control over Agency operations.
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In this regard, there was a telling exchange between Republican senator Charles Mathias of Maryland and Richard Helms during the latter's testimony before the Church Committee:

Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, and Eisenhower after the downing of the U-2, had refused to hide behind plausible deniability—to the detriment of US foreign policy, some critics said. In his testimony before the Church Committee, Colby took the position that the CIA was and always had been an instrument of the president. He claimed that he had always been opposed to plausible denial and observed that it had become “outmoded and contentious in today's environment.” Church and his colleagues took the easy way out, however. Following one meeting, Church told the press that the committee had not found any evidence “that would directly link the CIA involvement in this kind of activity with the President of the United States.” The CIA, he subsequently observed, could be compared to a “rogue elephant on a rampage.”
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On June 19, the night before he was to testify before the Church Committee, Sam Giancana, the Mafia figure who had been linked to the CIA plot to assassinate Castro, was murdered. The press went berserk. Senator John Tower (R-TX), who presided over hearings on the 20th, declared: “The committee, of course, notes with interest that Mr. Giancana was done away with.” Colby, who testified later in the day on Phoenix, was cornered by reporters as he left the Capitol building and forced to deny that the CIA had anything to do with the former Mafia boss's murder.
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In contrast to its Senate counterpart, the Pike Committee was determined to trace CIA wrongdoings directly to the White House and to force a constitutional confrontation if the executive branch did not agree to give up all its secrets to Congress. Though a Democrat, Pike, a World War II bomber pilot and supporter of the Vietnam War, was not a liberal in the George McGovern–Michael Harrington vein. Like Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC), he was genuinely concerned with constitutional issues, such as separation of powers and checks and balances. He believed that Congress had failed in its duty to hold the White House accountable for its actions. As the House investigation began, Pike made no secret of the fact that he was convinced that the CIA had committed misdeeds and blunders that it was trying to cover up, and that the cover-up was being aided and abetted by the White House.

In his usual “come, let us reason together” mode, Colby called Pike and set up a meeting to work out ground rules for the upcoming investigation. The DCI quickly learned that, unlike Church and Rockefeller, Pike was not interested in compromise. The CIA had no right to withhold any document from the committee, he informed Colby. He refused to accept a classification system or to compel his staff to sign secrecy agreements. The chairman subsequently told a staff member: “Don't bring back anything the agencies want you to have; just get what they don't want you to have.” A few days after their meeting, Pike wrote the DCI a sarcastic letter: “It's a delight to receive two letters from you not stamped ‘Secret' on every page. . . . You are concerned with the concept of ‘need to know' and I am concerned with the concept of ‘right to know.'” Representative James Johnson (R-CO) set the tone for the relationship between the committee and the Agency when he told Seymour Bolten, chief of the CIA's Review Staff (the team Colby had assembled to decide which documents should be provided to Congress), “You, the CIA, are the enemy.” Colby was appalled, particularly because he viewed the committee staff as a “ragtag” collection of “immature and publicity-seeking . . . children.” Deputy Director for Intelligence Edward Proctor recalled that “a Pike committee staffer came to my office to interview me. She had on blue jeans that had been cut off at the calf and shredded, and she was barefoot.” A more neutral observer, Church Committee counsel F.A.O. Schwarz Jr., observed that the Pike staff thought “they alone possessed virtue. They were all true believers.” Colby feared that the Pike Committee
would sensationalize at every opportunity and leak like a sieve. His fears were soon borne out.
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To help it prepare for hearings, Langley supplied Pike and his colleagues with a document listing the family jewels. The staff quickly began searching the document for gems that had not already been mined. A nugget, if not a jewel, soon appeared. One of the staffers discovered that over the years the Agency had detailed officers to various other bureaus and departments to act as liaisons. The sole object, Colby wrote in his memoir, was to enable the CIA to learn the ways of sister bureaucracies in order to better cooperate with them. Every agency head was aware of the officer's mission and identity, he claimed. Nevertheless, in 1973, Colby had issued an order terminating the liaison structure because, in a few “questionable” instances, the officers' activities “could be construed as involving the Agency in domestic activity [spying].” The wording of Colby's directive was unfortunate: the CIA “will not develop operations to penetrate another government agency, even with the approval of its leadership.”
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On July 9, Searle Fields, staff director of the Pike Committee, sent a memo to committee members saying that the CIA had infiltrated other federal agencies, including the White House. The memo was immediately leaked to ABC News. Shortly thereafter, Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, a CIA contract officer who had soured on the Agency, called reporter Daniel Schorr. The CIA had had a man in the Nixon White House, and he knew who he was: Alexander Butterfield. Schorr could hardly believe his ears—and his good luck. Butterfield was the man who had ratted out the Nixon White House on the existence of a secret taping system. His mind, Schorr later recalled, leaped back “to all the hints and rumors that the CIA pulled the plug on Nixon.”
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