Shadow Warrior (77 page)

On July 11, Bruce Morton and Schorr interviewed Prouty on the
CBS Morning News
. Prouty fingered Butterfield as the CIA's man in the White House and expressed the opinion that neither Nixon nor any of his aides knew his true mission, something that former White House aide Charles Colson subsequently affirmed. The program aired an interview with Colby, taped earlier, in which he declared: “I say that's outrageous and vicious nonsense. The CIA has never done anything with respect to the White House that's not known to the White House.” Butterfield, who subsequently denied the allegation, might or might not have been the Agency's spy in the White House, but the CIA had penetrated the federal bureaucracy at a
number of levels. Mole hunter Jim Angleton had spies everywhere. That fact was what lay behind Colby's 1973 decree terminating the liaison structure.
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The Pike Committee began its hearings by summoning budget director James Lynn in an attempt to uncover the CIA's money trail. Pike read Article 1, section 8, of the Constitution, which states, “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law and a regular statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.” Lynn stonewalled. Pike did not get any numbers, but the committee revealed that the General Accounting Office (GAO)—the independent arm of Congress that audits government agencies—had not been permitted to examine the CIA's books since 1962.
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When the misuse of taxpayer money issue did not strike a responsive chord with the media and the public, Pike and his colleagues moved on to more promising ground, namely, that the CIA was incompetent—that is, not only did the public not know how much it was spending on intelligence, but it wasn't getting much for its money. First up was the Yom Kippur War. There had already been reports that Langley's warriors had missed the boat badly, but Pike wanted to prove it. The committee subpoenaed a twenty-five-page internal postmortem prepared by the CIA. The retrospective was brutally frank—the Agency was not at all above learning from its mistakes—noting that intelligence on the crisis was “quite simply, obviously, and starkly wrong.” To reveal the full extent of Agency incompetence, the committee wanted to make public the entire six-page summary of the report. The CIA, in turn, insisted that five paragraphs of the document be kept secret.
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The battle was joined at a committee meeting on the afternoon of September 11. Mitchell Rogovin represented the Agency. In an increasingly heated exchange, the staff insisted that Colby had ordered the five paragraphs struck not to protect sources and methods but to shield the Agency from further embarrassment. Repeatedly, Rogovin excused himself to phone Colby to ask for guidance. Time after time the DCI gave way, but he finally dug in his heels over four words—“and greater communications security.” The words, referring to enhanced procedures to protect Egyptian military and diplomatic communications traffic, were part of the CIA station's report on the impending crisis in the Middle East; they implied that
the Agency had the ability to monitor encrypted Egyptian traffic and, in fact, was doing so.
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Pike viewed the words not as a threat to sources and methods but as proof of how badly the Agency had blundered. America's spies were able to read Egypt's secret communications and still had not been able to predict the war. (President Anwar Sadat's regime knew of or suspected US surveillance and had sent misleading messages.) During a press conference at Langley shortly after the committee meeting, Colby explained why the seemingly innocuous words were potentially harmful to US interests. “Very expert analysts go over it,” he said, referring to materials made public by congressional committees. “They examine their own machinery to see if there are chinks in the armor and whether there are gaps in their ability to keep secrets that they want to keep secret.”
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As sources within the intelligence community would subsequently tell the
New York Times
, the Soviets and the Egyptians already knew about US spy capabilities. Indeed, Kissinger, in a very flattering biography written by Marvin and Bernard Kalb, had revealed that he had chosen to confide in the Soviets. Rogovin later reflected on Colby's reasoning: “Well, maybe those four words aren't that important, but if they disregard us on this, they'll disregard us on four other words.” Disregard the administration is exactly what the Pike Committee did. Following a 6-to-3 vote, the chairman called a press conference to give a play-by-play account of the battle and then, over the formal protests of Rogovin and Assistant Attorney General Rex Lee, read the entire six-page report summary, including the four forbidden words, into the
Congressional Record
. “Obviously, we had reached a critical moment in the investigations,” Colby wrote in
Honorable Men
.
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President Ford convened an emergency meeting at the White House to discuss the executive branch's response to the Pike Committee's challenge. He agreed that it wasn't so much the significance of the four words but the challenge inherent in the decision to release them. “For the committee to flatly ignore my protest and release what I regarded as legitimate secrets placed all our classified material and sensitive information at hazard,” Colby later observed. Kissinger demanded a confrontation, insisting that no more classified material be turned over to the House committee and that everything of a sensitive nature that had been delivered be taken back. Schlesinger and Brent Scowcroft supported him. Ford's chief of staff, Donald
Rumsfeld, and White House counsel John Marsh, both of whom had been congressmen, blanched at the prospect of a no-holds-barred showdown. How were documents already in the committee's hands to be recovered—through a contest of arms between the House sergeant at arms and a group of CIA operatives? “I was certainly with the ‘doves,'” Colby later recalled, “holding that the committees should be given the material they requested with the exception of those that revealed the identities of our officers and agents, our relations with foreign intelligence services, and particularly sensitive technological data.” The hardliners prevailed. “Bill, you know what you do when you go up to the Hill?” Kissinger cracked. “You go to confession.”
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The morning following the gathering at the White House, Rex Lee arrived at the committee's public meeting to drop a bombshell. Until Chairman Pike promised that he would never again release classified information without permission, the executive branch would withhold classified documents. Moreover, the president would prohibit officials of the executive branch from testifying, and he had ordered that all sensitive materials be returned by the committee. Pike responded with righteous indignation. Sources and methods indeed! The issue was, “Shall Congress be a coequal branch of the Government?” It was secrecy versus democracy. Apparently, Pike declared, the CIA “would simply prefer that we operated in a dictatorship where only one branch of the Government has any power over secrecy.” House members, disgusted with congressional pusillanimity during Vietnam and Watergate, temporarily rallied to the flag.
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Meanwhile, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue an appointed president was being urged to prevent any further erosion of executive power. “The House's action in releasing classified information over the protests of the executive,” Kissinger wrote in a memo to Jack Marsh, “constitutes a challenge to the President's constitutional responsibility to conduct foreign affairs and protect the national security of the United States.” Ford declared that he would ignore any subpoenas issued by the House for classified material. Pike retorted that, in that case, Congress would take the president to court. The
New York Times
declared the dispute “the most serious constitutional confrontation between the legislative and executive branches since the Watergate scandal.”
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On Monday morning, September 29, the Pike Committee received a box of documents it had subpoenaed—the first such delivery since the
committee had released the now-famous four words. To Pike's disgust, the Agency had heavily redacted the material and indicated that it would continue to censor such documents in the future. The committee then voted 10–3 to ask the House to cite Colby for contempt. “My sense of isolation, of being out on a limb all on my own, was rapidly growing,” Colby wrote in
Honorable Men
. Morale at the Agency continued to deteriorate. Virtually all senior-level officials resented the congressional investigations, though for different reasons. Some were critical of the DCI for allegedly betraying Helms and breaking the Agency's code of secrets; others defended Colby, taking the position that he had had no choice in the matter and was being unfairly blamed for the sins of others. Regardless of their opinion of Colby, all of the Agency officials were offended not only by the Pike Committee but also by the irresponsible coverage by some media outlets. Colby was able to take some comfort from a blurb that Daniel Schorr read on the
CBS Evening News
: “Congress has its responsibilities, but Colby has his and he's prepared to take his chances. So, welcome Bill Colby to the club of potential jailbirds for principle!” But, surprisingly enough, it was aid and comfort—albeit indirectly—from another source—Henry Kissinger—that saved the DCI from a contempt citation.
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In line with its ongoing effort to prove CIA incompetence, the Pike Committee launched an investigation into the Greek-Turkish crisis that had temporarily gripped the world in the summer of 1974. In the course of the investigation, staff members learned of a memo written by Thomas Boyatt, the head of the State Department's Cyprus desk, critical of the intelligence he had received prior to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Subsequently fired from his post, Boyatt considered himself a whistle-blower and offered to help the committee. But on September 25, Lawrence Eagleburger, a Kissinger protégé and assistant secretary of state, appeared before Pike and his colleagues and informed them that the State Department would bar its personnel from testifying on policy matters and that no documents pertaining to Boyatt and the Cyprus crisis would be released to Congress. When Pike protested, Eagleburger compared the committee's demand for the Boyatt memo to the tactics employed by Senator Joe McCarthy during the Second Red Scare. Kissinger had ratcheted the confrontation between Congress and the executive branch up to a new level. Hitherto, Ford had not denied legislators the right to examine classified documents, only to release all or parts of them to the public.
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Having Colby and the CIA as an adversary was one thing; having Henry Kissinger was another. There was some mud from Watergate and the Allende coup still clinging to Kissinger's shoes, but in the fall of 1974, he was at the height of his power. No public official enjoyed a better press. The enormous amount of time he spent with journalists—rewarding allies, punishing enemies—was paying off in spades.
Time
called the secretary/adviser a “brilliant” policymaker with “diverse talents, energy and intellect.” As the confrontation with the Pike Committee evolved, Kissinger rallied his troops in the press corps. Aaron Donner, chief counsel of the Pike Committee, recalled receiving a phone call from columnist James “Scotty” Reston in the midst of the brouhaha. “This is Scotty Reston of the [
New York
]
Times
,” he growled into the phone. “What the hell are you guys doing down there? Are you reviving McCarthyism?” Both the
Times
and the
Washington Post
subsequently sided with Ford and Kissinger. Republicans on the committee began to get cold feet. Suddenly Pike's crusade was off the tracks. Though there was hardly a parallel, the ongoing comparison to McCarthyism proved devastating.
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It was time for a compromise, Bill Colby decided. While he, Rogovin, and Marsh worked on the White House, Pike Committee member Robert McClory, a moderate Illinois Republican hoping to avoid the humiliation of either his president or his committee, pushed Pike to be reasonable. Meanwhile, finally convinced that he had the upper hand, Kissinger agreed that “differences between the legislative and executive branches shouldn't be pushed to the point of law but decided on the basis of joint understanding and reconciliation.” On September 30, Colby wrote Pike proposing an arrangement. In the future, there would be no disclosure of classified material by the committee without prior executive-branch review. In the event of a disagreement, the matter would be referred to the president. If he continued to object, the committee could still not release but would reserve the right to submit the matter to judicial review. That same day, Colby delivered a bundle of documents with only fifty words deleted. The committee subsequently agreed to the proposed compromise.
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Meanwhile, with the Pike Committee dominating the news, Church decided to hold public hearings, his committee's first. And the staff had a new jewel, one that was guaranteed to titillate. Sometime in the 1960s, zealous scientists in the technical branch of the Directorate of Operations—James Bond's “M” and his team—had collected 11 grams of shellfish toxin and
8 milligrams of cobra venom—enough, if dispersed widely, to kill thousands of people and, if applied discreetly, to assassinate a foreign leader. Indeed, one of the scenarios for doing away with Castro was to smear shellfish toxin on his scuba gear. In 1970, in the midst of negotiations over a multilateral treaty banning chemical and biological weapons, President Nixon had ordered all weapons-grade poisonous substances destroyed. The toxins and venom had been expensive and difficult to obtain, however, and a mid-level CIA officer took it upon himself to secret the poisons away in a secure storeroom. Shortly thereafter, the officer in question retired. His replacement assumed that the decision to retain the biological weapons had been approved by the DCI. Reacting to Colby's continual prodding to discover and divulge any and every CIA misdeed, Carl Duckett, deputy director for science and technology, came upon the cache of poisons and informed Colby. Aware that “we had something we should not have,” Colby and Duckett reported the matter to the White House and subsequently to the Church Committee. “I unwittingly handed the committee a corker on a silver platter,” Colby later recalled.
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