A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  General Smith determined that the available but scattered data had contained more than a whiff of the probability that North Korea would attack South Korea. The Agency mandate to centralize intelligence evaluation and dissemination had not yet been achieved. Admiral Hillenkoetter’s single star did not glow brightly enough for him to force the Pentagon’s three-star generals and admirals to comply with CIA’s legislative charter.

  In winning his three stars as General Eisenhower’s chief of staff in the critical phase of World War II, Smith had earned the reputation, and sufficient political clout, to enforce the cooperation of the other U.S. intelligence agencies at all levels. He also had the organizational savvy to recognize the Agency’s problem.

  One of General Smith’s first steps was to establish the Office of National Estimates (ONE), reporting directly to himself. His purpose was to provide national leaders with a coordinated analysis of all the information available to the U.S. government on national security issues. The sources encompass ultra-secret signals intelligence, State and Defense Department reports, imagery, overhead reconnaissance, data from CIA agents, and such open sources as the world media—press, radio, and TV.

  Another of Smith’s initial moves was to summon Professor William Langer from his post in the Harvard history department. Langer’s experience—he had organized and run the OSS Reports and Analysis office (R&A) during World War II—made him the right choice to set up the new office. The professor promptly established a board of some twelve persons with the sole responsibility to produce coordinated national intelligence estimates. The impressive group was a deliberately mixed assembly including academics, retired diplomats, senior military officers, business executives, and lawyers. Some had World War II intelligence experience.

  The board was to be supported by a small staff of area specialists. These usually younger experts did the heavy lifting involved in preparing initial draft estimates by integrating and supplementing a wide range of contributions. The wear and tear involved in achieving consensus between younger staff and the senior board served to boil down any flabby prose or possibly muffled judgments in the final product.

  One of the more cogent pleasures of the scientists and scholars staffing the DI is knowing that along with the important world newspapers and clips from Associated Press and foreign news agencies, their in-boxes will be filled with the most sensitive State and Defense Department reports and documents, highly classified espionage reports, intercepted communications of all sorts, and think pieces from even the most obscure sources.

  At DCI Smith’s insistence, the board had no responsibility—administrative or executive—other than to produce National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) coordinated with the other U.S. intelligence agencies. The process of establishing ONE is easily recounted, but in action it was a fundamental step in thrusting CIA into position to discharge one of its primary missions—the production of National Intelligence Estimates based on all information available to the government.

  From the inception of CIA, the director has worn two hats. He is both the director of Central Intelligence and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. As DCI, he is the President’s senior intelligence officer, with overview of all other government intelligence components. As the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he runs the Agency. Thus, when the ONE completed a National Estimate, the director of Central Intelligence submitted it to the intelligence components of the State and Defense Departments. When the estimate was approved by the DCI and forwarded to the chiefs of other agencies it was returned to the DCI for his final signature and dissemination to the White House and National Security Council. Some estimates are produced on an annual basis; others are more nearly ad hoc. The process can take months; in a crisis, a few hours will suffice.

  CIA is not the only agency doing this analysis; both the State and Defense Departments indulge in it. The critically important difference in the CIA analysis and that of other institutions is that the Agency product is independent of the occasional parochial interests of other government offices—including the various departments, notably State and Defense—and the executive agencies.

  There is another vital distinction: the director of Central Intelligence reports directly to the President. Although National Estimates are coordinated with other agencies, the DCI has the last word. Any dissent from the final estimate is included as a footnote. This is the last step in affording policymakers an independent analysis of national security issues.

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  When Ray Cline left for Germany, Russell Jack Smith, a longtime DI officer, replaced him as chief of the Directorate for Intelligence. At the time, the directorate was made up of four analytic and reporting units: the Office of Current Intelligence (OCI), the Office of Economic Research (OER), the Office of Strategic Research (OSR), and the Office of Biographic and Geographic Intelligence (OBGI). Of these, the OCI was the frontline operation, producing six days a week a daily intelligence summary in three levels of classification and a steady stream of memoranda on threatening trends and developments worldwide. At that time, OER concentrated on Soviet economic activity and production of military equipment, especially bombers and ICBMs. OSR maintained a watch on troop and aircraft deployments and various activities of Soviet and other military forces. OBGI produced reports of key foreign personalities, various background studies, and maps of strategic geographic locales.

  In briefing outsiders on the intelligence directorate, Jack Smith described his shop as “the voice of CIA on foreign political, economic, and military affairs.” He would then explain that in addition to producing annual, monthly, weekly, daily, and, on occasion, hourly intelligence disseminations, the DI ran two overt activities—Contacts, and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). The Contacts Branch was primarily concerned with the overt debriefing of businessmen and others who travel to areas of strategic interest. (This open activity is practiced by most of the world’s intelligence services and foreign policy establishments.) The FBIS monitors a global range of foreign media—print, radio, TV—and publishes unclassified daily reports. The Central Reference office stores a wealth of intelligence data and maintains the Agency’s extensive library.

  I recall Allen Dulles’s agreeing with Jack Smith’s observation that an entire college faculty could be assembled from within the membership of the Directorate for Intelligence. This is surely true. The intellectual excellence and the professional qualifications of the area experts, researchers, scientists, and political analysts are unsurpassed within the government. But there is a certain irony in the remark: For all his professional expertise, Dulles tended to take the directorate for granted. He appreciated the value and quality of the product, but rarely addressed himself to the DI or any of its problems. This stands in sharp contrast to the major role Dulles played in shaping the operational elements of the Agency.

  The analyst’s daily task is to scan the material—virtually all of the information in his regional or functional discipline available to the U.S. government—for anything of immediate interest to the President, the White House staff, the secretaries of state and defense, or other senior officers. The longer-range data are filed for future use in “CIA Memoranda.” These studies were of a deeper draft than the national newsweekly magazines, and laced with secret information not available in unclassified form. Moreover, owing to CIA’s unique status—reporting directly to the President and lacking any responsibility for setting policy—these memoranda were characteristically objective and free from policy bias. In this respect it is understandable, for example, that Pentagon agencies, bearing the responsibility for national defense, were more inclined to emphasize the most threatening aspects in weapons development or military situations. In contrast, CIA analysts stressed what appeared to be the most likely outcome.

  Like major news agencies and national newspapers, the DI and especially its OCI function on a twenty-four-hour basis, with deadlines ranging from weeks for interim studies to minutes in
the case of the President’s Daily Brief.

  Here a confession. As much as I respected the intellectual heft, wisdom, and probity of the distinguished Board of National Estimates and especially the brilliant and colorful chairman, Sherman Kent, it never quite stilled the memory of my newspaper days in Berlin and inclined me to identify with the Office of Current Intelligence. For me the pressure of meeting urgent deadlines and responding immediately to developing crises always sparked a pleasant mnemonic echo. Indeed, Sherman Kent’s salty tropes were strongly reminiscent of a newspaper office. His assessment of a tin-pot dictator’s feckless effort to tidy up his government as akin “to gathering piss with a rake” is typical.

  Casting aside the perceived—and I must admit the occasionally real—excitement of secret operations, the absolute essence of the intelligence profession rests in the production of current intelligence reports, memoranda, and National Estimates on which sound policy decisions can be made.

  Chapter 23

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  A BONE IN THE THROAT

  There was another problem that became ensnared in the events that followed the President’s murder. In outline, the case we first knew as FOXTROT was simple enough. Examined in detail, it was the most frustrating operation in my experience, and was to plague me from my post as deputy director for plans (DDP) through much of my service as director of Central Intelligence. The files consumed hundreds of pages of documentation and argument—two of the early studies ran to some twelve hundred pages. During my years at the Agency, no case was more baffling.

  Operation FOXTROT opened in June 1962 when an urgent, Eyes Only cable was hand-carried to my office. Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, a middle-level KGB operative temporarily serving as a security officer on a Soviet disarmament delegation visiting Geneva, had approached an American diplomat and asked to be introduced to a CIA representative. In the course of several clandestine meetings with an Agency officer, Nosenko volunteered to serve as an agent within the KGB.

  From a security viewpoint, Nosenko’s alleged background and Moscow assignment—he served in the American Department of the internal counterintelligence service of the KGB—made him an extremely attractive source. His targets were American diplomatic and consular personnel, journalists, and tourists in the USSR. As an agent, he appeared to offer an inside view of high-priority KGB operations against the United States. In Moscow, the KGB had created surveillance facilities which when focused would give an intimate, around-the-clock oversight of a target individual’s everyday activity. Over time, this intense scrutiny enabled the KGB to identify any personal attitudes or habits which if manipulated and played upon by experts could lead to compromise and recruitment. No place on the globe were American personnel more exposed and vulnerable than in the Soviet Union.

  For years the embassy personnel had been intensively briefed on how to protect themselves. Sophisticated audio devices were routinely dug out of embassy offices and private living quarters. Staff personnel were regularly warned away from KGB-sponsored social contacts. These briefings were helpful, but could no more solve the persistent security problems than the best medical advice has kept some people from smoking, boozing, or indulging in drugs. As in all secret intelligence, the key is “penetration”—the best possible security protection is a source in the opposition’s counterintelligence component. Nosenko appeared to be just that. In our early meetings he named an American communications clerk who had been recruited, and pinpointed some fifty audio devices in the Moscow embassy.

  Before he returned to Moscow, Nosenko specified that no attempt be made to contact him in the Soviet Union, and that future meetings be restricted to the times he accompanied Soviet delegations abroad. The Russian also said that he had no intention of defecting—he would not abandon his family in Moscow—but would contact us the next time he was abroad.

  No matter what gifts they appear to bear, volunteers are always handled with extra caution. Initial reports are double-checked against reliable data, alleged motives are carefully sorted out, and the agent’s background is thoroughly examined. Even before the first rush of excitement subsided, doubts about Nosenko had developed. Some of the “inside” information that looked so promising in the field had, upon examination at headquarters, proved to duplicate the data supplied by another KGB defector six months before Nosenko volunteered his services. This might be seen as confirmation that Nosenko was speaking the truth and knew what he was talking about. Viewed skeptically, it could also mean that the KGB was attempting to convince us that Nosenko was a bona fide walk-in by slipping us material they knew had been compromised by the earlier defector. Doubts about Nosenko’s alleged career pattern and background also flared. If the Russian had been sent by the KGB, one purpose might be to deflect our interest from the reports of the earlier KGB defector and influence our other independent investigations.

  It was nineteen months, and January 1964, before Nosenko returned to Geneva. To our complete surprise, and contrary to his earlier statement, Nosenko abruptly announced that he now wanted to defect immediately. He insisted that his security had been compromised, that he would be arrested if he returned to Moscow. Then, with barely a pause, he delivered another surprise. In the days following President Kennedy’s assassination, Nosenko informed us, he had reviewed the entire KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald’s three-year residence in the USSR. Nosenko assured us that the KGB had found Oswald unstable, had declined to have anything to do with him, and he was not in any way involved in President Kennedy’s assassination.

  Coming some two months after the murder, when there was intense concern throughout Washington as to whether the Russians or Castro were in any way involved in the assassination, and when the Warren Commission was still scraping up every bit of information on Oswald, these allegations were a veritable bombshell. Nosenko’s claim was the most important ever made by any previous defector, and with it the FOXTROT operation exploded into another dimension. Our suspicions notwithstanding, Nosenko’s claim to have complete knowledge of Oswald’s KGB file gave us no choice but to hustle him out of Geneva and into the Washington area for extensive debriefing.

  Nosenko was brought into the United States under authority given CIA in Section 7 of the Central Intelligence Act of 1949. This provision states that in the interest of national security, and the furtherance of the national intelligence mission, as many as one hundred individuals a year can, with the authority of the director of Central Intelligence, and the concurrence of the attorney general and the commissioner of immigration, be admitted permanently to the United States without reference to other laws and regulations. This early Cold War legislation is clearly intended to facilitate the escape and prompt movement to safe haven of important agents or defectors. Once in the United States, these individuals are “paroled” in care of CIA and remain the responsibility of the Agency until they are granted citizenship or leave the country. CIA makes all defectors available for interrogation by other U.S. agencies—the FBI questioned Nosenko soon after his arrival. It remains the Agency’s responsibility to determine what we called the “bona fides” of these persons. This meant that we were to certify that the defector was the person he claimed to be, that his former position gave him access to the information he offered, that the reasons for his defection were plausible, and that there were no data suggesting the involvement of any foreign intelligence service in his defection.

  It was not surprising that the KGB found Oswald too unstable to consider using for any operational purpose. Unstable, he surely was. But the KGB failure to take even the slightest security precautions before allowing Oswald to remain in the USSR did not square with Soviet security procedures as we knew them. Equally odd was the alleged failure of Soviet intelligence to question the ex-Marine on his military background. Had the Russians troubled to ask, they would have learned that Oswald had served in a radar unit on an air base that sometimes accommodated a U-2 aircraft, both topics of considerable interest to Soviet intelligence at the time. The assert
ion that the KGB did not trouble to investigate the possibility that Oswald was a CIA plant before allowing him to remain in the USSR also seemed highly unlikely. Nosenko’s alleged knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald seemed out of context with his professional responsibilities and assignment. Some of the details Nosenko offered on his own education and his military and intelligence careers were unconvincing.

  If the conflicting elements of Nosenko’s story had not been inflated by the allegation that he knew exactly how the young man who had murdered the President had been handled by Soviet intelligence in the USSR, the case would have been little more than a snarled counterintelligence problem, to be solved by close interrogation and further investigation. Nosenko’s claim to knowledge of Oswald raised the case to national importance. If the Russian could be proved to be a legitimate defector, and his assurances concerning Oswald’s handling could be proved entirely plausible, then the continuing suspicions of Soviet involvement in the assassination could be disregarded. But if Nosenko had been hurriedly briefed and dispatched to mislead us about any Soviet connection with the assassination, then the existing suspicions would be reinforced with consequences that, as I later testified, I thought would be “staggering.” In March 1964 the Agency faced no greater problem than to resolve the allegations concerning the assassination of President Kennedy.

  Unfortunately, no consensus could be developed within the Agency as to the truth of Nosenko’s various stories. The counterintelligence specialists and some experienced operatives considered him to have been programmed to mislead us. Others tended to believe Nosenko, and to consider the transparently false discrepancies in his reporting to have been compounded by faulty memory, the determination to impress us with an exaggerated view of his knowledge and former position, language difficulties, fatigue, and emotional distress. All of these problems are common with defectors, and understandably so. The decision to abandon one’s family, friends, homeland, career, language, and culture ranks highest on the roster of events most likely to cause the maximum emotional stress.