by Paul Simpson
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‘It is hard to overstate the damage done to the intelligence service during the seventies,’ CIA Director William J. Casey said in a speech in 1982. ‘Unrelenting questioning of the Agency’s integrity generated a severe loss of credibility.’ Although the Church Committee and other assaults on the CIA certainly caused severe problems for the Agency, they were the cause of some of their own difficulties.
James Jesus Angleton, chief of counter-intelligence for the CIA from 1954 to 1975, has been seen by some as a scapegoat for the Agency’s problems; to others, the way in which he was allowed to operate epitomizes what was wrong with the Agency during this period. Even the CIA themselves describe him as ‘one of the most influential and divisive intelligence officers in US history’.
Angleton was recruited into the OSS in 1943, and served with the counter-intelligence branches in London and Rome, finishing the Second World War as chief of counter-intelligence operations in Italy. He remained there until 1947 and then became the liaison between the new CIA and other western counter-intelligence organizations, notably Shin Bet and Mossad, the agencies for the new country of Israel. In 1954 he was appointed to the role at CIA headquarters that he held until his departure. Although charming in a social context, in business he was described as ‘arrogant, tactless, dismissive, and even threatening’ to those who disagreed with him.
It was Angleton who managed to get hold of a copy of Nikita Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, via his Israeli contacts, when no one else had been able to obtain it. Angleton was utterly convinced that the Soviet Union was implacably hostile towards the West and, on top of that, as far as he was concerned, international Communism was monolithic. He didn’t believe that the Sino-Soviet split of 1960 was genuine, but was simply part of an elaborate disinformation campaign, and it was a firm tenet that the KGB had penetrated all of the Western agencies.
Angleton’s interactions with two KGB spies informed this opinion. He had been friendly with Kim Philby during the forties: the two met regularly when Philby was stationed in Washington from 1949 onwards, to the extent that their weekly dinner meetings were known as ‘The Kim and Jim Show’. When Philby’s treachery became obvious after the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951, Angleton spent the next few years deconstructing his former friend’s career, and realized that his various promotions had been part of a Soviet plan. If Philby could reach a situation where he was being seriously talked of as a future head of MI6, there could well be other agents. As a result, DCI Allen Dulles agreed to the establishment of the counter-intelligence section.
The other agent was Anatoli Golitsyn. While many regarded him as — to put it politely — a fantastist, his tales of KGB infiltration of the entire Western intelligence operation (which he didn’t start to mention until sometime after his defection) fit in precisely with Angleton’s way of thinking. Golitsyn claimed that British prime minister Harold Wilson was a KGB agent; by the end of his time at the Agency, Angleton would add Swedish prime minster Olaf Palme and West German chancellor Willy Brandt to that list (Brandt of course wasn’t the source of any leaks — it was his assistant Günter Guillaume).
In 1962, shortly after Golitsyn’s defection, Angleton moved to the new CIA building at Langley and set up the Special Investigation Group (the SIG), searching for KGB influence within the Agency. To the surprise of many, Angleton accepted Golitsyn’s claims at face value. It reached a point where the SIG would pass Golitsyn its case files for evaluation, and the Russian would ‘finger’ specific individuals as likely agents, a practice that later CIA officers found hard to credit.
This meant that when Yuri Nosenko defected, and his claims often contradicted Golitsyn (notably about the presence of a KGB spy within the CIA itself), the newcomer was ignored. The drastic treatment that Nosenko received at the CIA’s hands was because Angleton and like-minded colleagues refused to believe he wasn’t a KGB plant. Only when new DCI Richard Helms intervened and ordered a review of the evidence was Nosenko exonerated.
Angleton’s methods antagonized his colleagues, and many believed that he was speculating about likely Soviet agents, rather than bringing actual proof. The case that Angleton made regarding one particular agent, interrogated in 1968, was described as ‘the last piece of reasoning you would bring into a case where you already had evidence. But it’s certainly not the kind of thing that you would start off a case with.’ The paranoia that Angleton fostered even resulted in one of the counter-intelligence chief’s analysts accusing Angleton himself of being a Soviet spy.
Golitsyn maintained that there was one specific spy at the heart of the CIA, code-named Sasha, prompting what became known as the Great Molehunt. (The connection to John le Carré’s character George Smiley’s most famous mission in the novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy becomes more apt when one considers the description given of Angleton in 1980: ‘If John le Carré and Graham Greene had collaborated on a superspy, the result might have been James Jesus Angleton.’) Among the forty or so CIA officers who Angleton focused his suspicions upon was Richard Kovich (born Dushan Kovacevich) whose career was ruined by Angleton’s actions — despite placing bugs in Kovich’s home and finding nothing, Angleton still sought to prevent his promotion. After Angleton’s enforced retirement, CIA analysts spent three years going through the papers he had compiled — he refused to allow his material to be computerised, or otherwise indexed — and found not one shred of hard evidence to back up his notion that there was a mole.
Angleton’s suspicions extended to personnel in other countries’ intelligence agencies as well. Welsh-born agent Leslie James (‘Jim’) Bennett had served in British intelligence in Istanbul alongside Kim Philby, as well as Melbourne, Australia, before heading to Canada, eventually becoming deputy chief of the counter-espionage branch of the RCMP. Although Bennett’s service record wasn’t particularly outstanding — he suffered various setbacks that he ascribed in part to the KGB having a spy within the RCMP — he was invited to be part of the team debriefing Golitsyn. However, when he started to disagree with Angleton, the CIA chief opened a file on him, with allegations mounting to such a level that Bennett had to resign in July 1972. After Angleton’s departure from the CIA, no evidence was found against Bennett. Vitaly Yurchenko, a later defector, confirmed that the KGB spy had been Giles G. Brunet, not Bennett.
Much as Angleton’s behaviour upset those he worked with — although his counter-intelligence section continued to provide the goods, which meant that successive DCIs backed him — the public revelation of two operations that his department carried out brought his career to an end, and contributed to the bad odour with which the Agency became surrounded in the mid-seventies.
An operation had begun in 1952 in an effort to see if Soviet agents were communicating with the USSR via the US mail, and whether there might be any Soviets writing to American citizens who could become potential assets for the CIA. Originally only copying addresses from envelopes, in 1955 the operation was renamed HTLINGUAL and the letters within the envelopes were opened — in contravention of American law, although some of the Postmasters General over the two decades were informed of the operation by the CIA. The FBI had been a party to HTLINGUAL initially, although they stopped taking an active role in 1966. A similar operation, code-named CHAOS, began in 1967 in response to President Johnson’s desire to know if the anti-Vietnam War movement was being used by the Communists.
While Angleton and his counter-intelligence team regarded this work as ‘foreign surveillance’, the cold reality was that the post opened was travelling to and from American citizens. The CIA did not have a remit to operate domestically within the United States — its participation in ‘internal security functions’ was specifically prohibited by the National Security Act. Incoming DCI James Schlesinger shut CHAOS down when he learned in 1973 that it had yielded very few results; HTLINGUAL was stopped by Schlesinger’s successor William Colby later that year. When New York Times journalist Seymour Her
sh warned that he was investigating the projects in 1974, Angleton’s time at the Agency was drawing to a close, and he finally retired, very reluctantly, in 1975.
Suspicions about the CIA’s activities domestically had been circulating even before Hersh’s warning. Howard H. Baker Jr., the vice chairman of the Senate Watergate committee investigating the break-ins at the Watergate building in Washington DC in 1972, said at the time that the role of the CIA in the scandal was like ‘animals crashing around in the forest — you can hear them but you can’t see them’. On 2 August 1973 the committee was told by former DCI Richard Helms categorically that ‘The CIA had no involvement in the break-in. No involvement whatever.’ The fact that five of the seven burglars had previously worked for the CIA; that four of them had been involved with the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961; and that the two ringleaders, James W. McCord Jr. and E. Howard Hunt, had been career CIA officers prior to their involvement with the White House would seem to suggest that the committee’s questions weren’t unjustified.
If the committee had been aware of all the facts, then they might well have questioned Helms further. Although it was the letter sent by James McCord to Judge Sirica in March 1973 that would eventually expose the whole operation to public scrutiny, McCord had previously written to the CIA requesting assistance and was on the verge of exposing the operation, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, whose articles were instrumental in the cover-up’s failure. However, this letter, written in August 1972, was not passed over to the FBI investigation, on DCI Helms’ instructions. Nor did Helms see fit to share Howard Hunt’s request a couple of months before the Watergate burglaries to the External Employment Assistance Branch to see if a ‘retiree or resignee who was accomplished at picking locks’ might be available for some work on behalf of the White House. Writing in 2007, Bob Woodward referred to the CIA’s role in the Watergate scandal as ‘one of the murkiest parts of the story’.
The committee’s final report in June 1974 suggested that Congress ‘should more closely supervise the operations of the law enforcement ‘‘community’’’, pointing out that it had produced evidence that the White House had ‘sought and achieved CIA aid’ for the burglars, and ‘unsuccessfully sought to involve the CIA in the Watergate cover-up’.
By 1974, questions were also being asked about the CIA’s involvement in Chile. Richard Helms had been forced to step down from the CIA in late 1972 by President Nixon (partly because he refused to let the CIA be involved in an active cover-up of the Watergate scandal), but that didn’t mean that he stopped being loyal to the office that he had sworn to serve or protective of the men and women who had been under his care. As well as making his categorical statements regarding Watergate, he also perjured himself when called to give evidence in public before a Congressional committee over the CIA’s involvement in Chile. ‘Did you try in the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the government in Chile?’ Senator Symington asked Helms. Unhesitatingly, the former DCI replied, ‘No, sir.’
This was completely untrue. In 1970, the Marxist leader Salvador Allende Gossens finally won the presidency of Chile, on his fourth attempt, despite the CIA passing funds to opposition parties, and advising global company International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) how to finance the opposition. According to its own internal review in 2000, the Agency had been active in Chile since 1962, initially supporting the Christian Democratic Party, and then providing assistance to anti-Marxist groups, both financially and with propaganda. On 15 September 1970, President Nixon informed Helms that an Allende regime in Chile would not be acceptable to the United States. Authorizing a budget of $10million, Nixon instructed the CIA ‘to prevent Allende from coming to power or unseat him… without advising the Departments of State or Defence or the US Ambassador in Chile’. The Agency tried to start a coup to oust Allende, working with three separate groups of plotters, before the Chilean Congress reaffirmed his victory. One group had ‘extremist tendencies’ so were dropped; military hardware was supplied to the second; the third, led by retired General Roberto Viaux tried to kidnap Army Commander in Chief René Schneider, but mortally wounded him. The CIA had already withdrawn their support by this stage and didn’t proceed further following the strong reaction to Schneider’s death.
On his departure from the CIA, Helms was appointed Ambassador to Iran, and underwent Congressional nomination hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In both 1973 and 1975 he point blank denied that the CIA were involved in Chile. ‘If the Agency had really gotten behind the other candidates and spent a lot of money and so forth, the election might have come out differently,’ he said at the earlier hearing, although in 1975 he admitted that he might have made a mistake but pointed out that Allende was still in power at the time ‘and we did not need any more diplomatic incidents or any more difficulties’.
Only a few months later, Allende would be gone, the victim of a coup by General Pinochet that took place in September 1973. Unlike similar operations in other countries, this wasn’t orchestrated by the CIA, although even the Agency admits that ‘because [the] CIA did not discourage the takeover and had sought to instigate a coup in 1970 [it] probably appeared to condone it’. Rather than accept an offer of safe passage, Allende stood his ground in the presidential palace, and, as a forensic report in 2011 showed, he committed suicide with an AK-47 given him by Fidel Castro.
When it became clear that Helms had lied to Congress, it seemed as if he was part of yet another cover-up by an associate of disgraced President Nixon. However, as far as Helms was concerned, ‘I found myself in a position of conflict,’ he told a court in November 1977, when pleading guilty to a charge of perjury. ‘I had sworn my oath to protect certain secrets. I didn’t want to lie. I didn’t want to mislead the Senate. I was simply trying to find my way through a very difficult situation in which I found myself.’ Passing sentence, Judge Barrington D. Parker said, ‘If public officials embark deliberately on a course to disobey and ignore the laws of our land because of some misguided and ill-conceived notion and belief that there are earlier commitments and considerations which they must observe, the future of our country is in jeopardy… You stand before this court in disgrace and shame.’ As far as Helms was concerned, ‘I don’t feel disgraced at all. I think if I had done anything else I would have been disgraced.’ His $2,000 fine was paid by CIA officers.
By the time Helms was facing the perjury charge, the tide in America had turned very definitely against the intelligence services. Seymour Hersh’s article, ‘Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years’, appeared on the front page of the New York Times on December 22, 1974, and revealed the existence of a set of internal CIA documents called the Family Jewels. According to the compiler, future CIA DCI William Colby, these consisted of ‘693 pages of possible violations of, or at least questionable activities in regard to, the C.I.A.’s legislative charter’; that among the contents were ‘bizarre and tragic cases wherein the Agency experimented with mind-control drugs’; and that accompanying them was ‘a separate and even more secret annex’ that ‘summarized a 1967 survey of [the] C.I.A.’s involvement in assassination attempts or plans against Castro, Lumumba and [Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Leónidas] Trujillo [who was in fact killed by his officers of his own army]’. Certainly that material is in there, but the majority of the documents chronicle times where the CIA may have been acting outside their remit domestically — for example, in assisting a suburban Washington police department. The device they supplied may have helped prevent a policeman’s death, but they shouldn’t have been involved.
The article was yet another attack on the Agency, and prompted the formation of both a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities — chaired by Senator Frank Church, and known as the Church Committee. The headings of the latter’s final report give an indica
tion of the concerns it threw up: ‘(A) Violating and Ignoring the Law (B) Over-breadth of Domestic Intelligence Activity (C) Excessive Use of Intrusive Techniques (D) Using Covert Action to Disrupt and Discredit Domestic Groups (E) Political Abuse of Intelligence Information (F) Inadequate Controls on Dissemination and Retention (G) Deficiencies in Control and Accountability.’
While there were concerns that Senator Church was using the Committee to further his own political ends, it undeniably threw light on the CIA — as well as the FBI and the NSA — which the Agency didn’t want. For example, at the first televised hearing, Church displayed a CIA poison-dart gun as a way of illustrating the committee’s discovery that the CIA had directly violated a presidential order by maintaining stocks of shellfish toxin. Over the months it took evidence, many previously hidden CIA operations came to light — from the drug experiments of MKULTRA to the assassination plans against Castro and Patrice Lumumba; from the financial assistance for political parties in foreign countries to the support of indigenous populations during time of war.
Helms had been replaced as DCI by James Schlesinger, but Nixon soon tapped him to serve as Secretary of Defence. The attitude of his successor William Colby, was to reveal what needed to be revealed and create a working relationship with those who had been set up to monitor and investigate them. Unfortunately, there were those on all the various committees set up — as well as the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee, there was also the Pike Committee set up by the House of Representatives — who were determined to bring the various agencies to heel, and the hearings became power plays between the committee members, the CIA and even, at times, the White House.
Chairman Otis Pike did come out of the hearings with an improved respect for the CIA:
