National Security Intelligence

by Loch K. Johnson

  Two months later, in June 1969, Ehrlichman heard about a young White House aide on Pat Buchanan's speech-writing staff, a twenty-nine-year-old by the name of Tom Charles Huston. As an activist Republican and head of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF, a right-leaning student association) while an undergraduate at Indiana University, Huston had gained first-hand experience in confronting anti-war campus protesters; he was articulate and impassioned about their lack of patriotism. He saw the protesters as unwashed, unruly, and disdainful of authority; they were, in his opinion, often bearded, shabbily dressed, and on the far left of the political spectrum, undermining the security of the United States by opposing the communist containment policy in Southeast Asia pursued by the Johnson and now the Nixon Administrations.

  After college, Huston had joined the Army as an intelligence officer and was assigned to the Pentagon. During off-hours, he engaged in volunteer work for the Nixon presidential campaign. A bright, hard-working individual, he soon attracted attention among Nixon's senior assistants and, when his military tour came to an end, he had a job waiting for him in Buchanan's shop. Huston made clear to his new boss his deep-seated disdain for the tatterdemalion demonstrators marching through the streets of America. When Buchanan heard about the failure of the Intelligence Community to uncover a connection between the protesters and the Soviet Union, he shared the President's disbelief and suggested to Ehrlichman that Huston conduct a study of his own on behalf of the White House. After all, Huston wasn't much older than most of the protesters, had witnessed their tactics close-up at Indiana University, and knew more about radical (“New Left”) student politics than anyone else in the White House. Buchanan informed Ehrlichman that his young aide shared the President's suspicions about Soviet ties to America's domestic unrest.

  Ehrlichman called Huston into his West Wing office and, in the name of the President, charged him with the task of preparing a thorough report on the possibility of Soviet involvement in the funding of the anti-war movement in the United States. A brief pep talk in the Oval Office from the President followed. The young Indianan, slightly built with a finely boned face, spectacles, prematurely thinning hair, and little experience in Washington, suddenly found himself in a commanding position to carry on his opposition to the hippies who (he was convinced) were undermining American society. With a sense of zeal, he set out for the office of William C. Sullivan, the assistant director for domestic intelligence at the FBI – the number three official in the Bureau beneath the legendary J. Edgar Hoover and his deputy. Sullivan was the government's top counterintelligence officer, responsible for discovering and thwarting threats to the Republic from home-grown subversives, as well as from hostile intelligence services operating inside the United States – especially the Soviet KGB. His office was the place to begin in Huston's effort to stop KGB support for American student anti-war protests and protect the White House.

  Huston informed Sullivan about his orders from Nixon and Ehrlichman. The President wanted to know everything about the anti-war movement, “especially,” Sullivan remembers the youthful White House aide emphasizing, “all information possible relating to foreign influences and the financing of the New Left.” Sullivan replied to Huston that the White House would have to put this request in writing to the redoubtable Mr. Hoover. At the time, the FBI Director was in his twilight years at the Bureau, past the official retirement age, and increasingly uneasy about any controversy that might strip him of his beloved position as head of the Bureau. Huston returned to his White House office and wrote a letter that informed the FBI Director – the nation's self-anointed foremost authority on the Red Menace – that U.S. intelligence about the influence of communists on the anti-war movement was “inadequate.” The President wanted to know what intelligence gaps existed on this subject, as well as what steps could be taken to provide the maximum possible intelligence coverage of the street radicals who were tearing the nation apart. Huston sent a similar message to the leaders of the CIA (DCI Richard Helms), the NSA (Admiral Noel Gayler), and the DIA (General Donald Bennett) – all with a June 31 deadline for a written response back to the White House.

  When the responses came back to Huston, among them was an argument from Sullivan that the FBI would need increased sigint authority to obtain the information the President wanted. Sullivan stressed that “increasingly closer links between [domestic radicals] and foreign communists in the future” remained a real danger.3 The White House found the responses from the intelligence chieftains still lacking, however, in the search for a clear confirmation of its suspected link between Soviet intelligence and the hippie demonstrators.

  Huston persevered. In the coming months, he developed a close working relationship with Sullivan, a man his father's age. Together, they worked out a plan to convince Hoover and the other leaders of America's secret agencies to lower the legal barriers that barred intelligence collection against domestic protesters inside the United States. A year after he began this quest, Huston finally managed in June 1970 to arrange an Oval Office meeting between the President and the four intelligence leaders. Based on briefing notes provided to him by Huston, President Nixon told Helms, Hoover, Gayler, and Bennett that the demonstrators were “reaching out for the support – ideological and otherwise – of foreign powers,” and that the radicals were trying to “destroy their country.” He ordered the group to “insure that the fullest possible inter-agency cooperation is being realized and that all our resources are being utilized to gather the types of information which will enable us to halt the spread of this terrorism before it gets completely out of hand.”4

  Twenty days later, on July 25, 1970, following a series of intense work sessions with their top aides, the intelligence chiefs met again, this time in Hoover's office at FBI Headquarters in downtown Washington. They had gathered to sign the top secret (since declassified) forty-three-page “Special Report” that became known in the White House as the Huston Plan. The report provided a list of existing restraints on collection that the President should lift, thus enabling the Intelligence Community to spy on the war dissenters (see the examples in Figure 4.1). In a shocking episode in the annals of American intelligence history, each of the intelligence leaders signed the document that authorized hitherto illegal operations inside the United States. Huston and his mentor, William Sullivan, had achieved their goal of enlisting America's secret services in the internal domestic struggle against the anti-war protesters.

  Figure 4.1 Key recommendations in the Huston Plan, 1970

  As historian White has observed, the methods proposed in the Huston Plan reached “all the way to every mailbox, every college campus, every telephone, every home” in America.5 A memorandum accompanying the Huston Plan, addressed to the President and written by Huston, raised – and quickly dismissed – questions about the legality of two collection techniques in particular: covert mail cover and surreptitious entry. “Covert [mail] coverage is illegal, and there are serious risks involved,” he wrote. “However, the advantages to be derived from its use outweigh the risks.”6 As for surreptitious entries – break-ins, or “second-story jobs” in FBI lingo – Huston advised: “Use of this technique is clearly illegal: it amounts to burglary. It is also highly risky and could result in great embarrassment if exposed. However, it is also the most fruitful tool and can produce the type of intelligence which cannot be obtained in any other fashion.”7 With the provisions of this top secret document, the young White House aide was asking nothing less than for the President to sanction lawlessness inside the United States by the Intelligence Community – or, at any rate, four of its top agencies: the CIA, FBI, NSA, and DIA. The agencies themselves had worked with Huston to craft rationales for the use of these illegal operations. On July 14, President Nixon signed his approval of the recommendations. Chillingly, the Huston Plan was now secret presidential policy.

  The plan, however, proved short-lived. The Attorney General, John Mitchell, learned of the President's authorization for the co
llection procedures and urged Nixon to reconsider, on grounds that the “risk of public disclosure…was greater than the possible benefits to be derived.”8 Hoover, too, began to have second thoughts. His feelings of job insecurity were magnified by the possibility that the Huston Plan might be publicly disclosed. He might be fired if any of these machinations leaked to the media. Hoover withdrew his support only days after signing off on the scheme, at which point the Huston Plan collapsed and the President rescinded his initial approval. The broad attack on American civil liberties aimed at the anti-war movement, whose members (except for a few criminal elements in the Weather and Black Panther factions) were simply exercising their First Amendment rights to protest a government decision, had been stopped short.

  Or so it seemed. Five years later, the Church Committee would discover that the intelligence agencies had been involved in improper domestic spying both before the Huston Plan and after its rescission, all in the name of counterintelligence – protecting the nation against hostile (and, it turned out, virtually non-existent) Soviet influences among America's youth.9 In 1975, the Church Committee called Huston as its chief witness for public hearings into the startling domestic spy caper. Five years after the fact, he expressed remorse for his role in the drafting of the plan that bore his name:

  The risk was that you would get people who would be susceptible to political considerations as opposed to national security considerations. Or would construe political considerations to be national security considerations, to move from the kid with the bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.10

  The case provides an important, indeed fundamental, lesson in counterintelligence: however vital this intelligence mission is – and there should be no doubt that the democracies have genuine enemies who must be identified and thwarted by a well-trained counterintelligence corps – one has to be on guard constantly against the use of this tradecraft to spy against the very law-abiding citizens whom the secret agencies have been established to shield in the first place. Sound security measures against genuine threats at home and abroad, yes; turning the democracies into Orwellian “Counterintelligence States,” like North Korea, no.

  The proper focus of counterintelligence as an intelligence mission

  In the United States, an executive order offers this definition of counterintelligence (CI):

  Counterintelligence means information gathered and activities conducted to identify, deceive, exploit, disrupt or protect against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage or assassination conducted for or on behalf of foreign powers, organizations or persons or their agents, or international terrorist organizations or activities.11

  Stated simply, the task of CI is to thwart hostile acts perpetrated against one's nation by foreign intelligence agencies, terrorist factions, and internal subversives.

  Ambush at the agency

  The dangers to the free societies from hostile regimes and terrorists are palpable – everything from attacking computers in the democracies (an electronic Pearl Harbor, as some specialists envision a massive, modern-day cyberattack) to murdering their citizens. Consider, for example, one dreadful January morning in 1993. At 8:00 a.m. on a work day, a long line of CIA employees queued up in their automobiles at a traffic signal on Dolly Madison Highway, preparing to make a left turn into the main entrance of the Agency's 213-acre, forested compound at Langley. Just another ordinary morning for commuters – until suddenly a strange noise became audible to those waiting at the stop light. Perhaps a fender bender had occurred somewhere in the queue. But the noise grew louder and sounded more like firecrackers popping. Then the source of the noise became all too clear.

  Carrying an AK-47, a dark-haired man of stocky, medium build, dressed in brown, his face stone cold, his eyes unblinking, had walked up to the first of the idling cars, a Volkswagen, and fired into the open window, striking the driver in the back as he leaned away from the barrel. The assailant then started to trot toward the next car, and the next, spraying bullets into the windows at close range – some seventy rounds in all. As witnesses recall, glass shattered, car horns blared, and people screamed or prayed that the weapon would run out of ammunition.12 The murderer, a Pakistani national by the name of Mir Aimal Kansi, raced back to the first car and finished off the driver as the wife of the dying CIA officer opened the door on the passenger side and ducked for cover. Kansi then ran to his brown station wagon parked nearby and sped away from the scene. Two Agency employees slumped against their steering wheels, blood seeping from bullet holes in their bodies. Down the line of cars, others moaned in the agony of their wounds.

  Kansi escaped back to Pakistan, flying out of the United States that same day. His expired passport went unnoticed by airport security. It took four-and-a-half years for the CIA and the FBI to track him down at a small village in his homeland, but he was captured and returned to the United States for a trial. A day after his conviction in 1997, four American oil executives were killed in Karachi, Pakistan, in apparent retaliation. In 2002, Kansi was put to death by lethal injection at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia. Hours before, he said that he had carried out his attack to protest U.S. policies toward Muslim countries.

  The Oklahoma City bombing

  On April 19, 1995 – one of the most calamitous days in the nation's history – the United States suffered a different kind of assault, one that proved even more lethal. That morning in Oklahoma City, a rental truck sat parked at a curb downtown, near the entrance to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. In the truck's storage space, a homemade bomb composed of fifty-five-gallon drums suddenly erupted in a powerful blast, fueled by a mixture of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane. The date marked the second anniversary of a fatal assault by the FBI on the Branch Davidian sect near Waco, Texas, which resulted in the death of seventy-six people – a symbol for some “patriot” groups of the growing danger posed by the federal government in Washington.

  The Oklahoma City explosion, triggered by an alienated young military veteran, Timothy McVeigh, who seethed with anti-government rage, was the worst terrorist attack in the United States since a bomb exploded in front of the Morgan Bank on Wall Street, September 16, 1920, killing thirty-eight men and women.13 In a letter written shortly before the bombing of the Murrah Building, McVeigh said that he had shifted from being an “intellectual” in the anti-government movement to being an “animal” determined to shed blood in honor of his cause.14 The bombing left 168 people dead, including 19 children, and injured more than 500 other individuals.15 Careless in his plans for escape (his car license plate was out of date, for instance), McVeigh was quickly captured as he fled Oklahoma City. Conviction and a death sentence soon followed.

  One of the many questions raised by the Oklahoma City bombing was the extent to which the FBI had succeeded in placing counterintelligence informants inside patriot groups of the kind to which McVeigh had belonged. A well-placed informant – a “mole,” in counterintelligence spytalk – could have warned the Bureau of the planned attack.16

  Treason inside the CIA and the FBI

  Sometimes America's counterintelligence failures result not in the death of U.S. citizens at home, but in the targeting of its agents and operations abroad. The cases of Aldrich “Rick” Hazen Ames of the CIA and Robert Hanssen of the FBI, who began their spying for the Soviet Union at about the same time in 1984, are prime illustrations.17 Ames was a senior counterintelligence officer within the Agency who had responsibilities for the Soviet Union. From that perch, he knew the identities of most CIA assets in the USSR and had knowledge of the Agency's collection activities, covert actions, and counterintelligence operations aimed at this most important of all the West's Cold War targets. A senior CIA counterintelligence officer, Paul J. Redmond, who helped uncover Ames's treachery, told the Aspin–Brown Commission in 1995 that the traitor had essentially rui
ned the CIA's ability to spy against the Soviets during the final years of the Cold War.18

  Ames had engaged in espionage for the Soviets and then the Russians from 1984 to 1994, when his deceit was finally uncovered. Clues to his treasonous behavior had been there all along: questionable responses to the periodic polygraph tests given to all Agency employees (although he was given a pass by the examiners anyway); the absence of a mortgage on his $540,000 home in Arlington, Virginia; the purchase of a pricey new Jaguar automobile; expensive cosmetic dental work; a new wardrobe; increased foreign travel – all on a $70,000-a-year government salary. Yet Ames was hardly the only person at Langley to have a fancy house and car; the Agency has a number of well-to-do officers, individuals of independent wealth drawn through a sense of patriotism or a quest for adventure to a life of sleuthing on behalf of the United States.

  Ames, though, stood out in other ways as well. The “corridor file” (rumors at Agency Headquarters) about him had been negative long before his misdeeds were uncovered. He was widely known as a drunkard. This fact, plus the surplus of money in his pockets significantly over a bureaucrat's salary, raised questions among some colleagues. When they inquired about the new Jag and the fancy home, however, Ames brushed them off with stories of his Colombian wife (who was his partner in espionage), who, he claimed, had recently inherited money from her family. Moreover, since Ames's father had been a well-regarded DO officer for decades (which provided the son with a halo effect), and because drunkenness was hardly page-one news at Langley, his colleagues accepted the explanations and moved on.