Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  The junta had attacked. Boyatt rushed to the State Department, where a communications officer laid two pieces of paper in front of him. One was the CIA’s intelligence brief for President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger: “We have been assured by General Ioannidis that Greece will not move its forces on Cyprus.” The other was a cable from the American embassy in Cyprus: “The Presidential Palace is in flames. The Cypriot force has been decimated.”

  From Ankara came a flash that the Turkish forces had mobilized. Two NATO armies, the Greeks and the Turks, both trained and armed by the United States, were about to go to war with American weapons. The Turks hit the beach in northern Cyprus and cut the island in half with American tanks and artillery. There was a great slaughter of Greek Cypriots in the Turkish sector and a great slaughter of Turkish Cypriots in the Greek sector of the island. All through July, the CIA reported that the Greek army and the Greek people were solidly in support of General Ioannides. After the battle for Cyprus was joined, the Greek junta fell.

  The CIA’s failure to warn Washington about the war was an unusual case. There had been many such failures in the agency’s annals, from the Korean War onward. In 1974 alone, a leftist military coup in Portugal and a nuclear test in India had come as complete surprises. But this was different: the CIA was in bed with the military men against whom it was supposed to warn.

  “There we were,” Boyatt said years later, “sitting there with the entire intelligence establishment of the United States in all of its majesty having been conned by a piss-ant Greek brigadier general.”

  “THE TERRIBLE PRICE”

  On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned. The final blow was his admission that he had ordered the CIA to obstruct justice in the name of national security.

  The next day, Secretary of State Kissinger read an extraordinary message from Tom Boyatt. It said the CIA had been lying about what it had been doing in Athens, deliberately misleading the American government—and those lies had helped start the war consuming Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus, a war in which thousands died.

  The next week, gunfire broke out around the American embassy in Cyprus, and Ambassador Rodger P. Davies was killed by a bullet that tore his heart out. In Athens, hundreds of thousands of people marched on the American embassy; demonstrators tried to set the building on fire. The newly arrived ambassador there was Jack Kubisch, a veteran diplomat of broad experience, personally selected by Kissinger on the day that Nixon resigned.

  He requested a new station chief, and the CIA sent Richard Welch, who had learned his Greek at Harvard and had served as chief in Peru and Guatemala. Welch took up residence in the mansion where every one of his predecessors had lived. The address was widely known. “It was a very serious problem,” Ambassador Kubisch said. “I had made arrangements for him to go into a different residence and to live in a different part of town, to try and help conceal who he was and to give him some cover.” Given the anti-American fervor in Athens, that seemed prudent. But “neither Welch nor his wife seemed to be at all concerned about this,” he said. “They just didn’t think that in Athens there was any real severe threat to them.”

  Welch and his wife went to a Christmas party at the ambassador’s residence, just a few blocks from the CIA’s mansion in the hills. When they returned home, a small car with four people in it was waiting in the driveway. Three of them forced the station chief out of his car. “They fired three slugs from a .45 into his chest and killed him,” Ambassador Kubisch said. “They got into their car and sped off.” It was the first time in the history of the CIA that a station chief had been assassinated. But it was part of a pattern of the past.

  Ambassador Kubisch said that he had seen in Athens, for the first time in his life, “the terrible price the U.S. Government must pay when it associates itself so intimately…with a repressive regime.” Part of the cost was the consequence of letting the CIA shape the foreign policy of the United States.

  Photo Insert

  The Directors of Central Intelligence

  1946–2005

  The spirit of Wild Bill Donovan, the American spymaster of World War II, drove many future CIA officers who served under him, among them William Casey, director of central intelligence from 1981 to 1987. Above: Casey speaks at an OSS reunion, Donovan’s image above him.

  Left: President Truman pins a medal on the first director, Rear Admiral Sidney Souers. Right: General Hoyt Vandenberg, the second director, testifies before Congress.

  General Walter Bedell Smith, director from 1950 to 1953, was the first real leader of the CIA. Left: With Ike on V-E Day; Right: with Truman in the White House.

  Left: In an October 1950 photo taken at CIA headquarters, Bedell Smith, left, takes command from the ineffectual Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, in light suit. Right: A worried Frank Wisner, who ran the CIA’s covert operations from 1948 until his mental breakdown in 1958, stares into space.

  Left: Allen Dulles at his headquarters office in 1954. Right: JFK replaced Dulles with John McCone after the Bay of Pigs.

  Left: McCone became close to Attorney General Robert Kennedy who played a central role in covert operations. Right: President Johnson rejected McCone and hired the hapless Admiral Red Raborn, at the LBJ Ranch in April 1965.

  Richard Helms, director from 1966 to 1973, sought and won respect from President Johnson. Above: The week before his appointment as deputy director in 1965, Helms gets to know the president.

  In 1968, a confident Helms briefs LBJ and Secretary of State Dean Rusk at the Tuesday lunch—the best table in Washington.

  Left: President Nixon presses the flesh at CIA headquarters in March 1969. Nixon distrusted the agency and scorned its work. Right: George H. W. Bush and President Gerald R. Ford discussing evacuating Americans from Beirut with L. Dean Brown, special envoy to Lebanon, June 17, 1976.

  Saigon is falling as director Bill Colby, far left, briefs President Ford in April 1975. Flanking Ford are Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and, far right, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger.

  In November 1979, Director Stansfield Turner brings up the rear as President Carter calls his top military and diplomatic advisers to Camp David to assess the plight of the American hostages in Iran.

  In June 1985, President Reagan and his national security team in the White House Situation Room during the hijacking of a TWA flight bound for Beirut, a hostage drama that ended with a secret deal; Bill Casey is at far right.

  The end of the cold war created a revolving door at the top of the CIA—five directors in six years. The constant changes coincided with an exodus of expertise among covert operators and analysts. Left to Right: William Webster; Robert Gates, the last career CIA officer to lead the agency; and Jim Woolsey.

  John Deutch.

  George Tenet, with a wheelchair-bound President Clinton, tried desperately to rebuild the CIA for seven years.

  George Tenet at the White House with President Bush and Vice President Cheney as the war on Iraq begins in March 2003. Tenet confidently stood by the CIA in saying that Saddam Hussein’s arsenal bristled with weapons of mass destruction.

  His successor, Porter Goss, with Bush at CIA headquarters in March 2005, proved to be the last director of central intelligence.

  As its sixtieth year approached, the CIA ceased to be first among equals in American intelligence. In March 2006, General Mike Hayden was sworn in as CIA director at headquarters. The new boss, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, applauded as Wild Bill Donovan’s statue stood watch.

  33. “THE CIA WOULD

  BE DESTROYED”

  “Let me start by mentioning a problem we have concerning the use of classified material,” President Gerald R. Ford said as he opened one of his first National Security Council meetings in the White House Cabinet Room on October 7, 1974.

  The survivors of Watergate—Secretary of State Kissinger, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Walters, and the ambitious and influential Whit
e House staffer Donald Rumsfeld—were enraged by the latest leak. The United States was preparing to ship billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel and Egypt. The newspapers had printed the Israeli shopping list and the American response.

  “This is intolerable,” Ford said. “I have discussed several options for how to deal with it with Don Rumsfeld.” The president wanted a plan within forty-eight hours on how to stop the press from printing what it knew. “We don’t have the tools we need,” Schlesinger warned him. “We need an Official Secrets Act,” he said, but “the present climate is bad for this sort of thing.”

  The power of secrecy had been undone by the lies of presidents, told in the name of national security of the United States. The U-2 was a weather plane. America would not invade Cuba. Our ships were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Vietnam War was a just cause. The fall of Richard Nixon showed that these noble lies would no longer serve in a democracy.

  Bill Colby leaped at the chance to renew the CIA’s standing with the White House, for he knew that the assault on secrecy threatened the agency’s survival. He had cultivated Ford from the moment he became vice president, delivering a copy of the president’s daily brief by messenger, and keeping him posted on the CIA’s secret $400 million project to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean (the salvage operation failed when the sub broke in two). He wanted Ford to know “everything the President knew,” he said. “We didn’t want another situation like when Truman was unaware of the Manhattan Project.”

  But President Ford never telephoned him or sought his private counsel. Ford restored the National Security Council as it was under Eisenhower, and Colby attended, but he was never admitted to the Oval Office alone. Colby tried to become a player on the great issues of the day, but he remained an outsider. With Kissinger and Haig as gatekeepers and guardians, Colby never penetrated the inner circle at the Ford White House. And whatever chance he might have had to repair the CIA’s reputation died in December 1974.

  A New York Times reporter, Seymour Hersh, had uncovered the secret of the agency’s spying on Americans. He had gotten the gist of the story from months of reporting, and on Friday, December 20, 1974, he received a long-sought interview with Colby at headquarters. Colby, who secretly taped the conversation, tried to convince Hersh that the illegal surveillance was of no great importance, a small affair, best left unspoken. “I think family skeletons are best left where they are—in the closet,” he said to Hersh. But, he conceded, it had happened. Hersh wrote all night and into Saturday morning.

  The story ran December 22, 1974, on page one of the Sunday paper. The banner headline read: HUGE C.I.A. OPERATION REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTI-WAR FORCES.

  Colby tried to protect the agency by laying the issue of illegal domestic surveillance at the doorstep of Jim Angleton, who had been opening first-class mail in partnership with the FBI for twenty years. He called Angleton up to the seventh floor and fired him. Out in the cold, Angleton spent the rest of his life spinning myths about his work. He summed it up when he was asked to explain why the CIA had not fulfilled an order from the White House to destroy the agency’s stockpile of poisons. “It is inconceivable,” he said, “that a secret arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.”

  “DEAD CATS WILL COME OUT”

  On Christmas Eve, Colby sent a long note to Kissinger summarizing the secrets compiled at Schlesinger’s command. In the wake of Watergate, their release could wreck the agency. Kissinger boiled them down in a five-page, single-spaced memo to President Ford on Christmas Day. It took Congress a year of investigation, all of 1975, to dig out some of the facts in this memo.

  Kissinger informed the president that the CIA had indeed spied on the left, wiretapped newspaper reporters and placed them under surveillance, conducted illegal searches, and opened uncounted sacks of mail. But there was much more, and far worse. Kissinger did not dare put in writing what he had learned from what he called “the horrors book.” Some of the CIA’s actions “clearly were illegal,” he warned Ford. Others “raise profound moral questions.” Though he had served a decade on the small CIA subcommittee in the House of Representatives, President Ford had never heard a whisper of these secrets—domestic spying, mind control, assassination attempts. The conspiracies to commit murder had started in the White House under Eisenhower, the most revered Republican president of the twentieth century.

  Then on Friday, January 3, 1975, Ford received another bulletin, this one from the acting attorney general of the United States, Laurence Silberman.

  Silberman learned that day about the thick file that held the secrets of the CIA’s wrongdoing. It lay in Colby’s office safe, and Silberman surmised that it held evidence of federal crimes. The nation’s highest law enforcement officer mousetrapped the director of central intelligence. He would have to hand over the files, or he might face a charge of obstruction of justice. It was no longer a question of whether Colby wanted to spill the secrets. It was a question of going to prison to protect them.

  Silberman—later in life a federal appeals court judge and the leader of a devastating investigation of the CIA in 2005—came perilously close to becoming the director of central intelligence himself at this dangerous moment. “Ford asked me to come into the White House to run intelligence, but I declined,” Silberman said in an oral history. “I was seriously considered at that point to be CIA director. I did not wish to do that for a whole host of reasons.” He knew that the agency was about to face a howling storm.

  In his January 3 memo to the president, Silberman raised two issues. One: “Plans to assassinate certain foreign leaders—which, to say the least, present unique questions.” Two: “Mr. Helms may have committed perjury during the confirmation hearings on his appointment as Ambassador to Iran.” Helms had been asked, under oath, about the overthrow of President Allende of Chile. Did the CIA have anything to do with that? No, sir, Helms had answered. Sworn to secrecy but sworn to tell the truth, Helms eventually had to stand before a federal judge and face a charge of lying—a misdeameanor count of failing to tell Congress the whole truth.

  On the evening of January 3, Ford told Kissinger, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and Donald Rumsfeld that “the CIA would be destroyed” if the secrets leaked. At noon on Saturday, January 4, Helms came to the Oval Office. “Frankly, we are in a mess,” Ford told him. The president said that Rockefeller would run a commission to investigate the domestic activities of the CIA, but only the domestic activities. Ford hoped it could hew to that narrow charter. “It would be tragic if it went beyond it,” he told Helms. “It would be a shame if the public uproar forced us to go beyond and to damage the integrity of the CIA. I automatically assume what you did was right, unless it’s proven otherwise.”

  Helms saw what lay ahead.

  “A lot of dead cats will come out,” he warned the president. “I don’t know everything which went on in the Agency. Maybe no one does. But I know enough to say that if the dead cats come out, I will participate.”

  Helms tossed one over the White House fence that day, telling Kissinger that Bobby Kennedy had personally managed the assassination plots against Castro. Kissinger passed the news to the president. The horror deepened. Ford had first come to national prominence through his service on the Warren Commission. Now he understood that there were aspects to the Kennedy assassination he had never known, and the missing pieces of the puzzle haunted him. Near the end of his life, he called the agency’s withholding of evidence from the Warren Commission “unconscionable.” The CIA “made a mistake in not giving us all of the data they had available,” Ford said. “Their judgment was not good in not giving us the full story.”

  The White House now faced eight separate congressional investigations and hearings on the CIA. Rumsfeld explained how the White House was going to head them all off at the pass with the Rockefeller Commission, whose members would be “Republican and right.” One was already listed in his fil
es: “Ronald Reagan, political commentator, former President of the Screen Actors’ Guild, and former Governor of California.”

  “What should the final report be?” the president asked. All present agreed in principle that damage control was of the utmost importance. “Colby must be brought under control,” Kissinger said. If he did not stay silent, “this stuff will be all over town soon.”

  On January 16, 1975, President Ford hosted a luncheon at the White House for senior editors and the publisher of The New York Times. The president said that it was decidedly not in the national interest to discuss the CIA’s past. He said the reputation of every president since Harry Truman could be ruined if the deepest secrets spilled. Like what? an editor asked. Like assassinations! Ford said. Hard to say which was stranger—what the president had said, or that the editors managed to keep the statement off the record.

  The new Congress, elected three months after Nixon’s resignation, was the most liberal in memory. “The question is how to plan to meet the investigation of the CIA,” President Ford told Rumsfeld on February 21; Rumsfeld pledged to mount “a damage-limiting operation for the President.” He took charge of determining how many—if any—of the CIA’s secrets Ford and Rockefeller would share with Capitol Hill.