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

by Tim Weiner

  Chapter Thirty-one

  “to change the concept of a ‘secret service’”: William Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978). My portrayal of this passage in the history of the CIA is influenced by interviews with Bill Colby conducted in person and by telephone between 1988 and the week before his death in 1996.

  the enemy had breached the CIA’s defenses: There were, we now know, some low-level penetrations of the CIA at the time. An analyst named Larry Wu-tai Chin had been spying for China for twenty years undetected. The best evidence we have today suggests that none of the moles were Soviet. But in Angleton’s view, absence of evidence was not evidence of absence.

  “the central intelligence agency—small ‘c,’ small ‘i,’ small ‘a’”: Schlesinger quoted in Douglas F. Garthoff, “Directors of Central Intelligence as Leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community, 1946–2005,” 2006, CIA/CSI.

  one of the most dangerous decisions a director of central intelligence had ever made: Schlesinger says today that he did not mean for people to take his order to tell all literally, and that it had never occurred to him that anyone would actually comply. But it is inconceivable that the officers of the CIA would ignore a legal order from a director.

  The CIA’s exceedingly vague charter: The legal basis for the agency to conduct covert action depended on lawful direction from the National Security Council, a clear understanding between the president and the director of central intelligence, and a modicum of oversight from Congress. That tripartite relationship was entirely dysfunctional in 1973. The powers of the national security adviser—a purely administrative position that had no basis in law or statute—were by then whatever he could get away with in secret.

  Colby locked them up: He did confide in the four members of Congress to whom he had to report, the chairmen of the Senate and House subcommittees who handled the CIA’s budget. He had nothing to fear from them. The Senate subcommittee had convened exactly once since the fall of 1970.

  “We did not cover ourselves with glory”: Colby statement, House Select Committee on Intelligence, August 4, 1975. The CIA had reported “no military or political indicators of Egyptian intentions or preparation to resume hostilities with Israel.”

  “But there will be no war”: Cited in Mary O. McCarthy, “The Mission to Warn: Disaster Looms,” Defense Intelligence Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1998. At the time of publication, McCarthy was senior director for intelligence programs on the National Security Council Staff

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Pappas had delivered $549,000 in cash to the 1968 Nixon campaign: The following statement was placed in the Congressional Record in 1993 by Representative Don Edwards, a member of the House Judiciary Committee that approved articles of impeachment against President Nixon: “The Greek dictatorship, through its intelligence agency, KYP, (which had been founded and subsequently subsidized by the CIA), transferred three cash payments totalling $549,000 to the Nixon campaign fund in 1968. The conduit was Thomas Pappas, a prominent Greek-American businessman with close links to the CIA, the colonels, and the Nixon campaign.”

  “I am aware of what you’re doing”: Nixon White House tapes, March 7, 1973, declassified and transcribed in 1998, National Archives. Nixon told his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, to make sure there would be no record of the Pappas visit. “I don’t want to have anything indicating that I was thanking him for raising money for the Watergate defendants,” he said. To this day, no one knows why the White House sent burglars to the Watergate. The team might well have been looking for proof that the chief of the Democratic National Committee, Larry O’Brien, had evidence about the Nixon-Pappas connection—which he did. Pappas was instrumental in the selection of Vice President Spiro Agnew as Nixon’s running mate in 1968, and he had personally contributed at least $100,000 to Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign. In exchange for the latter donation, Pappas wanted Ambassador Henry Tasca to remain in Greece. Tasca was perhaps the only American outside the inner Nixon circle who knew that Pappas had been the courier for Nixon campaign funds from the Greek junta. Pappas never was charged in the Watergate scandal: congressional investigations of the Greek connection were quashed on national-security grounds. He died at his Palm Beach, Florida, estate in 1988.

  “These colonels had been plotting for years and years”: Keeley oral history, FAOH. 330 seven successive station chiefs: They included Al Ulmer, John Richardson, and Tom Karamessines, chief of the clandestine service under Richard Helms, who first came to Athens in 1947. Throughout the 1950s, Allen Dulles personally tended to the king and queen of Greece and their palace guard while his station chiefs bought the services of Greek soldiers and spies. “We were running Greece,” said Herbert Daniel Brewster, an American diplomat who devoted his career to the country from the early 1950s onward. “It was full control.”

  “the Central Intelligence Agency”: Anschutz oral history, FAOH.

  “The only time I saw Helms really angry”: Lehman oral history interview,

  “Mr. Current Intelligence,” Studies in Intelligence, Summer 2000, CIA/CSI.

  “the CIA would explode in anger”: Blood oral history, FAOH.

  “The CIA station chief”: Kennedy oral history, FAOH.

  “a major asset in Athens”: Boyatt oral history, FAOH.

  “I went up to Athens”: Crawford oral history, FAOH. The Greek colonels had reasons for hating Archbishop Makarios. Crawford explained that Makarios had “aided a young man, a mainland Greek, who subsequently tried to assassinate the prime minister of Greece. Makarios had given him safe haven, the use of the Cyprus diplomatic pouch, and a fake passport to enable him to get back into Greece after a year of clandestine planning in Cyprus.”

  “the terrible price”: Kubisch oral history, FAOH.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “concerning the use of classified material”: Ford in National Security Council meeting minutes, October 7, 1974, GRFL.

  “We don’t have the tools we need”: Schlesinger in ibid.

  “everything the President knew”: Colby quoted in John L. Helgerson, Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952–1992, CIA/CSI.

  “It is inconceivable”: Angleton testimony, Church Committee hearings, September 23, 1975.

  “Ford asked me to come into the White House”: Silberman oral history, FAOH.

  “Mr. Helms may have committed perjury”: Helms had been torn between truth and secrecy. Testifying before Congress before his posting as the American ambassador to Iran in 1973, he had lied about what the CIA had and had not done to overthrow the elected government of Chile. During his four years as an ambassador, he had been ordered back to Washington continually by congressional committees, criminal investigators, and the high councils of the White House. Humiliated but defiant, Helms stood before a federal judge in Washington on November 4, 1977, and received a two-year suspended sentence and a $2,000 fine in lieu of an eight-count felony indictment. He accepted a misdemeanor charge of failing to testify fully to Congress—a white lie, a sin of omission. Helms had argued that he had sworn a higher oath as director to protect the nation’s secrets. The Carter administration had weighed the prosecution and decided to let it proceed. The court said the dictates of the Constitution and the laws of the United States were stronger than the power of secrecy.

  “the CIA would be destroyed”: Memorandum of conversation, January 3, 1975, GRFL.

  “Frankly, we are in a mess”: Memorandum of conversation, January 4, 1975, GRFL. Notes from this meeting were declassified in December 2002:

  Ford: Colby has gone to Silberman not only with his report but numerous other allegations.

  Rockefeller: At your request?

  Ford: Without my knowledge…[Dr. Kissinger described the “horrors” book.]

  Ford: We are concerned that the CIA would be destroyed…. And Helms thinks Colby shafted him; Helms made it clear if there were any dead cats to be thrown out he would throw some of his ow
n.

  Kissinger: And Colby has taken to Justice the question of possible perjury by Helms.

  Rockefeller: This raises real questions on his judgment.

  Ford: We debated this and decided we could not move him out now.

  The CIA “made a mistake”: Gerald R. Ford oral history, July 8, 2003, JFKL.

  “the investigation of the CIA”: Memorandum of conversation, February 21, 1975, GRFL.

  “Within the CIA there is bitter dissension”: Memorandum of conversation, March 28, 1975, GRFL.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  “Let me get a grasp on the situation”: Minutes of the Washington Special Actions Group, April 2, 1975, declassified September 7, 2004. Days after this conversation, Cambodia fell. The American ambassador, John Gunther Dean, and the CIA station chief, David Whipple, had a better grasp on the situation surrounding them than their colleagues in Saigon. “The CIA had a good idea of the makeup and leadership of the Khmer Rouge,” Dean recounted. “David Whipple…gave us documentation of some of the barbarous acts being committed by the Khmer Rouge before April 1975.” Dean oral history, FAOH.

  Polgar awoke to the sound of rockets: Polgar interview with author. When he took over in January 1972 from Ted Shackley, Polgar commanded 550 CIA officers, 200 of them covert operators. His instructions from Nixon and Kissinger remained constant after the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 were signed: “Continue the war by other means to preserve a non-communist Vietnam.” Polgar had witnessed firsthand some of the diplomacy for which Henry Kissinger had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The grand strategist had negotiated terms of a peace accord and a cease-fire with North Vietnam weeks before the 1972 American presidential election—without the approval of the president of South Vietnam, the corrupt Nguyen Van Thieu. In Saigon, at a dinner attended by Kissinger, the American ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, and Kissinger’s aide John Negroponte, Kissinger had personally instructed Polgar to “put pressure on Thieu” through CIA assets among the South Vietnamese military. Polgar replied that Kissinger’s order made no sense; that was not how things worked in Saigon anymore. It made even less sense after Kissinger leaked the story of his secret negotiations to a favorite reporter at Newsweek. The reporter filed his story by cable from Saigon, and South Vietnam’s intelligence service intercepted it and gave copies to both President Thieu and Tom Polgar. The station chief showed it to Kissinger, who replied: “This has the unpleasant smell of truth.”

  The CIA station’s budget stayed at an even $30 million a year as the American military presence dwindled in 1973 and 1974. Polgar ran intelligence-gathering operations, not paramilitary missions. CIA interrogators grilled captured communist troops and suspected spies. CIA analysts combed through piles of reports from the field. CIA branch chiefs in each of South Vietnam’s four military sectors coordinated hundreds of American and South Vietnamese officers. And the enemy marched on.

  The CIA kept trying to locate an enemy field headquarters—the Bamboo Pentagon was what the American military called it—but there was nothing out in the jungle but tents and tunnels and a determined foe. After the fall of Richard Nixon in August 1974, Congress revolted against the war and began cutting hundreds of millions of dollars out of the effort to keep the South Vietnamese military afloat. By March 1975, North Vietnamese troops were wiping out South Vietnamese divisions and advancing on Saigon. The failure to create a coherent plan for the evacuation of Saigon led to the death or the imprisonment of thousands of Vietnamese who had worked for the United States. Ambassador Martin returned to Washington and became a special assistant to Henry Kissinger.

  “imperative that the evacuation proceed without delay”: Arnold oral history, recorded by Gayle L. Morrison. Morrison, an ethnographer, spent nine years recording first-person eyewitness accounts of Hmong and Americans who remembered the fall of Long Tieng. Her extraordinary book is Sky Is Falling: An Oral History of the CIA’s Evacuation of the Hmong from Laos (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999). My reconstruction relies on her work, including her oral histories of General Aderholt and Captain Knotts.

  forced a political arrangement: Richard L. Holm, “No Drums, No Bugles: Recollections of a Case Officer in Laos, 1962–1965,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 47, No. 1, Spring 2003, CIA/CSI.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  “Bury Bush”…“a graveyard for politics”…“the total end of any political future”: George Bush, All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings (New York: Scribner, 1999), pp. 195–196, 239–240; Herbert S. Parmet, George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee (New York: Scribner, 1999), pp. 189–194.

  “This is the most interesting job I’ve ever had”: Bush, All the Best, p. 255.

  Bush ran headlong into Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld: Douglas F. Garthoff, “Directors of Central Intelligence as Leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community, 1946–2005,” 2006, CIA/CSI. 347 Rumsfeld was “paranoid”: Carver oral history interview, May 13, 1982, CIA/CSI.

  “a turbulent and troublesome period”: George Bush letter to the president, June 1, 1976, declassified August 9, 2001, CIA.

  “We had been forced out of Vietnam”: Frank G. Wisner, Jr., oral history, FAOH. He recounted at the outset, “I grew up in World War II and have vivid memories of a father going to war…. As a child I had met General Marshall, Allen Dulles, and had known many Secretaries of State and Defense in passing as a little boy…. I have very, very strong memories of the end of the war, the emergence of the post-War period, the onset of the Cold War itself, sharp reflections born of the time…. My father was for a number of years the head of the clandestine services of CIA. I remember the outbreak of the Korean War, its passage, the crisis in Washington during the McCarthy years, the emergence of NATO, and the Suez War. I was in England at school and felt almost as if I were on the battlefront…. When I arrived in Washington at the beginning of the Kennedy Administration to join the Foreign Service, I had in a very real sense already lived a life of foreign affairs.”

  Bush prepared to meet the governor of Georgia: The Bush-Carter briefings are detailed in CREST documents and in John L. Helgerson, Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952–1992, CIA/CSI.

  the Church Committee, the Senate panel that investigated the CIA: The committee went down blind alleys trying to investigate the “alleged assassination plots” without coming to grips with the fact that presidents had authorized them. Its lasting contributions were a highly competent history of the CIA and the transcripts of the depositions it took, most of which were not declassified until after the end of the cold war. The House committee dissolved into rancor; a final draft of its report was leaked but never formally published. The first real attempt at congressional oversight was not a success. “When we got through with it, what did it amount to but a media circus?” John Horton, a forty-year veteran of the CIA and a very open-minded man, said of the Church Committee in 1987. “Who did the CIA ever assassinate? Nobody, as far as I can tell. But you would have thought that was all we were up to.”

  “Bush wanted to be kept on”: Helgerson, Getting to Know the President. 351 he revealed a handful of ongoing operations: George Bush, “Subject: Meeting in Plains, Georgia, 19 November 1976,” CIA/FOIA. Bush told Carter about “warrantless electronic surveillance” of American citizens, the CIA’s contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the unresolved case of Nicholas Shadrin, a Soviet defector working for the CIA—or perhaps a double agent—who had been murdered in Vienna eleven months before. There was another aspect to the CIA’s operations in Vienna that Bush did not mention. After the December 1975 murder of Richard Welch in Athens, Bill Colby, in one of his last acts as director, had ordered that direct talks be held in secret between the CIA and Soviet intelligence officers in Vienna. He wanted to know if Moscow had had a hand in the killing, which would have been a violation of the unwritten rules of the cold war. He also wanted to talk for the sake of talking. The two sides had never had an official channel of commu
nication at the highest levels. Each found the conversation useful. The line stayed open for the rest of the cold war.

  “howling right-wingers”: Lehman oral history interview, “Mr. Current Intelligence,” Studies in Intelligence, Summer 2000, CIA/CSI.

  “Let her fly!!”: Bush notation, George Carver memo, May 26, 1976, CIA/ CREST.

  the agency put Team B’s findings to the test: Raymond L. Garthoff, “Estimating Soviet Military Intentions and Capabilities,” Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett (eds.), Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union, CIA/CSI.

  In retrospect, you see: Robert M. Hathaway and Russell Jack Smith, “Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence,” 1993, CIA/CSI, declassified February 2007.

  “the greatness that is CIA”: Bush address, CIA headquarters, January 19, 1977.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Carter…wound up signing almost as many covert-action orders as Nixon and Ford: While no precise number has been declassified, “the Carter administration…availed itself frequently of covert-action programs,” said Carter’s deputy director of central intelligence, Frank Carlucci. Carlucci oral history, FAOH.

  “I had a brother who had worked for CIA undercover”: Sorensen interview with author. His brother Thomas Sorensen worked for the CIA during the 1950s. Thomas served as the number-three man at the United States Information Agency under JFK and Edward R. Murrow; he was the USIA’s liaison with Richard Helms, merging news and propaganda, while Ted wrote speeches at the Kennedy White House.

  “President Carter called me in”: Turner interview with author.