Executive Secrets
Page 19
LBJ then asked Bundy to review the program, and he did so, transmitting his results to the president on August 4, 1965 (interestingly, the date of the alleged second attack on American naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin). In a highly classified memo to the president, Bundy wrote:
SUBJECT: Italian Covert Political Assistance
Some weeks ago you asked me to review this problem and bring you up to date on it more specifically. I have now done so, and the situation is as follows:
Over the years the U.S. has assisted the democratic Italian political parties and trade unions at a very high rate. Over the period 1955–1965, the total amount of assistance is just under [still classified]. In recent years we have been cutting this assistance back, primarily because the professionals closely related to the operation have concluded that we have not been getting our full money’s worth and what the Italian political parties need is not so much U.S. money as energetic administrative leadership. President Kennedy had a personal feeling that political subsidies at this level were excessive, and they were scaled down.
In the last two or three years, assistance has been running at a rate of about [still classified], except in the election year of 1963. The recommendation for next year runs to a total of [still classified]. The interdepartmental review committee for covert operations—Vance, Thompson, Raborn and myself—has approved this recommendation subject to your concurrence.
Meanwhile, by separate and somewhat unusual channels, [still classified] have let us know that they would like a lot more money. They have given no practical justification, and indeed have been at pains to suggest that our orthodox channels are stuffy and uncooperative. I have had a long interview with the [still classified] man most familiar with this subject (he was in Rome for 8 years), and he persuades me that this end run is as unjustified in fact as it appears to be on the surface. Having begun with a sympathetic view that money might beat the Communists, I have been entirely converted by his detailed account of the efforts we have made to get the Italian parties to do better with the money we have already given them.
In this situation, I believe that we should approve the recommended budget for this year and go back to [still classified] by appropriate quiet channels to say that we cannot do more unless and until there is evidence that additional money is what is really needed, and that such money can be used really effectively. This would put the responsibility with them, where it belongs, while leaving us free to do more if and when a really good opportunity presents itself. It remains true that the anti-Communist battle in Italy is one of politics and resources; but simple hand-outs and intelligently applied resources are two entirely different things. McG. B.
The program carried on into FY 1966 and when it was being considered for FY 1967, the American ambassador to Rome wrote a confidential cablegram to Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson on September 12, 1966:
SUBJECT: 303 Committee Consideration of the Italian Covert Action Program
I want to elaborate further on our discussion on Tuesday about the Italian covert program. The coming months may represent a critical period for political stability in Italy. Decisive steps to reunify the Socialist and Social Democratic parties are anticipated this fall. This prospect, in conjunction with the strong rivalries within the Christian Democratic party, could put new strains on Moro’s center-left coalition. An additional unsettling factor is the approaching general elections. They must take place not later than April 1968.
Since my assignment to Rome I have consistently recommended the gradual reduction of covert activities in Italy. The record in fact shows sharp year-to-year cuts in expenditures. The level of funds has dropped from [still classified] in FY 1964 to a recommended [still classified] in FY 1967. The latter figure represents a cut of 35% from FY 1966. It is also significant that in recent years we have progressively discontinued direct subsidies to political parties—the last was the small program in FY 1966 for [still classified]. All other support to political parties has been contingent on approved action programs in support of U.S. policy objectives, in the absence of which no funds have been made available. The [still classified] is now on notice that any support for FY 1967 would be on such a basis. Accordingly the proposed program contains no unstructured contributions to any political party’s finances.
In the circumstances, I recommend that the program proposed for FY 1967 be approved. An abrupt discontinuance of the program at this time would be interpreted by some of our friends, on whom we must depend for achievement of our policy objectives in Italy, as a change in our long-standing support for them and for what they are attempting to achieve. I am particularly concerned that we avoid any action which might disturb the Moro-Nenni-Saragat leadership, which is relatively strong by post-war Italian standards and which seems to offer the best chance of strengthening political stability and democracy in Italy. At the same time, I feel that we should continue the gradual reduction of the covert program in Italy with the general objective of a final phase-out in connection with the 1968 elections.
The program was to be ended, at last, before the beginning of FY 1968. A National Security Council position paper, finalized on August 4, 1967, concluded that:
The point has been approaching rapidly in recent years where the continuation of a large-scale covert action program in Italy would no longer have pertinence. Currently, socialist unification has been achieved and the Christian Democratic Party (DC) . . . despite continuing financial problems, is at least for the time being well united behind its incumbent political secretary. Domestic funds are available if . . . political groups make sufficient efforts to tap them. In addition, the amount of covert assistance the United States is prepared to offer in light of other more pressing commitments no longer equates with the amounts needed to have other than peripheral impact on the Italian political scene.
And so at the August 22, 1967, meeting of the 303 Committee it was recorded: “Italy—Covert Action Program for FY-1968: The wind-down of covert political support to Italian parties ahead of schedule was enthusiastically welcomed by the committee.”
Although the Italian program was winding down, it is known, thanks mostly to the Church Committee, that in April 1964 Johnson approved $3 million to bolster Eduardo Frei in the Chilean elections, and, later, a modest $160,000 to Frei’s Christian Democrat Party (PDC) as aid to peasants and the poverty-stricken to build goodwill for the PDC. That September, Frei was elected with 55.7 percent of the vote. In 1964 the 303 Committee authorized another $175,000 to support favored candidates for the Chilean legislature, with the PDC winning an absolute majority in the lower house and control of the upper house. This election was an example of the limits of plausibility deniability, with those affected—in this case the losing Socialist party under Salvador Allende—strongly suspecting (if not “knowing,” in their heart of hearts) that the United States influenced their elections despite the absence of any probative evidence of such. In the final years of LBJ’s administration, the U.S. government retained its support of both the Chilean Radical Party and the PDC, including the establishment of a “propaganda mechanism for making placements in radio and news media.”25 More, and worse, was to come under Nixon.
TEN
Richard M. Nixon
and Gerald R. Ford
It is tragic that it was necessary to establish this committee to inquire into the activities of agencies on which we depend so heavily for our security. But it would be even more tragic if the results of our investigation were now to be ignored.1
Congressman Robert Kasten (R-Wisconsin),
Pike Committee Member
NIXON
Richard M. Nixon had acquired a broad understanding of and appreciation for covert action while serving as Eisenhower’s vice president, and as president he held no reservations about its use. Indeed, one can reasonably speculate that covert action greatly appealed to the secretive, suspicious chief executive who kept tight control of all aspects of American foreign policy, and to h
is equally secretive national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, as well. The principal proof of Nixon’s personal involvement in covert action lies within four thousand hours of White House tapes showing that he “made excessive and sometimes self-defeating use of covert operations.”2
Nixon retained the 303 Committee as a covert action oversight mechanism until its exposure in the press in 1969. As a consequence of that publicity, on February 17, 1970, Nixon signed Responsibility for the Conduct, Supervision, and Coordination of Covert Action Operations, National Security Decision Memorandum-40, rescinding and replacing NSC-5412/2 and concurrently superceding the 303 Committee.3 NSDM-40 substituted the anti-Soviet language of its predecessor memos with a more general global perspective, stating that covert action programs were to be employed as supporting adjuncts to established overt foreign policy programs—proving collaterally that Nixon fully understood the role and function of covert action in the execution of foreign policy. The directive mandated that the DCI “obtain policy approval for all major and/or politically sensitive covert action operations” and required an annual review of programs already authorized. And, as with the earlier memos, NSDM-40 directed that a committee be established with the specific responsibility to review all major and/or politically sensitive covert action programs. The new group naturally assumed the title “40 Committee,” although in-house it often continued to be referred to as the “Special Group.”4
Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, chaired the committee and continued to do so after he was elevated to secretary of state while retaining the security advisor position. At that point, Kissinger was at once secretary of state, a full member of the National Security Council, the president’s most important foreign policy advisor, and chairman of the committee that oversaw the administration’s most secret intelligence activities—a combination that, it may fairly be claimed, “corrupted the foreign policy decision-making process.”5
Membership in the 40 Committee was, according to Kissinger, composed of the attorney general, the deputy secretaries of state and defense, the DCI, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Kissinger chairing the committee and assisted by a staff of one, an officer seconded from the CIA. As with the 303 Committee, this group was directed to “supervise” covert intelligence activities, although in reality the 40 Committee only authorized and funded covert action programs, with the president subverting his own White House process. It was Nixon’s intent that Kissinger would manage the intelligence end of White House policy formulation and that the NSC under Kissinger would control the intelligence community. The reality, however, was that the committee was far more form than function. Also, Nixon distrusted the Agency at least as much as he did the State Department, in no small part because he believed that the Agency as an entity had somehow involved itself in the 1960 elections, contributing to his loss to John Kennedy. And Kissinger personally distrusted the DCI, Richard Helms, suspecting him of being part of a “liberal Georgetown set” that was anti-Nixon.6
It is doubtful that the inclusion in the 40 Committee membership of Attorney General John Mitchell, a longtime Nixon friend, former law partner, and political advisor, was to ensure that constitutional, legal, or procedural requirements were applied. In fact, one searches in vain for signs of any substantive role for Mitchell. As if to say that there was nothing unusual about the attorney general meeting with the president’s foreign policy team, Kissinger notes that Robert Kennedy as attorney general sat with similar groups in his brother’s administration.7
But Kissinger is too kind to John Mitchell. First, Robert Kennedy was his brother’s closet policy advisor on every issue across the board, and would have been so regardless of his position in or out of the cabinet. Second, in the 1960s and 1970s the Justice Department was not extensively involved in foreign policy issues, as it today. Third, in Nixon’s time congressional oversight of and legislative requirements for covert action did not exist to any significant extent. Indeed, this extensive oversight is one primary reason why, since the 1980s, the attorney general has been a full member of similar panels in every administration.
Unlike the closeness between the two Kennedys, the relationship between Nixon and Mitchell was not such that Nixon would have included the attorney general to play a substantive role in policy formation. Nixon’s documented distrust of Kissinger (which included tapping Kissinger’s phones), the State Department, the CIA, and just about everyone else working in the White House leads to the conclusion that Nixon placed Mitchell at the table simply to have a confidant reporting back on the actions of the president’s own staff.8
Through Kissinger, Nixon established several other groups to review various clandestine or sensitive activities and programs. The Washington Special Action Group (WSAG) served as a planning and crisis management organ, and the Senior Review Group (SRG) provided the final scrub of sensitive programs and plans. The composition of these groups was the same as the 40 Committee, save that the attorney general did not sit with either and that the SRG had no staff members.9
In concept the 40 Committee was to oversee all covert action programs that were either sufficiently large or politically sensitive to merit White House consideration. Most of the covert actions proposed to the committee were from the CIA or the ambassador in the country at issue; only in the “rarest of cases” did the White House propose a program.10 But Nixon and Kissinger ignored the 40 Committee and kept control, and even knowledge, of the majority of covert action programs to themselves. Virtually all major and many minor programs, perhaps as much as 75 percent, were never brought to the committee’s attention. As a Senate investigation later found, “Criteria by which covert operations [were] brought before the 40 Committee appear to be fuzzy . . . the real degree of accountability for covert actions remains to be determined.” Moreover, once a program was approved by the committee there was no provision for any review of the program, either on a one-time or a continuing basis. This no doubt suited Nixon and Kissinger perfectly, as it allowed them to exercise complete control without discussion or dissention.11
There were few actual meetings of the 40 Committee, with Kissinger often conducting the committee’s business individually by telephone, thereby eliminating a written record. One-on-one conversations also precluded the animated give-and-take of debate which occurs in multiparty meetings, as well as any opportunity for genuine dissent. In one thirty-two-month period, over three dozen “sensitive” covert action operations were approved, even though the committee held not a single meeting on any of these operations. With respect to Chile, both the CIA and the State Department were, officially and on the record, “cool” to the idea of interfering in the Chilean elections; but realistically the feelings are more accurately described as hostile—which only gave Nixon and Kissinger more reason to restrict control and knowledge of the program to themselves alone. Out of literally dozens of covert action operations in Chile from 1963 to 1974, only eight were briefed, in whole or in part, to Congress.12
COVERT ACTION PROGRAMS UNDER NIXON
Informed by U.S. intelligence in 1969 that the Soviets were secretly attempting to influence the Chilean elections, Nixon believed that similar activities were appropriate to forestall a government with potentially pro-Communist sympathies. In this, he was of course only continuing and expanding a covert action program already in existence. While the objectives of Kennedy and Johnson had been only to support the Christian Democratic Party and, to a lesser degree, the Radical Party, Nixon intended to do much more: specifically, he sought to keep the Socialists out of power. In this program, however, the president was directly contradicting his own officially announced U.S. policy, which was to accept whatever government the people of Chile chose, engage in fully reciprocal relations, and allow the Chilean “problems to be settled by Chile.”13
By late June 1969, the 40 Committee had approved almost $500,000 in propaganda and political action activities, first to prevent an Allende win in the election, and,
when that failed, to undermine or reverse the Chilean elections.14 The committee also included in its plans an economic destabilization program to “disrupt the Chilean economy,” believing that the civil unrest created by the worsening economy would propel the Chilean military to remove Allende from office. Thus it was that the Chilean program ultimately became part of a complex diplomatic and covert pas de deux to bring about a military coup against the democratically elected president. This program, which would haunt the president, Kissinger, one DCI, and the Agency in future years, was personally ordered by the president despite serious resistance to it by Agency officers. Agency antagonism was no surprise even at the time, as Nixon’s penchant for covert action operations far exceeded that of his DCI, Richard Helms, and many within the Agency’s Directorate of Operations.15
Moreover, in keeping with Nixon and Kissinger’s predilection for ordering covert activities without the knowledge of the 40 Committee, information on clandestine operations in support of a Chilean military coup against Allende was concealed from the committee, whose knowledge was limited only to the propaganda and political action programs intended to weaken support for Allende and obstruct Communist influence. While the Nixon administration acknowledged that Allende was openly and fairly elected through acceptable democratic processes, as well as understanding that he was neither a Communist nor under the influence of Communists, the administration was determined to oust him nonetheless. As justification, albeit specious, Kissinger claimed that there was “no reason why the United States should stand aside and let the country go Communist through the irresponsibility of its own people.”16