During the Civil War, in the tradition of Washington, Abraham Lincoln (1861–1865) was also his own spymaster. Lincoln recruited and ran a spy by the name of William Lloyd, a publisher of rail and steamship guides who had access to every Confederate state. Lincoln tasked and paid Lloyd personally. Unfortunately for Lloyd, no records were publicly available to substantiate this. Lloyd sued for monies due him after Lincoln’s assassination, and helped to create law when the Supreme Court ruled against him in “Totten, Administrator, v. The United States” (1875), when it upheld a president’s absolute right to contract and dispatch secret agents. The court ruled that Lloyd would have to seek redress from his employer—who of course was dead!
Additionally, Lincoln employed the famous Alan Pinkerton to set up spy networks in the Confederacy. Lincoln also pioneered the use of overt press to gather and analyze intelligence. An avid reader of the southern press, Lincoln made many of his decisions on the basis of press reporting from southern newspapers and other periodicals.
Both presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, actively used intelligence during the Civil War. However, with the end of the war, most later presidents were relatively passive about the use of intelligence. Presidents neglected intelligence so much during this period that, during the Spanish-American War, when the United States military discovered they had no maps of Cuba, they were reduced to getting copies from the British.
The one exception was Teddy Roosevelt (1901-1909), who benefited from good intelligence during the Spanish-American War. Enamored with clandestine operations, Roosevelt actually instigated a covert action in Panama to acquire the Canal Zone. Roosevelt immodestly claimed all the credit, stating: “I do not think that any feat of quite such far-reaching importance has been to the credit of my country in recent years; and this I can say was my own work….”2
It wasn’t until World War I boiled over that presidents again generally became active users of their own intelligence services. Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921) was on the receiving end of an intelligence coup—the Zimmerman Telegram that drove the U.S. to abandon neutrality and enter the war. And, to Wilson goes the accolade of being the developer of independent analysis when he created an independent unit called the Inquiry. This was a group of businessmen and academics whose job was to help the president develop courses of action following the end of World War I. Indeed, it was the Inquiry that wrote most of Wilson’s Fourteen Points.
The other Roosevelt, Franklin (1933–1945), was president during the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history before 9/11, the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Although he was intrigued with intelligence, and also reportedly ran one or two agents of his own, Roosevelt liked the fractured nature of U.S. intelligence at the time—with the army competing with the navy, and the FBI competing with both. Roosevelt had a cozy, close relationship with British intelligence operating out of New York and liked the British patrician way of doing business. Although he finally agreed to the first national U.S. intelligence apparatus, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Roosevelt never supported closer overall coordination of a national U.S. intelligence effort.
During Harry Truman’s presidency (1945–1953), a more systematic use of intelligence finally began to take shape with the establishment of the first national intelligence service in history, the CIA, in 1947. When he assumed office, Truman was ill prepared to oversee the nation’s secret operations. Incredibly, when Truman was vice president, he was denied knowledge of the Manhattan Project—the development of the atomic bomb. Truman set about to ensure that no future president-elect would be taken by surprise by either foreign events or intelligence operations conducted on behalf of the current administration. Truman instituted a procedure that became tradition and offered all presidential candidates secret intelligence briefings even before the elections. That tradition endures today, although the frequency and depth of these briefings has varied widely. All presidents-elect, however, have received substantial, in-depth intelligence briefing before taking office.
President Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower (1953–1961) was the first recipient of these candidate briefings when he first ran for president in 1952. Ike knew the value of intelligence from his days as Supreme Commander during World War II. Ike further knew the value of technical intelligence and pushed technical collection to new heights during his two terms. The U-2 was developed and deployed with Ike’s backing. Ike is also known as the first president to publicly acknowledge spying on another country, the U.S.S.R., during the Cold War. This incident was when a U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia, which greatly embarrassed the administration when the pilot, Gary Francis Powers, was captured alive.
In fact, following Eisenhower, in several instances candidates have believed that pre-election briefings have influenced the presidential debates before the elections. Candidate Richard M. Nixon was persuaded that his opponent, John F. Kennedy, had been briefed on the planning for the Bay of Pigs and took advantage by attacking Nixon as being soft on Cuba. Historians remain divided as to whether or not Kennedy was briefed on the CIA’s Cuba operations. Regardless, Nixon never really forgave the CIA.
And, the 1960 election was the first where the vice-presidential candidates received at least rudimentary briefings. All vice-presidential candidates since then have also received briefings in various forms.
But John F. Kennedy (1961–1963) was himself surprised by some of the intelligence he did not receive in briefings from President Eisenhower and his staff. As the specter of Vietnam arose, Kennedy complained once in private, “Dammit, Ike never mentioned Vietnam. He talked about Laos and the ‘Secret War,’ but he didn’t say a word about Vietnam.” Kennedy had a fascination with intelligence, particularly human intelligence and covert action. Kennedy was the benefactor of two of the greatest spy operations in history. The first was Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the U.S.S.R., who spied for the United States and Great Britain and provided near-real-time intelligence to the president during the critical time of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Additionally, Kennedy benefited from the excellent photography of the U-2 during that same crisis. Perhaps no other president has faced such a crisis—near nuclear war—and saved his nation and perhaps the world due to human and technical intelligence.
President Lyndon Johnson (1963–1969) never liked or trusted the CIA or other U.S. intelligence organizations. Johnson considered intelligence analysts who took official positions to be unhelpful to his own domestic agenda, the Great Society. When I came into the CIA in 1967, Johnson was president, and we were engaged in the escalation of what was to become the Vietnam quagmire. In CIA headquarters, it was said there were three kinds of case officers: those who had been to Vietnam, those who were in Vietnam, and those who were going to Vietnam.
It is entirely possible that Johnson’s first experiences with security and intelligence—the tragic assassination of JFK—left him jaded about intelligence, analysis, and warnings. Johnson’s first question to his foreign policy team was to ask if the assassination could be part of a Soviet plan to strike, followed by a full-scale missile attack.
But a more likely reason for Johnson’s aversion to the Agency was that he reportedly held a grudge, believing the CIA had conspired to help Kennedy get the Democratic nomination at the 1960 convention. Further, Johnson felt the Kennedys—Jack and Bobby—had a mutual admiration with top levels of the CIA that he did not have. Johnson’s uneasiness extended to his immediate relationship with the CIA director he inherited, John McCone, with whom he was never comfortable. Given that, it is not difficult to understand Johnson’s ultimate rejection of any intelligence on Vietnam with which he disagreed. Further, as documented by Christopher Andrew in his excellent work, For the President’s Eyes Only, Johnson was really only interested in what the CIA could do in the field of covert action in North Vietnam.3
Johnson firmly believed that the increasing military losses absorbed by the North Vietnamese would ultimately lead them to conclude that they could
n’t win the war. When CIA analysis repeatedly stated that, in fact, the North Vietnamese would and could sustain such heavy losses, Johnson simply discarded the CIA analysis and relied even less on their product. In fact, during perhaps the defining moment of the Johnson administration, the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, Johnson showed no interest at all in CIA information about the incident.
History has proven that CIA assessments during the Vietnam War were accurate, and reflected the deepening quagmire in Southeast Asia. Interestingly, this was in opposition to Johnson’s inclination to believe information from his favorite—J. Edgar Hoover—and the reports of growing widespread domestic opposition to the war. Ultimately this led to Johnson’s decision in April 1965 to replace McCone with a Texas crony, Vice Admiral William Raborn. Bob Gates captures Johnson’s views about intelligence and the CIA with one of his most revealing quotes: “Let me tell you about these intelligence guys. When I was growing up in Texas, we had a cow named Bessie. I’d go out early and milk her. I’d get her in the stanchion, seat myself, and squeeze out a pail of fresh milk. One day I’d worked hard and gotten a full pail of milk, but I wasn’t paying attention, and old Bessie swung her shit-smeared tail through that bucket of milk. Now, you know, that’s what these intelligence guys do. You work hard and get a good program or policy going, and they swing a shit-smeared tail through it.”4
Johnson’s crony for DCI didn’t last long. In June 1966, Johnson surprised everyone, including Richard Helms, by announcing that he would be the new DCI.
History blames Johnson and his administration for the terrible events in the tragic attack on the U.S.S. Liberty. Although the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 ended in a sweeping Israeli victory, the attack on a U.S. naval vessel with the resultant death of 34 American sailors continues even to this day to taint the Johnson administration. And the continual denial of access to relevant files at the Johnson Library does nothing to alleviate this.
The final blow to support for the war in Vietnam struck on January 31, 1968, when Tet exploded. During the early hours of the traditional lunar holiday, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese regular forces attacked more than 100 cities in South Vietnam. This ranked with Pearl Harbor in the pantheon of intelligence failures, and ultimately led to Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election. On November 5, 1968, Richard Milhouse Nixon was elected President of the United States of America.
As an aside, during Johnson’s run for the office in 1964, his opponent, Barry Goldwater, in addition to receiving a crushing electoral defeat by Johnson, “set a precedent by declining to receive any intelligence briefings.”5
Interestingly, even though President Nixon (1969–1973) was peeved at the CIA because he believed that it provided information to Kennedy in the 1960 election, he did accept candidate briefings when he next ran in 1968. His opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, also received the briefings. And in another twist, two other presidential candidates, Governor George Wallace of Alabama and dark-horse candidate Lester Mattox of Georgia, received the briefings.6
After Richard Nixon arrived in the White House, he selected Henry Kissinger as his national security advisor. Together, they made perhaps one of the most experienced foreign policy teams in U.S. history. But ironically, although Nixon was no fan of the CIA, he was enamored of the Agency’s covert action capabilities and what they could do for his foreign policy, as was his predecessor.
If there was one thing that bound Nixon to his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, it was their mutual love of secrecy and foreign policy. And, although Nixon kept Richard Helms on as his DCI, he hedged his bets by moving his former military advisor Lieutenant General Robert E. Cushman in as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence.
Combined with this penchant for secrecy and action, Nixon dragged a reluctant CIA into expanding Operation Chaos, actually begun in 1967 by his predecessor. As with Johnson, Nixon was convinced that student strikes and riots, both domestic and foreign, were being fed by money from the international communist movement. He thus ordered the CIA and FBI to engage in illegal domestic surveillance on American campuses, activities for which the CIA later—and properly—was called to task. It’s important, however, to note that during the academic year 1969–1970, there were 174 bombing incidents on American campuses.7 This further fueled Nixon’s conviction that subversive elements were at work.
Nixon wanted the Vietnam War to end. He had acknowledged that, following the Tet Offensive, a military victory was no longer likely. In an effort to bring negotiations about, Nixon ordered the secret invasion of Cambodia’s Parrot’s Beak in April 1970. News of this immediately leaked and fueled additional protests on U.S. campuses, to include the tragedy at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when National Guardsmen shot into a crowd, killing four student demonstrators.
Nixon’s foreign-policy focus turned to Chile in October 1970, when the Marxist Salvador Allende was poised to become Chile’s democratically elected president. In response, Nixon ordered the CIA to take action, and ordered two simultaneous tracks of covert action: find some way to prevent Allende from being elected to office by the Chilean congress, and, more sinister, engineer a military coup. Incredibly, Nixon also ordered that the proposed military coup be kept secret from the State Department, the Pentagon, and even the U.S. Embassy in Santiago.
The attempted military coup resulted in disaster. Books have been written on this subject, but in short, even though the CIA tried to put together a coup, the CIA was unable to engineer it at such a late date. Allende was elected, and Nixon never forgave the CIA for its failure to stop Allende’s election.
Nixon made a fatal decision in his attempt to set up a covert action capability to operate right out of the White House. Given that one of their tasks was to identify leakers, the unit called itself “the Plumbers.” The team included two ex-CIA operatives, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. It was a farce, breaking into the office of a psychiatrist of an administration critic, Daniel Ellsberg, in hopes of getting damaging evidence. And later, this group was responsible for the Watergate episode that ultimately brought down Nixon. The Watergate burglaries—to tap the phones of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building—were almost comic in their ineptitude. The first attempt on May 26, 1972, was aborted. On May 27, a second attempt failed for lack of proper equipment. On May 28, the burglars were able to make entry and place the bugs, but several of the listening devices didn’t work. On the morning of June 17, an attempt to enter and fix the malfunctioning bugs ended in the burglars’ arrest and the beginning of the Watergate scandal. Incredibly, the scandal did not develop in time to become an issue in the 1972 presidential campaign, when Nixon swept to victory. But Nixon got his revenge on the CIA by firing DCI Richard Helms on November 20, 1972, and sending him off to be Ambassador to Iran. And, it was at this point that President Nixon was heard on tape to say, “What the hell do those clowns do out there in Langley?”
The election of 1972 also had its unique aspects. Nixon’s opponent, Governor George McGovern, was scheduled to receive intelligence briefings as the Democratic candidate. Unfortunately, a scandal over McGovern’s running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, resulted in a cancellation of the briefing, which subsequently never took place.8
Nixon began his second term with a great foreign policy success, the Paris Peace Accords, ending 10 years of American involvement in Vietnam. And the year began also with a new Director of Central Intelligence, James R. Schlesinger, who took the position in February 1973. Schlesinger was an arrogant, abrasive man, albeit one of many talents. A Washington insider, Schlesinger was a former deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission at the time of his selection as DCI.
Schlesinger’s stay as DCI lasted only five months, but, per instructions from the president, he wanted to shake up the CIA. In that he succeeded. Schlesinger forcibly fired and retired over 1,500 CIA employees, two-thirds from the elite Directorate of Operations, the
spy arm of the nation. Morale at the CIA fell to rock bottom. Overseas assignments were cancelled; many employees overseas received cables advising them to return home to be fired. In my first decade of espionage, this was the lowest point I had experienced. It was devastating, and we expected worse as rumors abounded that Nixon and Schlesinger had only begun.
In retrospect, we were lucky that Schlesinger really had no interest in remaining DCI after the cuts, and that Nixon became obsessed and involved with the problem of surviving Watergate. Nixon moved Schlesinger to Defense (as a reward?) and appointed William Colby, a career professional, as the next DCI in May 1973.
But the turmoil was only beginning. On October 10, 1973, Spiro Agnew resigned the vice-presidency, and Nixon appointed Gerald R. Ford. On August 8, 1974, Nixon announced his resignation, and Ford (1974–1977) became the first non-elected President of the United States.
Although Ford had been appointed and therefore had not received presidential candidate briefings, he had had access to intelligence information during his time on the House Appropriations Committee from 1957 to 1965. This made for a smooth transition when he did begin getting regular CIA briefings.
But in addition to the task of restoring confidence in the presidency, Ford faced the task of restoring confidence in the CIA as well. And, he tackled both. But in the midst of his efforts, working with DCI Colby, Congress decided to begin its own investigations of American intelligence. To counter this, President Ford set up his own inquiry and established the Rockefeller Commission to look into the alleged misdeeds of the CIA in January 1975. Not to be out-maneuvered, Congress countered with the Senate establishing the Senate Select Committee (the Church Committee), and the House, not to be outdone, fielding the Pike Committee, both with the mission of probing the activities of the CIA.
A Spy's Journey Page 24
