Secret Intelligence; No. 103; Learning to say no

Secret Intelligence is made possible by public television stations and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding has been provided by United Airlines, rededicated to giving you the service you deserve. By the early 60s, the U.S. presidency had at its command, secret and powerful agencies of government. The CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency. But in service to the White House, these same secret agencies were engaged in activities that were sometimes illegal and sometimes directed against innocent American citizens. As we shall see, these activities, many of them undertaken for years, were uncovered following the national traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. A time when America's secret agencies found themselves caught in a bitter power struggle between Congress and the White House.

To survive, the agents of secret intelligence, so long the private arm of the president, would learn to say no. In 1961, few Americans suspected that a U.S. espionage empire existed. That began the change on this desolate beach. In April of that year, a CIA-trained brigade of Cuban exiles, seeking to overthrow the communist government of Fidel Castro, met disaster at Cuba's Bay of Pigs. After 100 of America's proxy soldiers were killed, more than 1,000 were captives of Castro.

It was a humiliating defeat for the CIA. This sounds like that I blame President Kennedy for the failure of the Bay of Pigs. Indeed I do. The guilty I think were those of us at CIA who didn't at some point say, hey, wait a minute. You're expecting this secret operation to perform what armies are supposed to perform. Somewhere along the line we should have had the wisdom as they know. But the CIA had not yet learned that lesson, neither had America's new president. John Kennedy had come to office, reluctant to approve the Bay of Pigs invasion. But only weeks after the fiasco, he was urging a new campaign against communism.

We did not fail to grasp the new concepts, the new tools, the new sense of urgency we will need to combat it, whether in Cuba or South Vietnam. These new concepts and tools included covert action. Secretly, he placed his brother Robert America's attorney general in charge of a new CIA campaign against Castro. Bobby Kennedy was very hands on in this period. You're absolutely correct. And after the Bay of Pigs era, he wanted to do something about that. And he was very forthright about it and very earnest about it. There's any question of it out. This is a legacy of Kennedy's demand for covert action against Cuba, a present day military training site on the outskirts of Miami. The CIA has no known connection to these men, but the Cuban Americans who trained here

maintain the Kennedy's obsession of one day toppling Cuba's Communist regime. In 1962, some of these men took part in Operation Mungus, a CIA program to remove Castro from power. Mungus was an operation that Bobby Kennedy proclaimed the top priority of the U.S. government. At the time, it was the CIA's largest covert mission anywhere in the world. And it was centered in the one place the CIA was not authorized to act inside the United States. Speaking as if it were on foreign soil, Mungus infiltrated South Florida neighborhoods. Supporting Operation Mungus were dozens of front organizations, safe houses, and Cuban

agents. One of them was Eugenio Martinez. Today, he sells cars in the Miami area. In the early 60s, he ran this CIA boat from South Florida waterways to Cuba. In the CIA, I acknowledge 350 foreign mission carry-on by me. We attack military bases of the Russian in Cuba, and I can tell you that you're successful, and a few others operations. Martinez's cargo was explosives, weapons, and commando raiders. His task was to slip them past Cuban patrol boats like this one. The explosives and the men who would use them made the 90-mile trip here to Cuba in small boats, slipping quietly ashore at night. The targets were for the taking, power transformers, bridges, communications towers, sugar refineries, all part of Bobby Kennedy's pressure on the CIA to cripple Cuba's economy.

Today, the U.S. maintains a 30-year-old trade embargo against Cuba. But in the early 60s, Operation Mungus aimed at inciting an antichestra revolution here. Mungus raiders blacked out cities. They attacked shipping, and they used chemicals to contaminate Cuba's sugar production. A variety of things were done, and Bobby Kennedy was sort of in charge of the whole thing. He was the one that had the whip in hand and was trying to get something done about this. What are you doing to get rid of those fellows? What are you doing to blow up this? What are you doing about that? How many fellows have you got ready to cause a landing and blow up that refinery and so forth? Raiders were only one part of Operation Mungus. And then off the record meeting with Kennedy, New York Times reporter Tad Schultzler

and that a more sinister component to the operation was being considered. I sat down in a soft van, he sat on the rocket chair, and he said, what would you say? If I had ordered, if I would order, if you don't cast for a assassination, and I was kind of taking that back, it's not your everyday question. When I said I believe, almost verbatim, Mr. President, I think it would be a appalling idea because as a citizen, I do not believe the United States should be in the business of assassination, and he sort of smiling said, well, I'm glad to hear you say that, because I feel the same way, but I have been or I am on the great deal of pressure to authorize such an operation. And I take a dim view, and I'm glad to see that at least someone agrees with me. And to which I said, thank you very much, because there isn't very much else that you can say at the end of a conversation like this, except to wonder did it really happen.

Methods for assassinating Castro already existed. This is Fort Dietrich Maryland. This once-secret facility was home to CIA experiments with drugs like LSD. It was also an armory for the agency's executive action capability, a program begun under the Eisenhower administration for disposing of unwanted foreign leaders. Some of the plots called for lethal poisons that were manufactured here. Dr. Everett Hennell, a microbiologist at Fort Dietrich for three decades, worked in association with the CIA. These are what we call class three cabinet systems, they're gas-tight systems for working with almost complete safety with any infectious diseases, toxins. Things such as the shellfish toxin, they're very toxic indeed, particularly when the highly purified.

And I understand that these could be placed on steel needles and fired with air guns into an animal and in juice, death almost immediately. They were apparently a very effective or could be a very effective type of covert weapon. But the real targets of these deadly drugs were not animals, but foreign leaders like Fidel Castro. One scheme called for contaminating his cigars. Others suggested spraying his television studio with LSD during one of his frequent speeches. To administer its drugs and poisons, the CIA hired the Mafia, which had been kicked out of Cuba. Prior to the Cuban Revolution, Havana had been a gambling haven run by organized crime. Castro had shut the casinos down. The CIA believed that the Mafia wanted Castro dead. mobsters John Raselle and Sam Giancana were hired by the CIA as hitmen.

It was under the Eisenhower administration that members of the mob, Sam Giancana and Raselle, were recruited by the CIA. It seems incredible, but they were recruited by the CIA in 1960, established in Miami hotels. I think they conned the CIA. I don't think they did a damn thing. They took a certain amount of money off the CIA. The Mafia assassins reappeared as part of the CIA's Operation Mungus. We did not know about the CIA assassination plot. All intelligence agencies cherished long enough, protected long enough, saved from oversight long enough, begin to take the law into their own hands. People who've spent all their life in this hallucinatory world come to feel that they know the requirements of national security better than transient elected officials. But the CIA had no doubt that it was simply saying yes to White House orders, explicit

or not. The issue about Castro and the Kennedys was simple enough. President Kennedy wanted to get rid of Fidel Castro, and he wanted to get rid of him in any way that we could find to get rid of him. I think it's a simple statement. One Kennedy may not have known of the assassination plots, but his brother did. The CIA told Bobby Kennedy about its Mafia assassination team. But only after Bobby, America's Attorney General, had tried to prosecute the Mafia men for racketeering. And he was extremely annoyed, but what he was really annoyed about was interference with his prosecution of these mafia types. He never said anything to me really one way or the other about the assassination operation. Bobby Kennedy in the White House had no comment on the CIA's assassination plots, neither did Congress. Formal congressional oversight of intelligence did not exist then, and there seemed to be no demand for it.

I think so. I think that the attitude was we don't want to know more than we need to know. And they were pretty conscious of the need to avoid compromising the community or compromising its ability to do its job. It might have been over cautious. Congress had sort of put its hand over its eyes, say, go do what you want. And here's the money, go do it, because intelligence has to be kind of a rough business to go and do it. The press seemed to mirror that attitude regarding any scrutiny of America's secret agencies as unpatriotic. At least one newspaper article appeared hinting of the CIA Mafia link, but caused no sensation. I would say the few people, the few reporters, had some angling assume that this was all okay and there was no reason to get involved in this. I think that what you did not have at the time was a sense of indignation. But Fidel Castro was aware of Operation Mungoos and the assassination plots.

With the help of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Castro began a major military buildup. In October 1962, a U2 spy plane overflight of Cuba returned with photographic evidence of Soviet nuclear missile sites under construction. The United States' answer to Soviet blackmail in Cuba was a quarantine of all offensive weapons being shipped from Russia to that island fortress. In Cuba itself a hundred thousand men were put under emergency orders as they had been during past invasion scares. Year centered the most critical threat of global war since the surrender of Germany 17 years ago. At the White House, commando raids quickly became less important than the CIA's other function, gathering intelligence, as the world faced nuclear war. Had nuclear war broken out and Soviet missiles been launched in the fall of 1962, Kennedy would have received the first warning from the North American Air Defense Command Center.

Norad is presently located a third of a mile inside Cheyenne Mountain outside Colorado Springs. Since Pearl Harbor, preventing another surprise attack has been a prime concern of America's intelligence community and this is a logical extension. A command post for a global network of technical systems that gather intelligence. In 1962, Norad was part of America's emerging intelligence collection empire, a system that gave Kennedy weeks of warning before the Soviet missiles in Cuba became operational, enough time to reach a peaceful resolution to the crisis. At the end of the acute period of crisis, the president traveled to Florida, the citation which he gave to an Air Force reconnaissance unit, symbolized perhaps the wider gratitude of the nation to all the service people.

The CIA intelligence function is fully vindicated in the missile crisis, but that was a justification of the intelligence function, not of the covert action function. In the midst of this, Robert Kennedy learned that the midst of this very tense situation that some of the CIA teams under Operation Mungoose were being sent into Cuba. He couldn't believe it and that ended his any illusions he had about CIA covert action. Two months after the missile crisis ended, Castro released the members of the brigade captured at the Bay of Pigs. At the orange bull in Miami, the brigade presented Kennedy with their flag. The president gave a promise in return. I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free of anger. Just how Kennedy intended to follow through on his pledge is unclear.

In Mungoose and its hidden run-rags were halted after the missile crisis, but the assassination attempts against Castro continued for another year. On November 22, 1963, a CIA asset was given a poison pen to use against Castro. On that same day, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. And in Johnson wondered in private if Kennedy's death was an act of retaliation. The new president had no use for, as he put it, a murder incorporated in the Caribbean.

He ordered the CIA's assassination program shut down. Johnson had managed to untangle America from Cuba. But another CIA covert war was now out of control. South Vietnam troops have stepped up their attacks on Vietnam rebels in recent weeks. And so for a little war in Southeast Asia is very much a major one to the South Vietnamese. Lyndon Johnson inherited JFK CIA-supported war in Vietnam. The agency's original strategy had been to fight the communist guerrillas with their own methods. And North Vietnamese, they sent people down to organize the villagers to get them together, found issues that they could complain about, nationalism, landlords, all that sort of thing, and to organize a force. And then their forces came in behind that. CIA advice led to the expansion of this type of warfare unit, the Green Berets, seen here

today training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In the early days of Vietnam, the CIA was loaned several hundred of these special forces to arm South Vietnamese militias. Take your thing out. Just nothing in here. Place the glass in the cap. On the detonation cord, you'll crept at one cord to one nationage up. Place it on the cap, turn, hold up for you, you can't sit, and print. But the CIA promised no quick solution to the war. And using the agency for large-scale paramilitary operations was unpopular after the Bay of Pigs, Fiesco. The post-mortem of that affair was that if a paramilitary operation got very large, that CIA should turn it over to the military.

The problem is that the military really has a different view of what to use force for. If you use force as a political, a people's war, then your idea is to add people, to add strength all the time. But you're less interested in shooting the enemy. In fact, if you can get somebody on your side who was in the enemy, that's fine. Now, when you turn it over to the military, however, the focus of the operation becomes shooting the enemy. That's what soldiers do. The Pentagon also pushed for massive air raids. The war was now based on a different concept, firepower. But the CIA did not believe this guerilla war could be won with conventional forces and tactics. And one of the jobs of an intelligence officer is that he got bad news is to present the

bad news, and it used to get intense to the extent that certain people in the administration would accuse the intelligence officers of not being on the team. What's the matter, aren't you in favor of the United States? You in favor of the enemy? What the hell is this kind of information that you're giving us? Increasingly, the CIA found itself at odds with Johnson's advisors and the military. A White House began to ignore CIA director John McCone. I disagreed with Mackamara and others who said they could see the light at the end of the tunnel. We and CIA didn't see any light at the end of the tunnel, and we had a very pessimistic view of which was sharply resented by everyone right up to the President Johnson. John McCone resigned as CIA director in the spring of 1965.

By then, Johnson was further expanding the war, sending tens of thousands more American troops to Vietnam. Although the CIA thought the war was a mistake, it put its covert action arm at the service of the military. Instead of winning the hearts and minds of villagers, the agency was now hunting down communist insurgents, part of a controversial US military intelligence operation called Phoenix. If you don't know who the enemy is, you're really not going to be able to shoot him. If you do know who he is, you can do something much better than shoot him, which is put his name up on a poster, which we used to do, saying, we know you, Mr. Sohn, so you're the head of the tax committee of this village. We're after you. If you want to, however, you can take amnesty and come with us. But there are also many who were killed.

There were a lot killed. Most of them were killed in military actions. If you go out and have a fight with a local guerrilla group, somebody's going to get killed on both sides. And they go around the morning and you see, oh, there's Mr. Don, he was, he's the local tax committee man. And he's killed. He wasn't captured. He didn't take amnesty. He was killed. But he wasn't murdered. At least 20,000 Vietnamese died as a result of Operation Phoenix. The real number may have been twice that figure. Phoenix hurt the communist infrastructure. But just how many among the dead were actual communist insurgents will never be known. Many suspects were tortured. Others were executed in the field. There were periods in the mid-60s when it was a brutal and terrible place. And there wasn't much government and the Indians were at the gate, you know, and coming in the windows and so forth. And people did a lot of very brutal things. Meanwhile, the agency's analysts continued their pessimistic reports.

The massive bombing raids were not working. On the ground, communist forces continued to grow. The CIA's little war in Southeast Asia had begun in secret, without public support. Now it was the Pentagon's big war that few Americans understood and that the United States was losing. There's a man with a gun over there, telling me I got to beware, thinking time will stop children, watch that sound, everybody look what's going down. By 1967, Johnson was also losing the war at home.

Public distrust of government was starting to grow as anti-war protesters took to the streets. Johnson responded by secretly ordering FBI director Jay Edgar Hoover to investigate the leaders of the unrest. For decades, Hoover had been saying yes to such White House requests via a long-standing FBI surveillance program. Nearly 60s bill counterintelligence was excellent as operated in the United States by the FBI. We had something called the security index. The security index was a means of keeping tabs on persons who were, even if it was only in potents, coming to sympathy. You had a card in the office where that person lived and in the office where that person

worked if it was different. It had to be updated every 60 days. It had a photograph, it had all the vital statistics, and at a given signal, we were in a position, should war break out or something like that, a national emergency, to go out and round them up just as we rounded up Japanese nationals and German nationals in World War II. Keeping files on suspected communists was part of Cohen Tellpro, a counterintelligence program begun during the Cold War. Their standard FBI activity was electronic surveillance, bugging. The FBI's surveillance in the 60s began with civil rights activists. A special target was Martin Luther King and John. I have a dream, but one day, this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its dreams.

John Kennedy himself told Martin about the FBI surveillance. And it was, we left about it because when Kennedy began to talk about who was surveillance, he wouldn't even talk about it in the Oval Office. He walked Martin out into the Rose Garden away from everybody and they walked around the back of the White House and he began to tell him of the difficulties that even he was having with the FBI and that because they were trying to portray the movement as communist and because there were one or two people who had some remote leftist connections, he felt that he had to give them permission to go ahead and do the surveillance. And when we found bugs under the pulpit, we didn't destroy them.

In fact, one of Ralph Abinath's favorite tricks was to look around the pulpit, find the microphone and then take it out and put it on top, hold it up and show it to the crowd, put it on top and then he'd preach to it and he'd call it the little doohickey. And he had a famous speech, little doohickey, I don't know where you play in. You may be in the governor's office, you may be playing to the mayor's office, you may be playing to Jay Edgar Hoover or you may be playing to John Kennedy. But you tell them little doohickey that we are going to get our freedom. By 1964, the FBI had moved beyond bugging to harassment of King, Hoover wanted to destroy the civil rights leaders reputation. Secretly, the FBI sent him a letter, King, like all frauds, your end is approaching. It said, the American public will know you for what you are, an evil beast. And closed with the letter was an audio tape, purportedly of King's lovemaking in a motel

room. They put together a tape of Martin and a group of ministers at the Martial Washington and they spliced it in with some tape of somebody obviously having in the act of sexual intercourse. They mailed it to Martin with the suggestion that this was going to be exposed publicly and that he ought to kill himself and, you know, avoid the humiliation. The Eddie War Movement was an even larger target of surveillance by the FBI and CIA. But the Eddie War Movement proved capable of fighting back. Revealed details of CIA involvement in domestic student groups, revelations that the American press was now willing to pursue. Immediately, there was a vast movement to examine everything, damage, control it.

But I don't think there was any more, any indication that anybody felt that we shouldn't do things like this, we shouldn't do the things that were blown. But we just have to be a little more careful about how we did our covert operations. But the White House wanted riskier CIA covert actions at home. Johnson and his advisors suspected the anti-war movement had links to foreign powers. Johnson wanted the CIA to join the FBI and spying on the protesters. Real effort they felt had to be made to find out where the money was coming from, who was generating and so forth. The fact that over time, this did not turn out to be quite as accurate as they thought it was going to be. In other words, the amount of foreign involvement was relatively minor, but that had to be demonstrated. They wanted to be shown, and it was a rather difficult problem. It was a difficult problem, because the CIA was forbidden by Congress to spy on Americans,

whether ordered by Johnson or not. But CIA director Richard Helms did not say no. He began a program called Operation Chaos. Well, this was, of course, an operation designed to meet the requirement of President Johnson that we find out just how much communist support was going to these damn students who opposed the Vietnam War. So a very, very secret operation was formed. It was really, very closely held, because we had all been told. And it was part of the basic indoctrination in training that we did not spy on fellow Americans. A major threshold had been crossed. At Lyndon Johnson's command, the CIA was now violating one of the few restrictions that Congress had placed on. Demands on the intelligence community for domestic spying only increased after Richard Nixon's

election in 1968. Nixon took office with a promise to end the Vietnam War and quail America's internal strike. To restore peace at home, Nixon turned to his intelligence agencies. The White House proposed a plan to increase domestic spying with a coordinated effort by the FBI, CIA, and the National Security Agency. There were to be more break-ins, wireteps, and mail openings. CIA director Helms warned at a memo that should the plan be exposed, it would prove most embarrassing for all concerned. But Jay Edgar Hoover went further. He said no. So, yes, there were attempts by various individuals to pressure the FBI to do such things as the opening of mail, the increase to usage of wireteps and microphones, however, Mr. Hoover

had learned the hard way that some attorneys general will back you up in such matters and some will not. Some will say that they will back you up and support you as with other politicians. But we found the hard way that when the chips were down, that they would not give you that support that you needed in order to prevent the criticism of a wrathful public. My first job in the White House was to be liaison to Jay Edgar Hoover. And so I marched over to the FBI and called upon him when I first got there and was treated to a two-hour harangue, just an incredible kind of tour of the landscape of American society and through the eyes of Jay Edgar Hoover. And the man was clearly over the hill as far as I could tell, far past his prime, living very much on his laurels, living on his alliances with the Congress, which were stainless steel, just iron clad.

With Hoover refusing to cooperate, White House A. John Erlichman began planning the FBI director's retirement, a feat other presidents had considered, but failed to accomplish. We got Richard Nixon all cranked up to remove Jay Edgar Hoover one time. Yes, he said he's got to go. That's all there is to it. I'll have breakfast with him and I'll tell him. So we wrote out a kind of a scenario. He asked me to take notes as he dictated this thing about Edgar. The time has come, your marvelous public servant and that sort of stuff. So I wrote all this out and had it typed up, delivered to the president. He went off the next morning to have breakfast with Hoover in the residence. He came back and I didn't hear from him. So after a while I called Bob Holman and I said, did he have breakfast with Hoover? He said, don't ask. And I said, what happened? He said, don't ask. So they had breakfast. And as it turned out, and as later I found out through memos, it came to me. He not only didn't fire Hoover, but he granted Hoover requests for more money for the Jay Edgar Hoover building, more overseas attaches to strengthen Hoover's international intelligence

capability. He gave a star away. So Hoover walked away wagging his tail, fire from fire. Hoover was a master politician. He had said no to a president ready to fire him and he'd come away from the meeting with more money for this, the new FBI National Headquarters. But why had Hoover, who was a long time associate of Nixon and had undertaken thousands of wiretaps and break ins in the past, refused the president's request? What did the answer had to do with Hoover's talent of reading the mood of the country? What in years past was acceptable FBI behavior had changed and Hoover knew it. Now he was retrenching. Saying no, not because the requests might be illegal, but because public knowledge of them might harm the agency he had spent nearly half a century building. A vacuum developed. And ultimately that vacuum led to the forming in the Nixon administration, in the executive office of the president itself, a very powerful, powerful in terms of its ability to command

the resources of every intelligence can counter intelligence agency, an organization which would do those things when ordered to do so. That organization came to be known as the Plumbers, a handful of former U.S. intelligence officers operating out of the Nixon White House. Their first assignment was uncovering the source of news links. This secret White House unit, led by G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, found recruits in Miami, CIA veterans of the Bay of Pigs and Operation Monkeys. I knew that that was working for Howard Hunt, who was retired, CIA and but I was retired before too. And I was still active with the CIA, so retirement meant nothing. He came one day and he said, how would you like to become operational again?

So I said, I've been waiting a pretty long time for you to say that. And he says, how much time would you need us to give me a half hour? So we started out, I figured, by that time, I really believed at that time that we were talking CIA. And then he explained to me that this was an organization which was above CIA and FBI and directly at White House level. For years, J. Edgar Hoover had carried out secret White House missions, but no longer. Hoover died in office in May of 1972. Six weeks after Hoover's funeral, the plumbers undertook their last mission. One that Hoover would almost certainly have refused to carry out.

Martinez came to me and said, Barker, this is crazy what we're doing here. You know, I said, I agree with you. And I went up to Howard and I told him in front of Liddy, Howard, according to the book we should scrub this mission, then Liddy said, I have to consult upstairs. So he left the room and he went to another room where he consulted upstairs. And he came back and says the orders aren't to go ahead with the mission. So I said, well, follow me, let's go. They didn't know it at the time, but the plumbers were about to leave the Nixon White House into the history books. Hunt and Liddy set up their command post in this hotel room. The break-in was to take place across the street. But soon things began to go wrong. And Hunt and Liddy could only watch as their men were discovered and arrested. A new word was about to enter the American political vocabulary, Watergate.

At first it would refer only to the building that housed the Democratic National Headquarters. But it would come to mean much more. Thanks to two enterprising reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. In the address books of two of the burglars who were caught in the Democratic Headquarters at Watergate, there is a name of Howard Hunt who was a White House consultant. And it says, W. House. Well, as my friend Carl Bernstein said, W. House could only be one of two things. So he said he would call a whorehouse and I should call a White House. With an awakening American press on its trail, the Nixon White House scrambled to cover up its connection to the burglars. Since some of the men were Cuban X CIA agents, the White House tried to stop the entire investigation on grounds of national security, involving the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion. But such a scheme required CIA complicity.

And so I simply said no. And I said, told Dick Waters again and again as he would come back from these meetings with John Dean, we're going to have nothing to do with this. It will ruin this agency. It will be the end of it. And I don't care whether you as an individual are willing to take a dive on behalf of the president of the White House or anybody else. I won't permit you to take the dive because it isn't going to be only you. It's going to be the whole agency that's going to be affected by this. Saying no to Nixon cost Helden's his job. He was replaced as CIA director a year later by James Schlesinger. But Schlesinger also said no to helping the White House fend off the growing controversy of Watergate. Instead, he decided to find out exactly what the agency's involvement had been. Paul Colby wrote a memorandum to the staff saying that anybody who knew anything ought to come in and reveal it.

I had in mind only those illegalities that might be associated with Watergate, but he wrote it. And so, general away, the people began popping up with information from years past. And we got a collection of things which weren't very pretty reading some of them. I didn't think I wasn't particularly shocked by them because I didn't think they were all that far out of line for an intelligence agency. There are a few things that we obviously should not have done. But they were all kind of minor steps over the edge, quite frankly, when you think of what intelligence services in other countries have done and kinds of activities they've involved actually with the CIA one, I thought was really quite clean. William Colby would have his own opportunity to defend the CIA record when he succeeded Schlesinger at mid-1973. By then, Richard Nixon, unable to gain CIA cooperation in blocking the Watergate investigation,

was losing the struggle to save his presidency. One year later, Richard Nixon resigned. We're here to say goodbye to us. And we don't have a good word for it in English, the bestest or of war. We'll see you again. Nixon had said goodbye to the mission, but suspicions of the CIA landed. Distrust grew when people like this man began going public. CIA officer Phillip A.G. wrote a book in 1975, which identified hundreds of his former colleagues worldwide. I didn't have the intention of naming a lot of names in the book.

I was going to try to describe operations as well as I could, but as I went along working and writing, I began to realize that there was no way to separate what the agency does from the people who do it. I happen to believe that torture is wrong, that disappearances of people are wrong, that the establishment and running of death squads is wrong, not only morally, but from a political point of view. And you have all the documentation you'd like to find on the agency's role in the establishments of, in the establishment of death squads throughout Latin America, from the 1950s to the present. On the time of A.G.'s accusations, word of the CIA's domestic spying leaked, setting off a call for presidential and congressional investigations. The sky fell down around you. Well, the thing that really did it, of course, was that it made the most excitement, was not so much the domestic intelligence.

I think that we had fairly well contained, but in the course of briefing the president, I had mentioned these cases of where CIA had attempted to assassinate foreign leaders. And in one background discussion, he, and a mistake, he blurted out something about assassinations. Well, that sent the rockets through the roof, and every newsman in town was after that immediately. So, that's what created the sense of uproar. Clark Clifford said today that he has already been questioned by the Rockefeller Commission about possible CIA assassination plots. Mr. Carmier, let me say at the outset that this administration does not condone under any circumstances any assassination attempts. President Ford distanced himself politically from the CIA, an agency that had carried

off a secret bidding of five presidents. Some 20 years earlier, a presidential report had decided that the normal rules of combat did not apply to the CIA. They were encouraged to be more ruthless than the enemy. But in this Senate hearing room, a different standard would apply. Mayor Congress, which for decades, had closed its eyes to the activities of the U.S. intelligence community, would, for the first time, take a serious look at the sprawling secret empire it had created. And we have seen today the dark side of those activities where many Americans who were not even suspected of crime, were not only spied upon, but they were harassed, they were discredited, and at times endangered. Frank Church headed a Senate committee probing the intelligence community.

Church took an open approach that some of his colleagues questioned. Where does the public's right to be secure override the public's right to know about something? Because in informing the public on a very sensitive matter, you're also informing the potential enemies in the United States. So I think you're right into a philosophical conflict there. And I err on the side of protecting the security of the people. For 30 years, Congress had turned a blind eye to intelligence. I'd say this. Now, Senators competed for the National Spotlight as the intelligence hearings went public. Every television camera in town was there, and it was really cranked up for a great show. I was told to bring this gun that we had developed and never used, never used on people. My counsel, a very splendid guy, who was with me, he said, look, don't you get near that thing.

If it has to be handled, I will handle it. Have you brought with you some of those devices which would have enabled the CIA to use this poison for, we have indeed, for killing people? Mr. Colby was supposed to bring this gun up to Mr. Church. What seated next to him was the ranking Republican Barry Goldwater, and Barry reached out and grabbed the gun and held it like this and got the picture that day, because it was in every picture in the United States and maybe around the world, every front page. And the next day I confronted Goldwater, I said, Barry, did you know you were going to get your picture in a paper by taking the gun, he said, yes, I did.

And I said, you took the gun away from the chair and he said, I know I did. I said, where did you learn that trick from? He said, you were gone free, and it worked. While Senators clamored for photo opportunities, Colby devised a strategy to save his agency. If you try to hide every possible imperfection, it will blow up in your face and you will be worse off, whereas if you can control it and be responsive and give them an honest feeling of what the whole thing is about, then I think you can survive one of these things. You've heard of the doctrine of plausible deniability. Yes, and I've rejected it now, Senator, I say that we cannot depend upon that anymore. So you don't find the work of this committee unwelcome? No, I do not. As I've said to the chairman, I welcome the chance to try to describe to the American people what intelligence is really about today. It is an opportunity to show how we Americans have modernized the whole concept of intelligence. Colby's decision to cooperate was unpopular with some former CIA leaders who tried to

hold on to the agency's secrets. You were specifically asked about shellfish toxins and shellfish poisons. You say it's inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government. Is that an accurate quote or not an accurate quote? Well, if it's accurate, it shouldn't have been said. Well, now I, I, it looks like we're implausible denial again as all I could say here, Mr. Chairman. Well, you never entirely sure, because after all many of the people in the CIA, I've been trained to lie. That's their job to spread propaganda overseas. Not that all of our propaganda are lies, in fact most of it is an effort to reinforce the truth of what America stands for, but some of the propaganda is lies. So you're dealing with people here who have been trained to mislead when they need to. But all you can do and all we did was to ask as many people as many questions as we possibly

could, and when we found contradictions to pursue those contradictions by asking yet more people. If one has in one's possession or under one's control, bacteriological or chemical weapons, they can be used both defensively and offensively. And by use offensively, we mean to include killing people, is that right? Well, they have the capacity to kill people if they were used in that way. Unrestrained, illegal, secret, intimidation and harassment of the, of the essential ability of Americans to participate freely in American political life shall never happen again. And suddenly it all began to roll out. The IRS was targeting thousands of Americans for tax investigations in order to chill the activity on their part that they didn't like.

The U.S. Army was conducting surveillance of civilians in civilian life. There was a whole pattern of this running throughout government. And it was, of course, once you saw what it was going on, it was a shock. We saw the tip of a iceberg that could have destroyed American liberty. For any other country, the church committee's final report would have been an inconceivable event. It was all there to see and read. Volume after volume, revelation after revelation of the past deeds of the CIA, FBI and the rest of America's intelligence community. But the committee did not hold America's secret agencies solely responsible. So, one of the findings of the church committee was that it was not out of control, that it was under too much control of the president, perhaps. The church committee criticized the Congress for not doing its job of proper supervision

over the years. I think the critical point would have been if church, the church committee had done a good job, and taken some steps to effectively either stop or put extreme limits on covert activity. I think there was a sentiment in the public to stop it. We could have gotten out of that pernicious business. The real story would have been to do an exhaustive investigation into some of the covert ops, and make some of more of a public, and also try and get an effective ban on some at least restrict the operations in some way, and they fail to do that. I think that the church committee hearings were not harmful. They simply made the agency look ridiculous in many respects, made it look evil in other respects, and when all was said and done, what did it achieve? Where is the legislation, the great piece of legislation that was going to come out of the church committee hearings? I haven't seen it. It hasn't passed the Congress as far as I'm aware. Richard Helms became a casualty of the struggle between Congress and the White House. He had denied the Congress that the CIA and the Nixon White House had intervened in

Chile. In 1977, he was given a suspended sentence for not testifying fully and completely. Mr. President, I present to you an intelligence agency and community of dedicated professionals. William Colby became a casualty too. He was fired by President Ford. The job of director of the CIA went to George Bush. I will not turn my back on the past from the past. We've learned a lot about what an intelligence agency must do to maintain the confidence of the people in an open society. Congress tried to restore confidence in the intelligence community through a stricter oversight to ensure that it too would abide by the nation's laws. After setting up permanent committees, another law passed, which required formal presidential approval of covert acts and timely notification of Congress. In the process, the secret agencies found themselves no longer solely under the control

of the president. For a while, it seemed it would be easier for intelligence agencies to say no to the White House. It did not work out that way. Do you solemn this where that in the testimony you're about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so I'll feel God I do. And you'll notice that the same thing happened again in the Reagan administration. The Congress very foolishly attempted to interdict the Central Intelligence Agency from carrying out one of its primary functions, and as a result, they formed another group. This time, not in the executive office of the president. That didn't work the last time, so this time they did it in the NSC. Next time, they'll run it at a red cross headquarters, but they will run it because it has to be done, and it will be done. All right.

We'll be right back. Thank you for having me, Angela. Sounds good. Secret Intelligence was made possible by public television stations and the corporation for public broadcasting. Additional funding has been provided by United Airlines, re-dedicated to giving you the service you deserve. Examples, colleges, public libraries, and other organizations may purchase video cassettes of this series by calling 1-800-424-7963.

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