Shadow Warrior (60 page)

Throughout the Watergate affair, the FBI would prove to be much more a foe than a friend to Colby and the CIA. Hardly a surprise. J. Edgar Hoover had been opposed to the very creation of the Agency, demanding of President Truman in 1946 that if there absolutely had to be a central intelligence entity, it be attached to the Bureau. Truman not only turned Hoover down, but the following year ordered the FBI to surrender its Latin American operation to the CIA. Rather than comply, the director had his agents burn their files and dismiss their informants. Hoover subsequently supplied Senator Joseph McCarthy with ammunition for attacks on the Agency. Allen Dulles felt it necessary to assign his inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, the task of making sure Hoover-McCarthy loyalists did not penetrate the Agency. Hoover harbored the secret belief that the Dulles brothers, like Eleanor Roosevelt, were agents of international communism. In Richard Helms he found no improvement. According to journalist Andrew St. George, the director hated the CIA even more than he did longhaired hippies, Black Panthers, communists, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “He thought of it as a viperine lair of liars and high-domed intellectuals,” St. George wrote, “of insolent Yalies who sneered at Fordham's finest, of rich young ne'er-do-wells who dabbled in spy work because they could not be trusted to run the family business, of wily ‘Princeton Ought-Ought' himself,
‘Dickie' Helms, who spun his tweedy web from an . . . enclave up the river in Virginia.” In February 1970, Hoover forbade all contacts with the CIA that he did not personally approve.
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Nixon and Hoover's shared animosity toward the CIA was not sufficient to overcome their mutual distrust, however. Hoover was far too independent for the president and Kissinger—and as far as the FBI director was concerned, the White House was full of amateurs like Thomas Charles Huston. Then, on May 2, 1972, Hoover died. Nixon picked L. Patrick Gray, then assistant attorney general and a known Nixon loyalist, to succeed to the directorship.

With Gray awaiting Senate confirmation but nevertheless in charge of the FBI, Nixon, on June 23, approved the idea of using the CIA to block the FBI investigation of the Watergate break-in. At a White House meeting that morning, Haldeman complained that Gray wanted to do the right thing but couldn't. “[T]he FBI is not under control,” he said, “because Gray doesn't exactly know how to control them.” But John Dean had come up with what he thought was a perfect plan. He and Ehrlichman would call in Helms and Deputy Director Vernon Walters and order Walters to tell Gray to back off Watergate because national security was involved. “[J]ust say, ‘Stay the hell out of this . . . we're set up beautifully to do it.'” Would Gray go along? Nixon asked. Absolutely, Haldeman replied. It should work, the president observed, because “we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things.” As they had during the Chilean imbroglio in 1970, Nixon and Kissinger continued to believe that they could use Mongoose and the rumored CIA roles in the assassinations of Diem, Lumumba, and Trujillo as weapons to fend off Democratic-led investigations of executive wrongdoings.
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That afternoon, Helms and Walters were summoned to the White House for a top-secret meeting on Watergate. This was the first time the DCI had ever been directed to bring along his deputy. A veteran of bureaucratic in-fighting and West Wing maneuverings, Helms smelled something fishy. No sooner had Helms, Walters, and Ehrlichman squeezed around a table in a small conference room than Bob Haldeman strode in and took charge of the meeting. The chief of staff observed that the Watergate break-in was causing a great deal of trouble, and the FBI investigation was threatening a “lot of important people.”
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He then turned to the DCI and asked “very formally,” according to Helms, what role the CIA might have played in the burglary.

“The CIA had no connection whatever with Watergate,” Helms declared.

Haldeman seemed not to have heard. The FBI had traced money paid to the Plumbers by the Committee to Re-elect the President to a laundering operation in Mexico City.

“It has been decided to have General Walters go to see Pat Gray and tell him that further investigation in Mexico could lead to the exposure of certain Agency assets and channels for handling money.”

Helms protested that he had told the acting FBI director that the Agency had nothing to do with Watergate; it had been two years since any of the burglars had worked for Langley. Again Haldeman ignored him. Walters was to see Gray and convey the message. He added for good measure that if the FBI was not stymied, its investigation would lead to revelations concerning the CIA's role in the Bay of Pigs affair. At this point, Helms exploded: “The Bay of Pigs hasn't got a damned thing to do with this,” he said. “And what's more, there's nothing about the Bay of Pigs that's not already in the public domain.”
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Not true, of course; Nixon and Haldeman probably had in mind Langley's dalliance with the Mafia during the course of Operation Mongoose. At this point, Helms could have ordered Walters to ignore the White House directive to see Gray and invoke CIA operations in Mexico, but he did not. Such a move would have led to his immediate dismissal, he suspected. During a conversation in the White House parking lot, Helms told Walters to have his meeting with Gray and remind him of the long-standing agreement between the FBI and the CIA, which was that if one agency's operations threated to cross lines with the other, the latter would be notified immediately.

The next day during his meeting with Gray, Walters delivered both messages: the FBI and the CIA had an agreement to keep their lines clear, and the White House had directed him to say that the FBI's investigation was endangering CIA activities in Mexico. Upon his return from this conflab, the deputy director asked Colby to investigate: Were there Agency activities in Mexico that might be threatened by an FBI investigation? Colby checked and reported that such an eventuality was extremely unlikely.
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On Monday, June 26, Walters received a call from White House counsel John Dean asking him to come to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for further talks on the Watergate matter. Dean informed Walters that he was heading up the Watergate affair for the president. The FBI was proceeding with
three hypotheses: that the Republican National Committee, or the CIA, or some other party was behind the break-in. Of one thing he was certain, Walters replied, the Agency was not involved. “It must have been,” Dean said. “These people all used to work for the CIA.” Perhaps this went on without the leadership at Langley knowing anything about it. Perhaps, Walters replied, but he had investigated, and that was not the case. Dean turned plaintive. Couldn't the Agency accept some of the blame? Not without destroying itself, Walters replied.
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Three days later, Dean again summoned Walters to the White House. Could the Agency see its way to paying bail for the burglars? Walters was noncommittal. Absolutely not, Helms declared in their subsequent meeting. The Agency had unvouchered funds, but it would not expend them for such purposes without congressional approval.
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Helms, Colby, and Walters thought they had put this little White House plot to bed, but on July 5, Walters received a call from Gray. Unless he received a written statement from the CIA saying that the FBI investigation was threatening its overseas operations, he was going to have to proceed. There would be no request, oral or written, Walters replied, for the simple reason that the FBI probe did not endanger any Agency operation.
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They were on their own, Helms and Colby realized. The Nixon White House would frame the Agency for Watergate if it could. In July, James McCord, a former CIA agent and a member of the team that had broken into Watergate, got word to Helms that the president's men had offered him a pardon if he would testify under oath that the Watergate break-in was a CIA operation. In 1972, the American press and public were ready to believe the CIA capable of virtually any wrongdoing. But if the leadership at Langley confronted the White House directly and revealed what it knew of the unfolding conspiracy, Nixon would simply sweep the fourth-floor corridors clean and install a coterie of lackeys ready to do his bidding. The Agency must do everything in its power to “distance” itself from Watergate, Helms told his lieutenants. He wanted, he said, “no freewheeling exposition of hypotheses or any effort made to conjecture about responsibility or likely objectives of the Watergate intrusion.” All well and good, but by 1973, not only the Justice Department but two separate congressional committees were investigating the Watergate break-in. The simple fact was that the CIA had partial knowledge that the White House had engaged in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. As a lawyer trained in constitutional
law, Colby understood the precipice upon which the nation and the Agency stood. He chose to follow Helms's orders.
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Watergate came too late to affect the 1972 presidential election. The Watergate burglars' trial did not get underway until January 1973, and it would be two more months before the Senate Special Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, the “Watergate Committee” under the chairmanship of Senator Sam Ervin, came into being. The Democratic nominee, George McGovern, attempted to make an issue of CREEP and its misdeeds, but he found the American people unresponsive. Promises of more money for social programs, amnesty for Vietnam-era draft-dodgers and deserters, and his “rainbow coalition” of minorities, young people, and union supporters found no purchase either. Kissinger declared that “peace was at hand” in Vietnam, and the White House dismissed the Watergate break-in as a “third-rate burglary.” The incumbent's 47.1 million popular votes and 520 electoral tallies made him the most successful GOP candidate ever.

On November 20, some two weeks after the election, Helms received a routine message that Nixon wanted to meet with him at Camp David. The DCI assumed that the topic of discussion would be the Agency's budget for the upcoming year. Shortly after his electoral triumph, Nixon had assembled his cabinet and asked for its collective resignation as well as those of all political appointees. Traditionally, decisions to appoint and dismiss DCIs were private matters handled in a nonpartisan fashion. Republican DCIs had served Democrats and vice versa. Helms had been tapped by Johnson to head the CIA in 1966, and Nixon had asked him to stay on. Over lunch on Election Day, General Alexander Haig, Kissinger's deputy, had hinted to Helms that he would be allowed to set his own retirement date. Helms knew that he was no favorite of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, but he felt he had survived tougher adversaries than them.

After his helicopter landed at Camp David, Helms walked to Aspen House, where he was met—not “greeted,” he noted in his memoir—by Haldeman. Nixon told him what a good job he had done as director, but then declared that he wanted a change of leadership at the Agency. What did Helms think? He served at the pleasure of the president, Helms said. Could he be allowed to stay on until the CIA's official retirement age of sixty, which would be in a few months? he asked. Certainly, the president replied. Would he be interested in becoming ambassador to the Soviet
Union? Nixon asked. He did not think the Russians would appreciate that, Helms observed. What would he like? Iran, perhaps, Helms said. And the meeting was over.
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There were all kind of reasons, legitimate and illegitimate, for Nixon wanting to get rid of Helms as DCI. First and foremost was his refusal to cooperate on the Watergate matter. Colby, for one, thought this was the crux of the matter. Noting with pride that none other than the
Washington Post
had singled out the CIA as the only agency in town to say no to the White House, Colby later observed that “Dick Helms paid the price for that ‘No.'” Nixon had entered office viewing the Agency as an adversary. Subsequent events, Watergate not included, had done nothing to change his mind. There was Langley's apostasy over the antiballistic missile debate, and the constant negativity on Vietnam from the Agency's analysts. The CIA had failed utterly to uncover the fact that Sihanoukville had for years been a principal entrepôt for North Vietnam as it funneled arms into Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam. But it seems that Nixon had just been waiting for an excuse to change leaders at Langley. Haldeman's notes of a September White House meeting on goals for the second administration read: “Helms has got to go. Get rid of the clowns—cut personnel 40 percent. Its info worthless.”
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Later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan asked Henry Kissinger why Helms had been fired. “I didn't do it,” Henry replied. “The Germans did it.”
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Nixon would not even allow Helms the dignity of retiring. On February 2, 1973, the president swore in several new members of his administration; among them was James R. Schlesinger as DCI.

Schlesinger's term as director would be the shortest in the Agency's history—roughly four months—but he was to have a major impact on the CIA. A native New Yorker some ten years Colby's junior, Schlesinger, like Kissinger, had begun his career as an academic. He had earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and had gone to work for the Rand Corporation in the early 1960s, rising to become chief of its strategic studies program. With a McNamara-like reputation for expertise in management efficiency and solid conservative, anticommunist credentials, Schlesinger was tapped first to be assistant director of what became the Office of Management and Budget and then to become head of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). It was Schlesinger who, at Nixon's direction, had authored a 1971 study advocating consolidation of the various elements of the intelligence
community under the DCI. Schlesinger arrived at Langley “running, his shirt tails flying, determined, with that bulldog, abrasive temperament of his,” as Colby put it, determined not only to consolidate the various intelligence services but also to impose major reforms on the CIA.
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