Shadow Warrior (79 page)

The Church Committee's interim report on assassinations cleared the CIA of killing anyone, but it found that the Agency had tried and failed to assassinate Castro at least eight times, employing everything from toxic diving suits to syringes disguised as ballpoint pens. It also found that the CIA had acquired and dispatched an unnamed “lethal substance”—poisoned toothpaste—to the Congo to be used to eliminate Patrice Lumumba, but his enemies had killed him before US operatives could execute their plan. In three other cases, the CIA had encouraged the murders of foreign leaders—Rafael Trujillo, General René Schneider, and Salvador Allende—but was not complicit in their deaths. Washington had facilitated the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, but did not advocate his assassination. But who was more to blame, the presidents or the CIA “rogue elephant”? The report equivocated.
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Shortly after releasing the report, Church filed papers with the Federal Election Commission to create an “exploratory” Church for President Committee. In February 1976, President Ford would issue an executive order—“Restrictions on Intelligence Activities”—declaring, “No employee of the United States shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” In a 1978
Playboy
interview, Bill Colby would observe that the Ugandan people would be morally justified in assassinating their brutal ruler, Idi Amin, and that if asked, the CIA would be justified in aiding such an effort.
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Meanwhile, the White House and the CIA had asked that they be allowed to review a draft of the Pike Committee report prior to its release. When it arrived the last week in October, President Ford and his advisers were appalled. The document was a litany of CIA failures substantiated by the Agency's postmortems, but without any mention of the spy agency's successes. More ominously, it contained specific information on covert operations in Iraq, Angola, and Italy. Shortly thereafter, portions of the report began leaking, and in the days that followed the trickle became a deluge. In a speech to the United States Navy League in October 1975, Colby asked rhetorically, “Is our intelligence to become mere theatre? Will it be exposed in successive re-runs for the amusement, or even amazement, of our people rather than being preserved and protected for the benefit of us all?”
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Even as leaks about the Pike Committee's report were occurring, it issued subpoenas for new material, including intelligence reports on the Soviet
Union, Portugal, and the Cyprus crisis; decision memoranda of the 40 Committee; and documents on Russian compliance with nuclear arms control agreements. Both Colby and Kissinger dug in their heels, and on November 16, Ford claimed executive privilege. On that same day, the House select committee voted 10–2 to cite Kissinger for contempt of Congress. Ford's advisers told the president that they were not at all sure that the White House would win in the courts, and Kissinger, though likely to win, did not want to risk a contempt vote in the House. Ford proposed a compromise—a State Department official would read from the subpoenaed documents, but they would not be made available to committee members directly. Pike quickly accepted. His committee was deeply divided, and he sensed that the support he had in the House as a whole was crumbling. Then came the crowning blow.
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On December 23, 1975, Richard S. Welch, the CIA's chief of station in Athens, and his wife attended a Christmas party hosted by Ambassador Jack Kubisch. Both men were new to their jobs, two of the most difficult US posts in the world. In 1967, a group of neo-fascist colonels had staged a coup and seized power in Greece. They installed George Papadopoulos, who had been on the CIA payroll off and on since the 1950s, as president. Relations between Washington and Athens were cold during the Johnson administration but improved dramatically under Nixon. By 1973, the United States was the only nation in the developed world on friendly terms with the junta, which regularly jailed and tortured its political foes. By the time Welch and his family arrived, anti-American sentiment in Athens was reaching a fever pitch. Ever since the Agency had first established a presence in Athens, the chief of station had lived rather conspicuously in the same large house. “I had made arrangements for him to go into a different residence and to live in a different part of town, to try and help conceal who he was and to give him some cover,” Kubisch later said. Welch refused. When the Christmas party at the ambassador's house broke up, the chief of station and his wife drove the few blocks to their CIA villa in the fashionable suburb of Palaio Psychiko. Parked in their driveway was a small car containing four people. Three got out, pulled Welch from his auto, and shot him three times in the chest with a .45. This was the first assassination of a station chief in the history of the Agency.
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Welsh's murder made the front page of newspapers across the United States. In still another press conference, Colby praised Welch and implied
that he was a victim of the anti-CIA hysteria that was gripping the nation. More specifically, he pointed the finger at
Counterspy
, the magazine of an organization called The Fifth Estate. Among its members were disgruntled former CIA employees, including Philip Agee, as well as a number of anti-Vietnam War activists. In its winter 1974–1975 issue,
Counterspy
had listed Welch as the CIA chief of station at Lima, Peru. The magazine, whose chief financial angel was author Norman Mailer, was hardly repentant. “If anyone is to blame for Mr. Welch's death,” the publication declared, “it is the CIA that sent him to Greece to spy and intervene in the affairs of the Greek people.” Soon afterward,
Counterspy
's winter 1975–1976 issue hit the stands. It quoted Agee as saying, “The most effective and important systematic efforts to combat the CIA that can be undertaken right now are . . . the identification, exposure, and neutralization of its people working abroad.”
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Welch was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on January 6, 1976. Ford, Kissinger, and Colby attended. “The funeral was a rare and glittering tableau of the American national security establishment,” wrote Laurence Stern in the
Washington Post
, “with several generations of diplomats and spies gathered on the grassy slopes of Arlington to pay tribute to Welch and the institution he served.” “Welch in death may have started the rollback that President Ford, Secretary Kissinger and the whole CIA seemed unable to accomplish,” Daniel Schorr commented on
CBS Nightly News
. In 2002 a member of the radical Marxist organization 17 November (or 17N, for the date of an uprising in 1973) confessed to playing a role in Welch's murder and named his accomplices. But the statute of limitations had run out.
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On January 15, President Ford, riding the backlash that followed in the wake of Welch's murder, wrote Otis Pike, forbidding him to publish the details of various CIA covert operations. Colby called on the chairman to observe the terms of the “Colby compromise,” but Pike insisted that it applied only to the release of specific documents, not to the committee's final report. With the committee's mandate set to expire on January 31, its staffers and a CIA team headed by Mitchell Rogovin negotiated frantically over specific deletions. Pike accepted some Agency redactions but rejected 150 others. The House select committee approved its report on January 23, but on the 29th the chamber as a whole voted 246–124 against releasing the document.
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By then, however, much of what was in the report had already leaked to the press. On February 13, the
Village Voice
published the results of the Pike investigation in their entirety. It listed the CIA's six most conspicuous “failures,” released material on the 40 Committee that proved decidedly unspectacular, and dealt with some ongoing CIA covert operations. Ironically, the Pike report was an indictment of the presidency rather than the CIA. In his testimony before the committee, in an effort to deflect attention from himself, Kissinger had given the coup de grace to plausible deniability when he declared that every single covert operation carried out in recent years had been approved by the White House. “All evidence in hand,” the committee report declared, “suggests that the CIA, far from being out of control, has been utterly responsive to the instructions of the President and the assistant to the president for National Security Affairs.” It was soon revealed that the source for the
Village Voice
article was Daniel Schorr. CBS immediately fired him, and the House subsequently cited him for contempt.
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There were those within and without the media who took the position that the family jewels flap was a product of post-Watergate journalism. “Had Seymour Hersh not written his CIA domestic surveillance stories for
The New York Times
in December 1974 (indeed, had not
The Times
seen fit to splash the first story across five columns of page one headlined ‘Massive Surveillance'),” wrote Timothy Hardy, a Rockefeller Commission staffer, “there seems little doubt that there never would have been a Rockefeller Commission, a Pike ‘Report,' a Church committee. . . . Hersh, and Hersh alone, caused the President, and then Congress . . . to make intelligence a major issue of 1975.”
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Shortly after the original Hersh stories appeared, the respected
Washington Post
investigative reporter Walter Pincus wrote that “no series of news stories since Watergate has had so quick an impact on government, while generating so much discussion among journalists as the Hersh pieces.” Like many other reporters of that time, Pincus had long used CIA personnel as sources of information for news stories; they were usually the best-informed Americans about any particular foreign situation. It was well known that the Agency sometimes solicited and received information from newspeople and used jobs in the industry as cover. Pincus, a friend of Hersh's, went on to show how Hersh and his editor, A. M. Rosenthal, had manipulated the scarce information they had—and had tricked Bill Colby
into confirming information that they did not have—into a story that was at the least exaggerated and then helped prompt an investigation. Indeed, the first solon to demand a congressional probe was Senator William Proxmire (D-WI), whom Hersh had called seeking comments on his initial story. “Like it or not, he [Rosenthal] and his counterpart in
The Washington Post
are participants,” Pincus declared. “The front page story selections set an agenda for government.” In early 1976, shortly after the Pike report came out, Clare Boothe Luce observed to President Ford, “The press has arrogated to itself the right of secrecy . . . [and] no one else can have it.”
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As George Bush prepared to return to the United States and face confirmation hearings, Colby did everything he could to ease the transition. “We have arranged a suitable office here and will organize secretarial, transportation, etc.,” he cabled Bush, then en route from Beijing. Colby's own office staff and the Agency's senior officers would be at his service. “Also certainly would fully brief you on on-going ballgames with Senate and House Select Committees and, of course, the substantive business of intelligence.” Bush replied that it would probably be best for him not to take up residence before his confirmation, but he gladly accepted the offer of consultations. After his arrival, the DCI-designate met almost daily with Colby and the deputy directors. “Bill Colby . . . has been extraordinarily thoughtful to me,” Bush wrote President Ford.
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The Senate confirmed Bush as director on January 28, 1976; two days later, Colby received him and President Ford at Langley. The past and future DCIs were waiting at the entrance to the Agency's auditorium and greeted Ford as he pulled up in his limousine. The three then entered the great hall, where CIA employees had assembled. Colby began: “Mr. President and Mr. Bush, I have the great honor to present to you an organization of dedicated professionals. Despite the turmoil and tumult of the past year, they continue to produce the best intelligence in the world.” He was treated to a standing ovation.

Following the swearing-in, the three emerged from the auditorium, but instead of accompanying Ford and Bush into the main office building, Colby inconspicuously walked away from them to the visitor's parking lot, where Barbara's rather dilapidated Buick Skylark was waiting. Ripples of applause followed him. An unassuming man making an unassuming exit. “It was an ending,” wrote Laurence Stern in the
Washington Post
, “that
would have done justice to George Smiley, the antihero of spy novelist John Le Carre: understated and not without its ironies.”
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Shortly thereafter, journalist Neil Sheehan visited Langley and, viewing the portraits of past directors, was struck by the contrast between the ones of Bill Donovan and Bill Colby. “It was an interesting line . . . from Donovan, the somewhat flamboyant corporation lawyer/general to Colby, the self-effacing servant of the state, dressed in a business suit as Donovan was dressed in a warrior's garb.”
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In truth, there were far more similarities between Donovan and Colby than differences. Both were warriors and covert operations addicts. And, like Donovan, Colby would remain closely associated with the CIA long after he had officially departed its ranks.

I
n the aftermath of his ouster as DCI, Bill Colby's most immediate concern was how to make a living. He had his pension from the Agency, but that would not suffice. He started a small law firm—Colby, Bailey, Werner & Associates—but also did work for the Washington firm of International Business-Government Counsellors, Inc. (IBC), doing risk analysis, that is, assessing the political stability of various nations on behalf of potential investors. He advised development projects in the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia, and did the same for Japanese businesses wanting to invest in the United States. He would write two books and numerous articles. Though it brought him little remuneration, Colby would continue to be involved with his beloved CIA for the remaining twenty years of his life. Indeed, he became a central figure in what one journalist termed “the wars of the CIA,” with Colby at the head of one faction, and James Jesus Angleton and Richard Helms the standard-bearers for the other. The split was personal, but it was also political and ideological, pitting opponents of Soviet-American détente against its supporters, disciples of the counterintelligence culture versus its critics, and political conservatives against liberals.