The Family Jewels (11 page)

Jim Angleton argued that handing mail-opening over to the FBI would not work: the Bureau would not meet CIA's needs, and the activity was about
foreign
intelligence. He insisted the game was worth the candle. On June 1, the day before the CIA director met with Postmaster General Blount, he saw Attorney General John Mitchell. A reading of the documents clearly indicates Helms sought Justice Department protection, then informed Blount of CIA's illegal operation—and
only at the point when it was in serious danger of compromise
. Thus Helms
protected
the mail intrusion project.

Director Helms's instructions after these briefings reinforce this interpretation: he told responsible officials that in
the event of a security flap or danger of a leak, Lingual was to be folded up instantly and its personnel absorbed into the agency's New York base. Almost immediately a fresh problem arose. In August 1971 the mail-openers selected a letter at random that turned out to be from Idaho Senator Frank Church. There was no Church Committee at that point, so this was not a factor, but the act of intercepting a United States senator's correspondence threatened an enormous flap. That should have triggered action according to Helms's edict. Instead, Jim Angleton merely ordered that elected officials be taken off the watch list, and any of their intercepted mail be put in a “Special Category Items” file. Angleton kept this in his personal safe. By 1973 the file contained not only the Church letter, but one from Senator Edward Kennedy, mail from a governor, another from a congressman, and a half dozen other “items.”

The power of secret knowledge can be extremely seductive. One wonders if Angleton succumbed, since there are multiple testimonials to Lingual's minimal intelligence value. His determination to keep mail-opening going in the face of mounting obstacles requires explanation. In presenting Lingual to Helms's successor, Schlesinger, Angleton made extravagant claims as to its effectiveness in identifying Soviet exchange students as Russian spies, but Lingual was hardly necessary to make that discovery.
²⁵
The other logical explanation is the utility of the mail intercepts in monitoring American citizens, both in their own right and as trading stock for dealing with the FBI. (In today's context we have to wonder what the National Security Agency and others do with the intercepts they must have acquired of officials and prominent citizens.)

Meanwhile, Postal Inspector William J. Cotter's discomfort continued to rise. In 1972 Cotter let it be known he no longer felt bound by his CIA secrecy agreement and intended to rescind Post Office Department understandings with the
agency. This raised hackles at Langley, since neutralizing Cotter now required Helms to approach the postmaster general and renegotiate the original arrangement. Then James Angleton lost his benefactor when President Nixon sent Helms to Iran as ambassador, appointing James Schlesinger as the Director of Central Intelligence. Angleton's bid for redemption, assembling the most comprehensive overview of HT/Lingual yet put to paper, argued the CI chief's case solely on the basis of counterespionage against the Soviets, mentioning “radicals” and “dissidents” only in the context of alleged Russian connections. Agency executive director William E. Colby used this paper in February 1973 to brief Schlesinger and his deputy, showing them samples of the “take.” Director Schlesinger was not impressed and said so. Rather than go back to the well at the Post Office, he ordered that CIA induce the FBI to take over the mail-opening, or, failing that, terminate it.

This proved the end of HT/Lingual—except for the investigations, inquiries, and history. In the after-years, despite Church and all of that, Langley remained sensitive to its legal jeopardy from this excess. Agency censors used their authority to protect Langley. Restricted to deletions of information damaging to national security when they declassify documents, the censors instead deleted so as to hide the CIA's liability. During the Year of Intelligence, William Cotter indeed testified before a panel of the House Judiciary Committee. Langley's Office of Legislative Counsel reported on March 20, 1975, that Cotter's testimony on Project Lingual was about to be released, and that the Post Office official had furnished “a complete picture of the mail intercept program,” which revealed which senior officials had been aware of it. As late as 2005—thirty years after the fact—the CIA censors still pretended that the fact Mr. Cotter had spoken out, and the sparse details the congressional liaison office had included of what he said, were proper national security “secrets.”
²⁶
Langley's Project Lingual files were destroyed in 1990 on instructions from CIA's General Counsel. When the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board sought them later that decade, the CIA could find only a few working files that survived.

It is obvious why mail-opening became a Family Jewel. Even the agency acknowledged its flap potential. In addition to criminality and social reprehensibility, the mail-opening illustrates other dangers inherent in intelligence activity. Project Lingual moved through the classic stages of a covert operation: begun for discrete purposes it expanded, became routinized, attracted even less oversight, pushed beyond original boundaries, and ended up as another surveillance program threatening constitutional rights. The communications surveillance projects also demonstrate the tremendous difficulty of bringing secret operations back under control. Senior officials repeatedly resisted terminating—or even cutting back—the project. It is hugely significant that operatives disdained matters of legality—almost as an afterthought, one related merely to the viability of their cover story. But the projects were certainly illegal. From Day 1. And the CIA knew it. That is a black thought.

Finally, the surveillance evolved with the technology: at the beginning, when letters were a primary form of communication, while another was cables and telegrams, the CIA served as the intrusive agent for the letter operation, while the National Security Agency monitored the electronic forms, as will be seen shortly. When communications monitoring returned, the public had shifted to the computer and cell phone for its vehicles, and the spooks followed suit. Recent monitoring has been NSA all the way. The Family Jewel would be polished anew in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Here may be the place for a general point about CIA's internal controls, specifically on the function of the agency Inspector General. This treatment of an assortment of CIA activities, Project Lingual not least among them, reveals details of a good half dozen IG reviews of projects. Two concerned Lingual, another the assassination plots, others the agency's chemical experiments or the drug trafficking in Southeast Asia. In all these inquiries the focus remained on CIA
efficiency
, not the legality of operations. Though the IG's investigators took pains later to argue they had called for termination of various activities, never once was their expressed aim to eliminate illegalities. And actions often proved less than advertised. With Lingual the recommendation was not to terminate the project, but to pass it along to the FBI. On assassinations (see
Chapter 6
) the aim of investigation was purely to assess flap potential.

The IG had no authority to enforce his recommendations or to review their implementation, except as authorized by the CIA director. Worse, completion of an IG inquiry was often represented as certification that some episode had been “covered,” whereupon the underlying records were destroyed. This happened with evidence of both CIA assassinations and interrogations before the Year of Intelligence. Agency arguments at that time that its programs were monitored effectively by the internal apparatus were disingenuous at best.

Not until the 1990s, when a system of presidentially appointed Inspectors General replaced the internal mechanism, was there a significant advance in this area. Some of the most valuable oversight work accomplished in recent years resided in the IG's investigations, some retrospective, some current, of drug trafficking, the Guatemalan hit squads, the shootdown of American missionaries by the Peruvian air force under a CIA project (not covered here), and its inquiries into Bush-era rendition and interrogation programs.

But the independent Inspector General still has important limitations. Most important is that the IG is seen as an adversary by operators. An Inspector General seeking to preserve a modicum of comity is thus tempted to get along by going along. Next is the IG's limited investigative capability. Line agency officers try to avoid assignment to the IG, where they are obliged to challenge colleagues—who may be their superiors later on—about controversial matters, with potentially career-ending consequences. The most experienced officers with the deepest current knowledge are in short supply whereas an IG tour is not “career enhancing.” The solution of rotating line officers through the IG has limitations, since the careerists' recourse is to pull punches during investigations. Less effective field officers, young lawyers plus senior field officers on their final tours, round out the IG complement. The operating units believe IG inquiries are one-sided efforts to take them down. Tension abounds in these inquiries.

A CIA director has the ability to compel the excision of sensitive information from an IG report to Congress. This sets up a dynamic reinforcing the Inspector General's incentive not to be seen to be off the reservation, thus limiting the effectiveness of investigations. The spooks' counterattack against the IG would be seen during the war on terror, when a spate of leaks divulged details of CIA rendition and interrogation programs (
Chapter 5
). Senior line officers suspected the IG's office as the source. In May 2007 CIA Director Michael Hayden put an aide, Robert Dietz, to work on an inquiry into the Inspector General's office. The agency instituted more than a dozen measures to prevent the IG from going too far, and created an ombudsman to handle the cases of officers who felt the IG had dealt unfairly with them. It is noteworthy that the inquiry began when the Inspector General delivered an opinion that CIA's destruction of evidence of illegal methods in prisoner interrogations might constitute an obstruction of justice. This sally constituted a disturbing shot across
the bow. The conclusion must be that the effectiveness of CIA Inspectors General remains limited.

Meanwhile, the technology continued to advance. In the mid-1960s telephone electronic switching came into widespread use, supplanting older manual systems and greatly improving the speed and convenience of phone service. More and more communications began to move by these means, to include both the phone and written communications—in the form of cables and telexes—that passed by wire or microwave. In the United States it is the National Security Agency (NSA) that has responsibility for this intelligence work. The NSA, too, had its domestic programs—ones revealed only in the heat of the Year of Intelligence. To put that differently, NSA domestic intrusions would have evaded any accountability at all but for the fact that U.S. intelligence was already under scrutiny. Of all the investigations of this season of inquiry,
only
those on electronic monitoring led to new law to regulate intelligence activity.

Actually the National Security Agency had
two
major programs. The first was known at Fort Meade, NSA headquarters, as Project Shamrock. It had been born in the fires of World War II when the United States was anxious to learn what German, Italian, and Japanese representatives in the U.S. were reporting home. Intelligence officers simply went to the major companies and asked that extra copies of cables be made for authorities. Following the war the United States persisted. So Project Shamrock had been underway even before the National Security Agency existed. Created in 1952, the NSA inherited Project Shamrock.

The transmission companies—Western Union International, RCA Global Communications, and ITT World Communications—continued to participate. Literally millions of private communications changed hands. Like tampering
with U.S. mail, accessing these cables was a criminal offense. The companies were assured by senior Pentagon officials in 1947 and again in 1949 that they were in no legal jeopardy from their participation. Under the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S. Code §605, and 18 U.S.C. §952), the cable companies, as common carriers, had a duty to protect traffic, and federal employees who furnished or published any code or material between a foreign government and its diplomatic mission in the United States were also subject to criminal penalties. Congress had made an exception for demands from lawful authority, but this was never defined to include NSA codebreakers, and the law had never been clarified by court case.

After the war the U.S. government actually considered seeking amendment of Section 605, but avoided this until 1968, when an exception was written into the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act (18 U.S.C. §2511 (3)). NSA lawyers gave congressional staff their opinions when lawmakers were drafting this legislation. In addition, in 1950 the United States enacted amendments to the Espionage Act (18 U.S.C. §798) that recognized communications intelligence as a government activity—but that statute merely provided for punishing individuals who divulged information, remaining silent on the legality of this type of intelligence collection per se. Thus, for most of this period Project Shamrock proceeded secretly and on shaky legal grounds. The ITT company actually dropped out of the program in 1969. The FBI involved itself too—“G-men” physically carried the telegrams starting in 1963.

By one account pairs of men, one FBI, the other NSA, would visit the cable companies very early each morning to pick up stacks of accumulated cables. Cooperating employees were paid fifty dollars a week. Technology evolved. The cable companies switched from punched paper strips to magnetic tape recordings. They were happy to continue
cooperating, but reluctant to relinquish the tapes. The code-breakers suddenly needed to make copies of the tapes, which meant a physical presence in New York City. Deputy Director Louis Tordella of NSA met with CIA's Tom Karamessines on August 18, 1966. From September 1 until August 31, 1973, the CIA's Project LP/Medley furnished NSA with corporate cover and office space in lower Manhattan. There the code-breakers made their copies. The FBI also continued to bring NSA “drop copies” of cables until 1973. The NSA finally canceled Shamrock in May 1975.