The Family Jewels (22 page)

Abe Rosenthal wondered what could be so embarrassing. Jerry Ford blurted out the first thing that came into his head. Barely two weeks before, Henry Kissinger, William E. Colby, and Lawrence Silberman—the latter referring to “unique questions”—had all warned the president on the assassinations matter, and Ford had discussed the subject privately with Richard Helms. Ford, of course, had been a member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the Kennedy
assassination, and he could not help but know of the charges of plots that had swirled around the tragedy for years. Gerald Ford had himself written a book about the Kennedy assassination. So he was especially attuned to the assassinations issue. At lunch, answering Rosenthal, the president replied, “Assassinations!” Later Ford asked to keep this—plus remarks he'd made about Dick Helms—off the record.

The
New York Times
officials debated what to do. Typically news is placed “off the record” by prior understanding, not subsequent appeal. The journalists decided to honor the president's request anyway. But, Washington gossip being what it is, rumors soon spread about Ford's remark.
¹
Sy Hersh learned about the conversation, but
Times
editors prevailed on him to keep quiet. Another who heard was Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) reporter Daniel Schorr. He thought the rumor concerned domestic assassinations and spent weeks in a fruitless search for possible cases. Schorr even sought evidence on a New York traffic accident in which Soviet diplomats had died. But he could find nothing. Then, late in February, the CIA accepted Schorr's long-standing request for an interview with Director Colby. The encounter took place on February 27 and mostly concerned Watergate (
Chapter 9
). Toward the end of their conversation the journalist sought to draw Colby out, venturing that he heard Ford had a problem with the CIA on assassinations. Schorr asked if the agency had ever killed anyone in the United States.

“Not in this country,” Bill Colby answered.

The next day Daniel Schorr recorded an item for Walter Cronkite's
CBS Evening News
that reported, “President Ford has reportedly warned associates that if current investigations go too far they could uncover several assassinations of foreign officials involving CIA.”
²
According to historian Kathryn Olmstead, this news transformed the Year of Intelligence.
³
Bill Colby began a fight to prevent, then marginalize, inquiries into Langley's role in assassinations. President
Ford may have disagreed with Colby's approach to other aspects of the investigations, but on this they were as one. Officially the president was responsive. But Ford counted on his staffers Jack Marsh and Roderick Hills to carry the torch for a minimization strategy inside the White House, and on Nelson Rockefeller to hold the line within his commission.

Rockefeller did not succeed. His key opponent became David W. Belin, the inquiry's executive director, handpicked by the president. Belin had served the Warren Commission as assistant counsel, so he had Ford's confidence. Bringing the Iowa lawyer into the Rockefeller group had seemed a safe choice. But the Kennedy investigation and Warren Commission had sensitized Belin to all manner of assassination issues, and instead he made the CIA plots a special concern. Later, in mid-March, the vice president ran into Daniel Schorr at the National Airport and disclosed that conversations with Ford had convinced him to look at assassinations, but under a formula that amounted to examining only those that had included major activity or training inside the United States.

The Rockefeller Commission staff sent Langley a general requirement for a listing of possible unlawful activities. Belin drew on the Colby Report to request data on many specific items, things like Projects Chaos or Merrimac. One thing they got back was the Family Jewels documents, but with blank pages. Belin asked his CIA liaison, Deputy Director E. H. (“Hank”) Knoche, what material was missing, and the latter replied that the deleted items concerned things that fell outside the commission charter. Belin was incensed. Like any good investigator, he was not about to let someone else decide what was germane to his inquiry. The lawyer used the commission's authority to go out to Langley and read the full text. Mentions of the CIA and the Mafia leaped out at
him. Belin began a battle for jurisdiction to put the agency's assassination plots under the microscope.

Parsing the language of Rockefeller's charter, David Belin argued strenuously to include this matter. That debate was underway when Daniel Schorr revealed the assassination story he had gotten from Colby. The dam broke. President Ford was obliged to widen the commission's scope and extend its deadline by two months specifically to cover assassinations. Vice President Rockefeller then imposed his convoluted formula, and his executive director countered by lobbying the commission members. Governor Ronald Reagan became a strong supporter. Alert to the political ramifications of assassination plotting, Reagan insisted they be examined. Agency historian Nicolas Dujmovic finds that Governor Reagan's view persuaded most of his colleagues, who voted down Rockefeller when the commissioners considered whether to put this on their agenda, and they rejected the vice president's narrow formula.
⁴

With jurisdiction settled, Belin pitched in. Buried in CIA's responses to various requests were snippets of data, including an admission that plans had been made to assassinate foreign leaders. The Family Jewels had a bit more. David Belin collected key documents, including the Inspector General report of 1967, and sent his assistant, R. Mason Cargill, to fish through agency files. Henry Kissinger played his usual game, dragging his feet until the commission's deadline neared, then furnishing a few National Security Council papers. Those of the “special group” managing covert operations were denied. That grudging bit of cooperation was secured only after Vice President Rockefeller interceded with Kissinger's deputy, Brent Scowcroft.

Rockefeller's investigators did talk to national security advisors Gordon Gray, McGeorge Bundy, and Walt Rostow. Belin interviewed a range of CIA officials, including the security chief who had supervised early plots against Castro, the
head of the clandestine service at the time, the field officer who had led the first “executive action” unit, the case officer responsible for one of the more advanced schemes, and former CIA director John McCone. Belin extended his analysis to include plots against leaders of the Congo, Dominican Republic, and Indonesia. He tried to assemble case studies.

By mid-April 1975, Belin expected to have a draft report ready at the end of the month. On the 15th he met with White House aide James A. Wilderotter to discuss the commission's status. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the Church Committee had filed requests for a wide array of documents, some of them now held by the Rockefeller Commission. Belin had no problem with passing the materials along once the commission had completed its work. In the course of the conversation he mentioned his “special preliminary report” on assassinations.
⁵
Wilderotter passed that information up the line. On May 12 commissioner Douglas Dillon told the press that the Rockefeller report would include discussion of assassinations. Belin labored on his paper, intended as a chapter in the final report, into late May, delayed by the sluggish responses to his requests. Dillon's affirmation, however, would be retracted two weeks later.

White House intervention made the difference. When the commission met to review the assassinations draft, Rockefeller objected that the State Department—headed by his friend Henry Kissinger—felt this discussion of assassinations would not be appropriate in the commission's report. According to David Belin, Rockefeller learned of Kissinger's concern directly from Gerald Ford. This time the commission backed Rockefeller. Belin then planned a news conference where he would disclose the assassination findings. The day before this event, upon seeing Belin's intended release, Dick Cheney and Phil Buchen both intervened. They conceded Belin's appearance was up to him, but given Kissinger's position that disclosure “was not in the best interests of the
country,” and that Belin would be taken as a spokesman for the Rockefeller Commission, the event could be very damaging. Belin reluctantly desisted. In retrospect he felt he had made a major mistake.
⁶

On June 9 President Ford presided over a public commemoration of the Rockefeller Commission's achievement, noting its records would be passed to the Church Committee, and that the Rockefeller report was being prepared for publication. That “preparation” amounted to an extensive rewrite. One thing that ended up on the cutting room floor was assassination plots. The only discussion to appear in the Rockefeller Commission report was its treatment of John F. Kennedy's murder. Presidential lawyer Roderick Hills worked hard on this. Gerald Ford appointed Hills to head the Securities and Exchange Commission shortly afterwards. David Belin returned to Des Moines to resume his law practice. There he filed a Freedom of Information Act request for many records he had seen during the Rockefeller investigation.

David Belin's suppressed report ran to eighty-six pages of densely packed detail. It found CIA discussion of, but no action in, the death of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba; discussion of, but only a preliminary search for an assassin in, the plot against Indonesian leader Achmed Sukarno; action, including the provision of weapons, in the death of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo; and an extensive record of activities aimed at Fidel Castro. Investigators found no record of presidential approval for any of this. McGeorge Bundy vaguely recalled talk of plots against Castro but did not remember any recommendation to okay one, and added that he would be surprised if the CIA had moved without coming to him first. Gordon Gray and Walt Rostow insisted they had never discussed assassinations with anyone. In his conclusion Belin wrote, “It is against the constitutional and moral principles for which this Republic stands for there to be any direct or indirect participation of any agency of the
United States Government in any plans involving the assassination of any person in peacetime.”
⁷

This document was retrieved from Dick Cheney's Fordera White House files.

The Belin report, his notes and interviews, and other records held by the Rockefeller Commission, went to the Church Committee a few weeks later—not without some more fighting for custody, but that is less important. “For the committee,” staffer Loch Johnson notes, “access to these documents was equivalent to finding the Rosetta stone.”
⁸
Fortified by this evidence, the Senate investigators at once advanced their inquiries. With fresh leads, documents, and the power of the subpoena, the Church Committee interviewed seventy-five witnesses and compiled eight thousand pages of sworn testimony. It sought to get to the bottom of the United States government's complicity—and that of the CIA—in murder. The subject was an obvious Family Jewel.

When it came to “dirty tricks,” it is remarkable how many threads led back to Colonel Sheffield Edwards. The Church Committee never could discover them all, for the colonel passed away just a few weeks after it received the Rockefeller documents. Investigators were left only with the interview Edwards had given David Belin and the committee's own preliminary talk with the colonel, one that took place days before Rockefeller's people closed up shop and before the senators knew what to ask. Already quite ill, Sheffield Edwards died on July 12, having dropped the bombshell that CIA Director Allen W. Dulles and his deputy for operations, Richard M. Bissell, had ordered him to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Formally responsible for security at the Central Intelligence Agency until 1963, Edwards seems to have functioned
as a sort of Mr. Odd Jobs for dark work. Nothing in his background obviously equipped the colonel for this. Filled with patriotism at the height of the Great War, Edwards had obtained an appointment to West Point. “Shef,” as he was known, compensated for his stutter with finesse. He had been an artillery officer, a staff marvel, and chief of staff for air units. In World War II he had earned the Bronze Star, risen to full colonel, and ended up as a section leader on Omar Bradley's Twelfth Army Group intelligence staff. After the war Edwards joined the Central Intelligence Group, the progenitor of CIA, where he worked well with its brilliant boss, General Hoyt Vandenberg. He continued as chief of security while the CIA grew and matured. Colonel Edwards managed the buildup as the Office of Security expanded from a tiny appendage of thirty-five officers to an apparatus of seven hundred persons.

This was the story of a conscientious man, a successful military officer and agency official with a sterling record. Yet there was another side to Sheffield Edwards. The FBI viewed CIA with suspicion from the beginning, when the agency took over its operations in Latin America and poached its G-men. Bureau people had difficulty talking to agency officers. Shef Edwards stepped into the breach, becoming the contact for Bureau liaison Cartha DeLoach, to the degree that some agency officers saw him as J. Edgar Hoover's spy inside the CIA. In his security role Edwards participated in the persecution of Carmel Offie, hounded out of the agency as a homosexual—a security risk—in 1950. That might have been in keeping with the times, but in 1953 “Wild Bill” Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services and a major mover in the CIA's creation, discovered he was being followed around Bangkok, where Donovan was by then the United States ambassador to Thailand. He traced the action to Shef's CIA office. Yet Colonel Edwards had been the
agency's emissary to Wild Bill for several years. Unknown to Donovan, Edwards had been communicating with the FBI about the spy chieftain's “loyalty” for some time.

Near the end of his career Edwards had a piece in another bit of skullduggery, the witch hunt that unfairly marked Peter Karlow, CIA's first station chief in Moscow, as a Soviet agent. It was the dawn of the spy war that sucked in Yuri Nosenko and crippled CIA espionage.