The Family Jewels (27 page)

When the stories began to appear on April 25, 1966, CIA headquarters dispatched a global alert to its stations instructing them to report back which specific items in the
Times
articles got the most attention in their countries. Langley also furnished talking points for station personnel to rebut the stories. Both McCone and Rusk remained angry at the
Times
for the newspaper's simple exercise of its Fourth Estate role. Meanwhile, quite apart from CIA's efforts to counter the series within the United States, it crafted a campaign to neutralize the reporting in the lands affected by the
Times
revelations. The agency succeeded on at least one front—after publication of the articles, Richard Helms and Tracy Barnes met with top
Times
officials and convinced them to drop plans for a book expanding on the series.

It was now that CIA effectively went to war against
Ramparts
, a San Francisco–based journal of political commentary.
Ramparts
opposed the Vietnam war and the CIA's
foreign adventures and commissioned articles that struck at agency operations. One, in June 1966, exposed the Vietnam activities of a group of Michigan State University consultants, as well as their work in tandem with the CIA and role providing cover employment for agency personnel. Written by a disaffected former project coordinator and one of the magazine's editors, the exposé was authoritative. Langley obtained advance knowledge of this
Ramparts
article. Admiral William F. Raborn, in his last months as director, demanded a briefing on the magazine and authors from his Office of Security.
¹²
With a couple of days of name checks the spooks pulled together scraps of information from agency files on as many as 40 percent of
Ramparts
writers and staff. Howard Osborn could tell Raborn that the journal had morphed from a religious magazine to one of political commentary, and maintained offices in New York, Paris, and Munich. It had more than fifty staff, among them two members of the Communist Party of the United States. But all that digging yielded no gold, and in May 1966 the CIA was obliged to tell Walt W. Rostow that
Ramparts
had no identifiable foreign communist ties.

A couple of
Ramparts
editors, including one of the article's authors, Robert Scheer, planned to run for Congress opposing the Vietnam war. Richard Helms, shortly to be elevated to CIA director, immediately passed this to the Johnson White House and bent more effort to burrowing into the journal's universe. By then Langley had developed dossiers on the editors and had begun probing its freelance writers. On June 16 Admiral Raborn asked Osborn to advise the FBI that
Ramparts
ought to be investigated as a subversive threat. The security chief complied, telling the Bureau that CIA would be interested in any “derogatory material” it turned up. The FBI investigation of Robert Scheer undoubtedly had a negative impact on his campaign. He indeed lost the election. The CIA's role in this has not been established.

Not long afterwards Mr. Helms succeeded Admiral Raborn at the head of the agency. The focus of the
Ramparts
operation shifted from Osborn's office to CIA's Counterintelligence (CI) Staff. Agency officer Richard Ober, assigned to CI upon completing the course at the National War College, took charge of the files. The CI Staff put nine professionals, later a dozen, to work on this project. Eventually they accumulated files on 127 freelance writers, staff, and editors and almost 200 others associated in some way with
Ramparts
. Another agency unit, the Domestic Contact Service, supplied data on
Ramparts
writers and employees through its San Francisco field office. These files later formed the nucleus of the CIA's entire operation to monitor domestic political dissent (
Chapter 3
).

Meanwhile, Edmund Applewhite coordinated operational activity against
Ramparts
. Applewhite recalled, “I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. . . . We were not in the least inhibited by the fact that the CIA had no internal role in the United States.”
¹³
There were efforts to dissuade advertisers and weaken the magazine's subscriber base, but the agency could do little about the most important source of
Ramparts
's funding—investments by the publisher Edward Keating. Langley tried to persuade the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to audit Keating's tax returns only to learn the tax enforcers had already done that—for both funder and the magazine itself, and for Robert Scheer—over several years running. The enforcers' actions had had no impact on
Ramparts
people.

In January 1967 the CIA learned—again in advance—that
Ramparts
was on the verge of revealing that the agency secretly funded the National Student Association, an explosive charge that explicitly showed Langley engaged in illegal domestic activity. (At the time, membership dues accounted for as little as $18,000 of the association's $800,000 annual budget—about $5.2 million in 2010 dollars.) The news
electrified Applewhite's unit. CIA redoubled efforts to get at
Ramparts
through the IRS. The key meeting between agency officials and Thomas Terry, special assistant to the IRS commissioner, took place on February 1, 1967—before
Ramparts
even blew the whistle. The CI Staff supplied tax investigators with inside information on the magazine's backers. By mid-month Langley had a copy of Keating's tax return. Almost simultaneously, on February 14,
Ramparts
disclosed its findings in full-page ads in both the
New York Times
and
Washington Post
, with front-page articles in both newspapers discussing the facts.
¹⁴

Foreknowledge—and the desire to learn about the money that fed
Ramparts
—led the CIA to reach out to the IRS anew. The agency now asked to see
Ramparts
's corporate tax returns and asked for an IRS briefing on its taxes, illegal under U.S. law. Langley planted articles elsewhere to discredit
Ramparts
. Its operations against the magazine included recruiting a source who reported on staff meetings and advertising accounts, attempting to recruit former employees, priming a CIA asset with answers to feed
Ramparts
reporters who were to interview him, and using the feedback to plan further suppressive maneuvers. Completed on April 5, 1967, more than forty years ago, this plan aimed at Americans, not a foreign enemy, and it remains secret today. It is said to have included recommendations to induce funders to desist, pressure on advertisers to drop
Ramparts
as a venue, and smearing the magazine with phony stories planted in other media. Articles of this ilk actually did appear in the
Washington Star
and in the weekly
Human Events
.
¹⁵
Domestic activity, including this kind of propaganda placement, is prohibited to the agency. Edmund Applewhite would be promoted to CIA Deputy Inspector General.

Yet
Ramparts
's revelation of agency funding of the student association triggered a wave of public concern that overwhelmed such attacks. Further disclosures quickly
followed—Langley's money flowing through private foundations, secret subsidies to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Then came President Johnson's order to halt CIA funding to any and all youth or student groups, followed by a presidential commission review of agency relationships with private and voluntary organizations. The atmosphere became too charged, further suppressive maneuvers against
Ramparts
too sensitive. After the first wave of CIA countermeasures, the plan would be filed away, though the Ober unit went on to more intrusive work against American political groups and private persons (
Chapter 3
).

During the Watergate era the CIA would be extraordinarily touchy about all manner of allegations. Notes of the director's staff meetings are replete with entries regarding the leak of the Pentagon Papers, agency involvement in Watergate itself, and other charges against the CIA. These were often put on the list for debunking. A typical example is legislative liaison John Maury's July 1972 paper on the CIA and drug trafficking, which surveys charges made by various journalists and authors over the period from April 1970 to July 1972. In the face of elaborately detailed charges, the CIA's entire defense was the summary assertion in one sentence that “Intensive investigation has revealed that each of the above, and similar, allegations which have come to our attention are unfounded.”
¹⁶
There had in fact been an Inspector General (IG) survey made on the drug accusations, but that IG report is not mentioned nor are its detailed findings relayed, possibly because they
confirmed
the charges in at least one aspect—that employees of the CIA proprietary Air America had carried drugs on their planes during agency flights (the IG disputed whether this was witting and argued the pilots had no control over what people brought on board the aircraft). Executive Director William E. Colby made
similar denials in a letter to the editor published in
Atlantic
magazine. But by the summer of 1972 the atmosphere in the United States had passed the point where summary denials were going to get the Central Intelligence Agency off the hook. Its own leadership was to blame for not, in the phrase of CIA baron and Helms intimate Cord Meyer, Jr., facing reality.

Debunking was pretty much standard fare for government agencies stung by media reporting, but, as with
Ramparts
, CIA suppressive maneuvers repeatedly went further. See what happened in 1964 when authors David Wise and Thomas B. Ross published their book
The Invisible Government
.
¹⁷
The Wise and Ross work would be considered pretty tame fare today. But, inspired by the spectacular failure at the Bay of Pigs and the authors' sense that behind the scenes certain agencies operated far differently than their official images suggested, they sought to penetrate the façade of U.S. intelligence. Their book discussed the Defense Intelligence Agency and NSA as well as the CIA and included a discussion of agency efforts to use the Peace Corps for cover. Wise and Ross were the first to go beyond the heroic image of CIA covert operations in Iran and Guatemala—or the opposite in Cuba—to present such cases as Burma, Indonesia, and Laos, pairing tales of derring-do with a discussion of the struggle to control the agency.

Langley's operatives had managed to obtain—“covertly,” Wise recalls—a copy of the galleys for the book. Desperate to quash it, CIA officials went to the Department of Justice, where they saw Deputy Attorney General Nicolas deB. Katzenbach. More than two decades later a select committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy, questioned Katzenbach on the treatment of Russian defector Yuri Nosenko (
Chapter 5
), on which the agency also consulted him. Katzenbach could
not recall the Nosenko matter, but what he did remember was the CIA effort to suppress publication: “Whenever they wanted a book suppressed they came to me and I told them not to do it.”
¹⁸
The works concerned were
The Invisible Government
and Haynes Johnson's history that would be titled
The Bay of Pigs
.

The authors learned the CIA had their manuscript when John McCone invited them to lunch. They found McCone to be a “wonderfully polite man.” But once the plates were cleared, the CIA boss took out a paper that listed ten “national security breaches,” which he demanded they remove from their text. Tom Ross noticed the paper was stamped “Top Secret” at the top and bottom—something that leaped out in those days, since classification markings were applied by rubber stamp using bright red ink. “Mr. McCone,” Ross replied, “we don't deal in classified documents.” They could not possibly take the CIA's list with them. Suddenly agency Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick appeared from a side door and, with scissors, snipped off the offending markings. But the CIA's exercise in instant declassification proved futile—Wise and Ross did not change a thing.
¹⁹

Director McCone then discussed the book with President Johnson at some length when they met privately on May 20, 1964. Aside from warning the president that
The Invisible Government
might damage agencies beyond the CIA, McCone confirmed to Johnson that he had asked Wise and Ross for changes. More than that, he told the president, McCone had intervened with their editor at Random House, Robert Loomis, even threatening him with espionage charges. When Loomis persevered, the CIA chief approached corporate executives, and he also complained to the publisher of
Look
magazine, which was about to run an excerpt. McCone judged he had failed, and pressed LBJ to enter the fray with a public condemnation at a news conference.
Lyndon Baines Johnson, ever attuned to personal image, refrained from doing so.
²⁰

Langley then offered to buy every copy of the book. Random House countered that it would see the book to print no matter what the agency did.

The president might have been careful, but the Central Intelligence Agency was in panic mode. An ad hoc group formed to deal with the fallout. It recommended mobilizing agency assets to ensure that
The Invisible Government
received poor reviews. An all-stations cable went out over McCone's signature ordering additional counteraction. Propaganda staff at headquarters crafted a phony “book review” to be planted in the foreign press. What seemed so sensitive to Langley was Wise and Ross's affirmation in the book that all covert operations were approved by a White House Special Group, revealing that all such ventures were, in effect, approved by the president. The CIA propaganda mavens concocted a counterargument that, according to agency veteran Joseph B. Smith, “contained a view of the president's office which would have forced James Madison to rewrite the
Federalist Papers
.”
²¹
Smith would have known. His duty post prior to assignment in Argentina had been with the propaganda staff. A decade later, with the CIA under fire as a “rogue elephant” beyond presidential control, the data in
The Invisible Government
would have helped the spy barons. All hands ignored the lesson that national security “damage” was in the eye of the beholder.