The Family Jewels (34 page)

Phil Agee was no model for Frank Snepp. He regarded the Latin Americanist as a turncoat. Despite Langley's efforts to lump them together, Snepp began in channels, filing reports through CIA from Bangkok, later speaking of his experiences to agency audiences and at the Foreign Service Institute. He agitated to obtain high-level review of his charges. Snepp determined to write about what had happened only after efforts to follow procedure failed to produce a meaningful post mortem or any reforms, and began by actually asking permission to write a book on the end in Vietnam. Superiors turned him down primarily to avoid having a strong critique of Kissinger and company emerge from the Central Intelligence Agency.

As it became clear to Snepp that he would never be permitted to tell his story inside the CIA, intermediaries began to approach publishers on his behalf, and a deal was soon made
with Robert Loomis at Random House, the same editor who had handled
The Invisible Government
. Snepp resigned from the agency in January 1976 to write his book without interference, and he decided not to submit the manuscript to CIA review. Supplied with chapter and verse on how Langley had sought to interfere with the Wise and Ross project, Snepp handled the writing process much like a spy operation. There were telephone codes, secret meetings, cutouts to hand over portions of the material, and so on. By these means Frank Snepp successfully contrived to get his book,
Decent Interval
, into the bookstores without Langley learning its contents.

Snepp reached his goal in the face of CIA's efforts to block him. As had happened with Agee, an active surveillance program was proposed, this time by Ted Shackley, now in the exalted position of head of CIA's operations directorate. The Office of Security refused to go the whole way, but it allowed “volunteers” to keep track of Snepp's comings and goings. This began within a month of the officer's resignation. Moreover, watch officers and agency group chiefs were put on the lookout for Snepp, alerted that he was writing a book that would not be put up for review. People were warned not to talk to the former officer. One who did was Bill Colby, now retired, who had been a close friend of Frank's father in law school. But Colby—who would have his own little problem with CIA publication review—saw Snepp to counsel him not to rock the boat. Former friend and Saigon station chief Tom Polgar, and CIA deputy director Hank Knoche, also met with Snepp to talk him down. Knoche informed agency director George H. W. Bush that Frank Snepp's revelations had the potential to damage the CIA. By the fall of 1976, Snepp was being looked at as a counterintelligence problem, which, as Snepp writes, “meant I was to be treated as a hostile foreign spy.”
⁷

At this point Joseph Smith's
Portrait of a Cold Warrior
suddenly hit the bookstores, triggering a new flap. Smith too
had evaded prepublication review, and in his case the CIA had been completely unaware of the book until it appeared. Security officers quickly found fault with it. Agency lawyer Anthony Lapham tried to get Smith's publisher, Putnam, to pull the book for a CIA review, and while Putnam was amenable, so many copies had already shipped that no censor's pen could prevent its contents becoming known. Langley then considered suing Smith for breach of contract à la Marchetti, but CIA lawyers decided that would merely draw attention and ensure even more people read the book. The net result was the agency abandoned any action against Joseph Smith. Then the CIA was further embarrassed by the revelations of former contract officer John Stockwell, whose article on shoddy covert work in Angola was scathing. Langley's fury was white-hot. Snepp and Stockwell, their books yet to appear, became the targets.

In October 1976 OGC lawyer John Greaney—the same fellow involved in both the Marchetti and Agee affairs—sent Snepp a letter demanding access to his work. Greaney insisted the agency veteran was violating secrecy agreements and enclosed copies. By Snepp's account, this was the first time he'd seen his 1968 contracts since signing them, and he had been assured when leaving the agency that a less-demanding end-of-service agreement was the only one that applied. Moreover, in the original contract a CIA employee was assured the agency's Inspector General was ready to hear any complaint. In addition, five of Snepp's six secrecy agreements constrained only
classified
writings, and he intended a popular account, one that was not secret. Snepp and his publisher considered that the CIA had nullified the original contract by failing to let him air his grievances, and none of the other contracts applied. The agency primed its own guns, enlisting Admiral Stansfield Turner, its new director, to seek legal action. In March 1977 that recommendation went to the Justice Department.

Decent Interval
appeared in November 1977. By then Bill Colby's memoir
Honorable Men
was in the hands of its publisher, and Colby, too, had violated CIA protocol by sending it in ahead of the agency review. Worse, Colby's manuscript was being translated for a French edition, and pieces the CIA demanded be lopped off the English-language narrative survived in French. The agency took no action at all against its former director. Nor did authorities act against former Saigon ambassador Graham Martin, whose car, recovered after being stolen, was found with a trunk full of authentic secret documents. But the full weight of the law descended on Frank Snepp, who had used phony names to protect agency colleagues and taken other measures to safeguard secrets—though he had given an unvarnished account of the intelligence reporting flowing in and out of Saigon, embarrassing as it was, and going to his central point. Simultaneously with the first rush of media attention, the CIA issued statements misleading the public that the veteran had reneged on an express promise to submit for review. By the time Snepp appeared on the television program
60 Minutes
, Langley had put it out that Director Turner was discussing prosecution with DOJ attorneys. The CIA also resorted to the now-standard tactic of cabling all stations instructions on how to handle Snepp's revelations—in this case he should be painted as an embezzler, someone who had
stolen
information.

The government filed suit in February 1978. Allegations about avoiding CIA publication review or disclosing secrets were not even pursued—either avenue would have enabled the defendant to contrast the action against him with the government's complete failure to act against Colby, Martin, or Joseph Smith. So the legal complaint against Snepp stipulated that it did
not
consider that
Decent Interval
contained
any
classified information. Instead, the Justice Department argued that Snepp had
profited
from CIA information—so that income from his book should be seized—and for the
future he should be subject to a formal legal stricture to clear his writings. At base, the effort to cast this case as a contract violation shifted the ground. Although normally a showing of actual monetary damage is required by contract law, here the “national security” argument was employed to equate damage to the full amount of the author's earnings, whatever they might be. In July 1978 a judgment was rendered against Snepp that accepted all the government's arguments. Eight months later the federal Circuit Court for the District of Columbia affirmed the finding in every important respect. Snepp petitioned the Supreme Court to take his case on First Amendment grounds. In February 1980, without ever hearing arguments, the Supreme Court issued a summary judgment against him.

In the meantime, the CIA used Frank Snepp, as it had Philip Agee, this time in a campaign to further reinforce its ability to restrict information access on grounds of protecting intelligence sources and methods. One aspect was to seek new exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act. The other was to tighten secrecy agreements, even though Admiral Turner conceded that the Justice Department believed existing criminal statutes gave it all the authority necessary in this area. As Turner put it to Zbigniew Brzezinski in an October 23, 1979, memorandum, “It is imperative that some visible action be taken promptly in this area.”
⁸

By the summer of 1980, the CIA had completely reworked the texts of existing agreements, creating an “APEX” family of contracts it believed airtight. The agreement that applied at the highest level, “sensitive compartmented information,” provided that even if the courts invalidated one or more provisions of the APEX, the others would remain in full force, and specified that once access was given to an employee, she or he was bound for life to agency review, regardless of whether the actual information was subsequently declassified. Agreements had text implying that anything employees
saw was “damaging” to national security—regardless of whether it was, in fact, classified—and the CIA would later argue in courts that the contract language alone was a sufficient demonstration of damage to national security of whatever information was in an employee's writings. The contract even had a provision assigning to the United States all income an individual might earn if the CIA had not approved his writings in advance.

By the time the Carter administration ended, the spooks had built their fortress of secrecy. A full set of cloaks was available to conceal the daggers. Basic relations with journalists were mediated by agency spin doctors, who paid specific attention to image. In combination, the Marchetti, Agee, and Snepp cases completed the lock box. Marchetti established prior restraint in the form of prepublication review. The Agee affair led to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and powerfully reinforced demands to curb FOIA provisions. Snepp established the “principle” that the CIA could seize the income of whistleblowers and added to the arguments against FOIA. All three cases set very unfortunate precedents—for American democracy, if not the wizards of Langley.

Despite Langley's intense interest in scouring the writings of those who had held security clearances and therefore signed secrecy agreements—a group that ranged far beyond the agency itself—the CIA had never bothered to create a unit to review manuscripts. Until the mid-'70s, that had been done informally by the Office of Security. That mechanism was established in June 1976 and would be called the Publications Review Board (PRB). The Publications Review Board was actually a
product
of the selfsame series of embarrassing disclosures that bedeviled the CIA through the Year of Intelligence and after. The agency's motives are apparent in its
location of this staff in its
public relations
office, within the inner sanctum of the CIA director. The public relations chief headed the Board. The unit had barely gotten desk space when Stansfield Turner took up the reins, and the admiral brought with him what the professional spooks viewed with suspicion as a “mafia” of naval officers. One of them was Herbert Hetu, a retired navy captain who had been the PR guru for the United States Bicentennial Commission, and made his career before that as a navy spin doctor, doing public relations for the Pacific Fleet, two chiefs of naval operations, and the navy's central public information office. Hetu was best known for his liaison with movie producers, having worked on the navy side of the productions of
South Pacific
,
The Enemy Below
, and
In Harm's Way
. He had come to Admiral Turner's attention when Turner headed the U.S. fleet in the Mediterranean—the post from which he was appointed to the CIA—and Hetu did PR for Commander, Naval Forces, Europe. As a Turner acolyte and a Johnny-come-lately at Langley, Hetu had little trust from the spooks and, lacking any background in intelligence, had no way to judge what was truly sensitive when line officers complained that manuscripts before the PRB contained flap potential. The Board under Hetu became a zealous guardian of secrets, many of them real, but an equally large number fanciful.

The Publications Review Board never overcame its origins. For a decade and a half, until relocated to the CIA's administration directorate, it remained an artifact of Langley's public relations machine. Wearing his PR hat, Hetu would tell the
Washington Post
in 1980 that the Board had cleared nearly two hundred manuscripts and had had to negotiate changes in only three. One of the three was, of course, William E. Colby's book. The other former agency persons who published during the period were Vernon A. Walters, Peer de Silva, Cord Meyer, and Harry Rositzke. Walters mentioned the CIA almost exclusively in connection
with Watergate, a subject too hot for the censors to touch. Meyer deliberately set out to craft an unrevealing account and without doubt had no difficulty with the Board. The remaining books were clearly affected by review. Put another way, the majority of major CIA memoirs of the era were combed out.

Wielding the clout of the Marchetti standard, sanctifying its authority to intervene, and the Snepp precedent, which permitted retaliation against those who went off the reservation, the Publications Review Board reigned supreme. It was regularized as an entity comprising a representative of each of the CIA's directorates, a legal advisor from OGC, and detailees from units dealing with personnel security and clandestine cover. To avoid problems, CIA authors had preliminary conversations with the monitors to gain their trust, self-censored their manuscripts, and then suffered through Board review. The various court decisions had set a timeliness requirement, eventually interpreted as a thirty-day interval within which to scrub a manuscript. That rubric was honored in the breach, and delay emerged as a weapon in PRB's bag of tricks.

Former director Stansfield Turner became an early victim. He made a start with opinion pieces for the newspapers. The Board held on to the urgent, timely ones and let pass those on general, nondescript organizational topics. When the admiral spoke up the agency came down on him. On March 8, 1985, for example, a car bombing took place in Beirut that aimed at a Muslim cleric and brought down an apartment building, killing eighty people. The incident was linked to the CIA by
Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward (it is now generally credited to Saudi intelligence, but the agency had dropped a similar project, which Bill Casey may have handed over to the Saudis). When Admiral Turner made a comment to
Newsweek
, CIA's public relations chief, George V. Lauder (Hetu's successor), insisted in a letter that “it's a bum rap,” declaring
Langley had no direct or indirect contact with the Lebanese officer who had masterminded the bombing, and cautioning Turner about what he said in public.
⁹
The admiral shot back a letter referring Lauder to the “presidential finding” for a covert operation that seemed to sanction the initiative. Lauder stuck to his guns.