The Family Jewels (35 page)

All this took place while Stansfield Turner was trying to finish and publish his CIA memoir, and the lesson was that the more vapid the prose, the better chance of agency approval. Turner's efforts to squeeze his book through the PRB were lengthy and frustrating. The admiral's book was even a subject at Lauder's staff meetings. On March 16, 1984, the PRB assistant was reporting that the Board had cleared two “more” of the former director's chapters subject to various deletions.
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Turner had been a key actor in establishing the publication review system—and he had the advice of Herb Hetu and former CIA lawyer Anthony Lapham, both of whom had had key roles in the Snepp case. Despite Turner's self-censorship, the agency demanded over a hundred deletions. Admiral Turner appealed many, but received just three concessions. The CIA told him to proceed as he felt “appropriate,” but reserved the right to take any action
it
felt appropriate. The mailed fist inside the glove was evident.

Turner records that Board members were friendly, but preliminary review on each chapter consumed three weeks and adjudication another three or four. With many chapters being rewritten multiple times, and reviewed at each pass, the net impact felt both unreasonable and unnecessary.
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Ten or 15 percent of his time evaporated in meeting PRB demands, and the former director said so in his book, which finally appeared in 1985. On April 26, 1985, the CIA issued a statement denying Turner's charges. But his book was gutted. Subordinates calculate that Admiral Turner made his way through—and extensively marked up—five briefcase-loads of paper every day. That added up to more than two million
shelf-feet worth of documents. Virtually none of that knowledge is reflected in the Turner memoirs.

The
Fort Lauderdale News
noted the Publications Review Board's arbitrary standards for what had to remain secret. Public relations chief Lauder hit back hard: “The charges leveled by Admiral Stansfield Turner, suggesting that the CIA insisted that he remove unclassified material from his book, have no validity.”
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When the
Miami Herald
reviewed Turner's book, it mentioned that the narrative had been “picked apart” by agency censors. Public relations chief Lauder sent the paper a letter that insisted “the review process . . . exists solely to identify and delete classified material.”
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The stalling of Admiral Turner continued. In the Beirut bombing affair, Turner complained of the PRB's dilatory handling of his opinion pieces. Lauder passed Turner's letter to the Board, but told the admiral the fault lay with National Security Council staff aides.

George Lauder's missive to the
Miami Herald
also asserted baldly that “The CIA's record in avoiding any kind of partisan stance in its review process is a matter of record.”
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That was a falsehood. In fact, there existed no public record at all of the Publications Review Board's performance. If Lauder was referring to the Inspector General's audit of PRB in 1981, that was not public; was produced in-house by a unit that aimed at efficiency, not oversight; and had been done during an era when the CIA became politicized on Bill Casey's watch. A decade passed before the Inspector General returned to review the Board.

Stansfield Turner's experience proved the norm, not the exception. Another example is
Mole
, an account of and reflection on an important CIA spy in Russia published in 1982 by William Hood.
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The retired clandestine services officer had had some involvement with the case and knew intimately those who had run the Russian agent. The case was publicly known. This was a feel-good situation for Langley, which had
obtained some of its best intelligence on the Soviet military in the 1950s from this spy. Even the Russians got into the act, putting out their own account of trapping this CIA spy. Hood had no objection to the review system, was a respected officer, and cleared his idea of a book with a CIA deputy director even before starting. He adopted pseudonyms for his CIA characters except well-known persons or dead agency heroes. After twenty months writing, he entered the wilderness of mirrors of publication review—to discover the agency would have preferred this case remain buried. Hood was bewildered—spy tradecraft, like arithmetic, had been known for centuries. He had avoided sensitive matters and had been protective of identities. Hood met Board objections by lopping off offending passages and hiding dead men. In May 1981 his book was finally cleared to go.

Avoidance strategies became standard. Russell Jack Smith, actually a CIA deputy director, mentions hardly anyone below the level of publicly known officials, and referred to his own foreign assignment as a station chief by his State Department cover identity.
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Agency lawyer Scott Breckinridge avoided using names and where obliged to do so went with given ones only.
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Operations officer Tom Gilligan made up names for people and even for the countries where he had been assigned.
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In his account of the CIA in Vietnam, Orrin Deforest altered names, dates, places,
and
particulars to protect individuals.
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Shortly before Richard Bissell's February 1994 death, his coauthors submitted chapters of his memoir concerning his time with the CIA—and only those materials—to the Review Board.
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By way of contrast, CIA spy Miles Copeland, who published a gossipy memoir in 1989 and prided himself on
not
submitting his manuscripts, visited agency lawyers to tell them what he intended to include. Rather than sue him, Copeland recounts, the CIA said he would have to go out and get his own publicity.
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The Publications Review Board, empowered simply to
protect classified information, has been wielded as a cudgel to regulate free expression. That is the meaning of interventions, and the effect of self-censorship. During the 1980s the agency worked to restrict discussion of its secret wars in Central America and Angola, and to minimize the research of an author investigating its activities in the Vietnam era. There was improvement, but also fresh evidence of CIA's caution. Procedures became routinized, and the agency gradually moved to uncloak matters once shrouded in secrecy. But indications of self-interest remained. In the late 1980s, the CIA's Family Jewels were, of course, the evidence of its involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. The Board had to restrain itself with the reports of the joint congressional committee and independent prosecutor who investigated the scandal, but it got a crack at the book by prosecutor Lawrence Walsh—naturally he had been given a security clearance. It also got a look at the memoir of President Ronald Reagan. When Iran-Contra CIA principal Duane R. (“Dewey”) Clarridge penned his own CIA book, the PRB initially sent him a nineteen-page, single-spaced letter of redactions it demanded. Then cooler heads prevailed. Board chairman John Hollister Hedley viewed himself as a broker, adjudicating between the demands of agency operating divisions and the larger public interest. In what amounted to a bid to take the high ground of history, PRB made special efforts to allow a maximum amount of material when Dewey Clarridge told his story in 1997.
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By the late 1990s, the volume of texts had risen to over eighteen thousand pages a year. The concessions to Dewey Clarridge were taken as precedent, and a more open approach became the hallmark. Notable works followed on the CIA in the Cuban Missile Crisis and in Berlin, and several on the wartime Office of Strategic Services. During the millennium year, several hundred texts crossed the PRB transom. Approaching retirement, John Hedley could write
optimistically in
Studies in Intelligence
, the CIA journal, that PRB procedure was well established and improving, its “interpretation of damage is not absolute and unchanging,” and, despite change toward openness, the CIA was not headed down a slippery slope to “diminished capability to function as a secret organization.”
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Those were pious words, but the bright future Hedley described no longer exists and possibly was morphing even then.

In October 1997 the Board was finally moved to a newly created agency entity, the Office of Information Management, where it was retitled the “Publications Review Division,” though the name change never stuck. The new office was buried in the bureaucracy, far from the director's office, and, with a different division, also in charge of CIA responses to the Freedom of Information Act. The effect was a recrudescence of the culture of secrecy. A brief on the PRB's work issued in 2000 by its then-chairman, Scott Koch, noted that the Board relied upon “voluntary compliance” and specified that the “CIA can eliminate information from nonofficial publications only if the text is classified and the Agency can demonstrate the damage to national security that disclosure would cause.” This document, never classified, deletes passages supposedly “damaging” to the national security. The regs explicitly said that the Board
could not
deny permission simply because information was critical of or embarrassing to the CIA. But that was nullified by the stricture that agency directorates, as government employers, can prevent publication of even unclassified information if this would affect their ability to function or be detrimental to the foreign policy or security of the United States.
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By 2004 the number of pages reviewed was up to thirty thousand, and requests for permission to write had quadrupled. Langley worried that Board review could be overinterpreted. The Publications Review Board countered with what has become a standard notation in CIA memoirs—that PRB
sanction means neither approval of a work nor authentication of its contents. Richard L. Holm, an officer with key roles in the Congo, Laos, and Lebanon, used both pseudonyms and single initials for senior officers. Holm's book contains such a statement.
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So does the Robert Baer memoir, which has names and short pieces of text, along with a few more extensive passages, deleted.
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Ted Shackley's posthumous account contained a similar notice in its acknowledgments.
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Frank Holober's book follows this model. Holober's account of CIA covert missions along the China coast—by then dealing with events three decades in the past—was held up for months by the agency's FOIA office and cover representatives on the Board, who demanded pseudonyms for long-departed persons.
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It is worth noting that the Intelligence Identities Protection Act has the purpose of protecting the names of clandestine officers (only) serving in active operations
within the last five years
. Holober credits then–Board chairman John H. Hedley with helping him overcome these objections. Any Board representative can block a manuscript, and representatives do so from the parochial positions of their divisions. Floyd Paseman, a clandestine service division chief, thanked the Review Board for helping him navigate the obstacles posed by his own unit, the Directorate of Operations.
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Stuart Methven, an agency operative prominent in the Southeast Asian wars, made up countries, people, languages, and more with such aplomb that his book hardly qualifies as a memoir, but fully justifies its title,
Laughter in the Shadows
.
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Though treating his readers as fools, Methven nevertheless includes the standard CIA disclaimer. One who does not is former Congo station chief Larry Devlin, whose memoir protects colleagues by using only their given names (except for senior officials).
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Devlin notably uses the term “station.” Devlin's former subordinate David Doyle refers to himself simply as a CIA representative, with self-censoring throughout.
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Milt Bearden, a general in the secret war in
Afghanistan and chief of the Soviet Division at the triumphal moment the Berlin Wall fell, made deletions requested by Review Board chairman Scott Koch, but his coauthor James Risen, not a CIA person, did not submit his portion of the text to censorship.
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Among CIA directors, several of whom have told their stories, there has been strong support for the Publications Review Board. Stansfield Turner has been mentioned, and he affirms the appropriateness of review despite the trouble it caused him. Robert Gates thanks the Board's Molly Tasker for cooperation and prompt action and pictures his review as “eminently fair and consistently reflect[ing] good common sense.”
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Similarly, former director George Tenet has kind words for Hedley's successor, Richard Puhl.
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There are no deletions in Richard Helms's memoir, and he equably notes that “in keeping with CIA regulations, some of which I instituted, this manuscript was submitted to the Agency for security clearance.”
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Ironically, Helms's editor at Random House was Bob Loomis, the man the CIA had threatened at the time of
The Invisible Government
, and who had shepherded Frank Snepp's cri de coeur into print.

In the recent past the secrecy mavens have wavered. The CIA worked to inhibit public knowledge of its operations in the war on terror—from the Afghan campaign to secret prisons, to hostile interrogation—but also such historical subjects as the 1970s project to salvage a Soviet submarine using novel technology. In a book on the agency's first training class following the September 11 attacks, author T. J. Waters falsified names, places, dates, times, activities, and sequences of events to satisfy secrecy preferences.
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One who had a positive experience with the PRB was John F. Sullivan, a longtime polygrapher.
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So did Melissa Mahle, whose account of her recent CIA experience was critical
but evenhanded.
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Michael Scheuer, who gained fame as the anonymous author of a book on America's hubris, told a reporter, “I think it is going to be very difficult to publish a book on anything except cooking or Civil War history.”
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