The Family Jewels (44 page)

Director Helms positively resisted termination of the Chaos and Lingual projects. In fact, Helms solicited customers for the latter, and he went to brief the attorney general in an effort to preserve the operation when the Post Office threatened to blow the whistle on the entire effort. Helms would have gone along with the massive domestic spying entailed by the Huston Plan. At that fateful meeting of January 4, 1975, with President Ford, when Mr. Helms raised the veiled threat of joining the critics in tossing “dead cats” around Washington, Dick Helms had real stock to trade. The president could not afford to let him take the rap for the Family Jewels.

Among the ranks of lesser ringmasters, something similar appears to have happened with Jose Rodriguez. Captain of the Counter-Terrorist Center and architect of the destruction of the torture tapes, the agency veteran also had smelly carcasses to dangle before prospective prosecutors. So did John Rizzo of the Office of General Counsel and White House attorney Alberto Gonzales. James Angleton, notorious CIA counterspy, had an armful of dead cats to purvey, stretching back to CIA mail-opening and its mind-control experiments. And then there was Ollie North of Iran-Contra, whose diversions and manipulations were positively scary. Bill Casey and John Poindexter were right behind him. Philip Buchen, Cheney's loyal lieutenant in President Ford's damage control campaign during the Year of Intelligence, would have understood the need to protect them. So too did Attorney General Eric Holder, who in the Obama administration stayed the sword of justice for John Yoo with his interrogation papers, and the CIA people implicated in those Family Jewels. That does not pass the smell test.

On a table shrouded by a cloak of secrecy lies a pile of Family Jewels just waiting to tumble to the floor. Once that happens, there will be another bloodletting. No one wants that. On the other hand, there must be accountability. America has been shamed by what has been done in its name. There is a price for that. The sword half-sheathed at the outset of Barack Obama's presidency has been drawn again. Obama's refusal to countenance a truth commission will not be the end of the story. Rather, unanswered charges and new ones are likely to renew demands for investigation. If the United States fails to enforce accountability, someone else will, whether in the form of criminal proceedings elsewhere or perhaps even hostilities. The steady implantation and solidification of international human rights law, increasingly bold moves toward cross-national legal enforcement, and the broadening trend toward international prosecution of war crimes ensures that. It would be foolish to suppose that any statute of limitations will protect torturers—and the Nuremberg principles apply to their superiors as well. French officers who participated in torture during the Algerian war of 1954–1962, despite dispensation by that country's National Assembly—and even a presidential pardon—found themselves ensnared in renewed controversy more than four decades later. The underlying acts, not the mumbo jumbo of legal “authorization,” will be the controlling factors.

The masters of the Family Jewels do not see it that way. Their view is that enforcing accountability will result in trials that confront the United States government with the unpalatable choice of declassifying dark secrets or foregoing prosecution. Ringmasters have some precedent for that. Richard Helms actually was brought up on charges—though for lying to Congress about Chile rather than any of his other exploits. The Carter administration flinched in the face of the secrecy dilemma. Helms got away with a plea bargain, not contesting the charge, and wore the conviction as a badge of
honor. In 1980 the United States enacted the Classified Information Procedures Act to fix that problem, but during Iran-Contra Oliver North's lawyers found a counter—demand release of such a broad swath of secrets that the government is left in the same place. The most important charges against North were dropped because he had received congressional immunity, but the demands for revelations of secrets at trial certainly affected the prosecution.

This illustrates another aspect of the Family Jewels problem that begs reform: the Central Intelligence Agency's fortress of secrecy. The question of proper security classification encompasses issues beyond Family Jewels, but these kinds of activity are a major motivator in Langley's arbitrary and capricious—indeed self-interested and ultimately selfdefeating—approach to interpreting “damage” to national security. Current practices risk robbing the agency of credibility and prevent the emergence of a public consensus on the value of the CIA and, particularly, covert operations in a free democracy.

It is five decades now since Harry Howe Ransom, an astute observer of intelligence, published his book titled
Can American Democracy Survive Cold War?
¹
Ransom is renowned for his work at the University of Texas, of which he eventually became president, but was among the first and deepest analysts of the American intelligence scene, even a founder of the field, and was read closely at Langley and elsewhere. Secrecy is among the primary themes of this book, which, although it was concerned with the Cold War, could almost have been written yesterday. “The existence of a large, secret bureaucracy sometimes pivotally important in making and implementing national policies and strategies raises special problems,” Ransom notes. He continues:

At the level of democratic ideals, the problem is the existence of a potential source of invisible government. At the level of representatives of the people—Executive and Legislative—the problem is primarily how to control a dimly seen instrument, so hot that if not handled with great skill it can burn its user instead of its adversary.
²

Ransom believed that an informed electorate was both the ultimate power and ultimate restraint of a democracy, and he ruled out any attempt to assert that intelligence, by its nature, was not an appropriate subject for public inquiry. Instead, Ransom advocated a careful approach distinguishing between legitimate secrets and the mass of material that resides in the secret vaults. This was perhaps a radical position in 1963, but today it is the norm, and the United States has built an entire declassification system around that precise principle, manifested most recently (2009) in the creation of the National Declassification Center. It would not be difficult to find texts that declare commitment to this on Central Intelligence Agency letterhead paper.

The problem with CIA is that principle is not manifest in practice. In fact, as shown here in Langley's suppressive maneuvers, its construction of a fortress of secrecy, and its manipulations of the record, the agency's practice is the opposite of its principle. The fact is that CIA commitment to declassification is almost entirely declaratory. Its actual declassification process lacks objectivity, seemingly even any capacity to discriminate between real national security secrets and embarrassing misadventures; appropriate time-frames within which secrets need protection; any incentive to timely declassification; or, indeed, any desire to reduce the monetary cost of maintaining secrecy. Flap potential is no guide to legitimate secrecy. This strategy invites Family Jewels—and the revelations that create political crises. The CIA process is a discredit to the agency and to its principle.

Given its discredited declassification program, the conclusion is inescapable that the agency is too self-interested to be entrusted with such a critical function. The most important reform that can be made to the secrecy system is to take away the CIA's authority to release secret materials and entrust this to some other entity. The National Declassification Center, with appropriate addition of staff and funding, might be a suitable candidate for this role.

Ultimately openness is but a tool of accountability. The goal is to ensure our secret agencies operate on the basis of principle. The current system has not succeeded in enforcing accountability. There are many reasons for that. Presidents are zealous defenders of their political interests. On some level serious inquiries into intelligence operations are perceived as attacks on the presidency. Once presidents see themselves as vulnerable,
then
they throw the spooks under the bus. The CIA itself, jealous of its freedom of action, strives to avoid any inquiry and to stall those that materialize. The independent Inspectors General are obstructed and their credibility impugned, and their powers are limited in any case. The congressional intelligence committees are actually dependent upon the CIA and other agencies responding in a frank and honest fashion, leaving them exposed to the proclivities of the denizens of Langley. Committees' staffs are too small and too far stretched to accomplish anything more than broad oversight, and the committees have been victims of presidents' manipulation of the data made available to them. At the same time, the courts have been overly solicitous of the intelligence mavens and quite susceptible to vague assertions of national security damage.

As a result, accountability is administered in bursts—when abuses of sufficient dimension erupt onto the public scene. Then comes a rush to investigate, with proliferating
inquiries, hysterical responses from the intelligence agencies, and presidents running for cover. A modicum of reform usually follows, but the system is not fundamentally changed. Much of this pattern, triggered by Family Jewels in the Year of Intelligence, then in Iran-Contra, later in the Guatemalan affair, most recently in the 9/11 Commission review, is driven by short-term calculation. The first thing to notice about all this is its cyclical nature. Another aspect to the phenomenon is that, for all the hysteria, the “truth commission” exercises have had a cleansing, hence positive, effect.

It would be a huge advance in oversight to routinize the process of inquiry. This would make short-term calculation much less useful as a tactic, and remove both agency and White House tendencies to try and avoid any investigation at all, which is a frequent inducement to cover-ups. It would recognize the limited capabilities of congressional overseers and the delicate position of internal watchdogs like inspectors general. Line intelligence officers would then gain nothing by lying in an effort to circumvent investigation. Such regular—public—reviews would become an important device in restoring and then growing citizens' confidence in the activities of the United States intelligence community. This system would air the Family Jewels.

President Barack Obama has rescinded permissions for torture and secret detention, but an unconscionable assassination campaign continues, sometimes targeting Americans, and it has attained the level of a military operation without so much as a nod to the question of war powers. The Family Jewels piled up during the war on terror remain to be examined. A web of measures designed to prevent the cutting of new gems is still to be created. There is much work to be done by presidents, legislators, officials, and citizens. The time to start is now.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1
. Readers who wish to explore the drug experiments and mind control issues should consult John Marks,
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1978); or the more recent account, H. P. Albarelli, Jr.,
A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments
(Waterville, OR: Trine Day, 2009). At this writing the family of U.S. Army scientist Frank Olson, killed in the agency drug experiments, has announced its intention to file suit against the CIA and the United States government.

PROLOGUE

1
. Seymour Hersh, “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years,”
New York Times
, December 22, 1974, 1.

2
. Walter F. Mondale with David Hage,
The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics
(New York: Scribner, 2010), 135–136.

CHAPTER 1. WHERE DID THE FAMILY JEWELS COME FROM?

1
. The Directorate of Plans (DDP), very shortly to be renamed the Directorate of Operations (DO), and known since 2005 as the National Clandestine Service, was the unit of CIA mainly concerned
with field activity. The nomenclature thus changes repeatedly over our period, and it is further confused in that all three units were informally known as the “clandestine service,” and by the way it was typically abbreviated, with the Deputy Director for Plans (DDP) using the same denotation as his unit. For consistency, except where unavoidable (as in quotations), this text will use the formal name “Directorate of Operations,” and informally, “clandestine service.”

2
. Cord Meyer,
Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA
(New York: Harper & Row, 1980), quoted p. 160.

3
. William E. Colby and Peter Forbath,
Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 338.

4
. CIA, Office of the Director, “Memorandum for All CIA Employees,” May 9, 1973, Gerald R. Ford Library, Gerald R. Ford Papers, White House Operations Series, Richard Cheney Files, Intelligence Subseries, box 5, folder “Colby Report.”

5
. Colby and Forbath,
Honorable Men
, 338.

6
. CIA, “Reflections of DCIs Colby and Helms on the CIA's ‘Time of Troubles,'
”
Studies in Intelligence
51 (3): 12 (hereafter cited as “Colby Oral History”).

7
. Ibid.

8
. See John Prados,
Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 262–263.

9
. CIA, Office of the Inspector General, William V. Broe Memorandum for the Record, May 23, 1973, National Security Archive, Family Jewels Collection, 401–403.

10
. Houston's office record of this hearing, along with the Osborn deposition, appears in the Family Jewels Collection at pp. 399–400, 404–409.

11
. The record is in United States Congress, House of Representatives (94th Cong., 1st sess.), Armed Services Committee,
Hearings: Inquiry into the Alleged Involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency in the Watergate and Ellsberg Matters
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1974).