The Family Jewels (6 page)

By far the most extensive domestic spying was that carried out by the CIA Counterintelligence Staff. James Angleton's staff here functioned under instructions from Director of Central Intelligence Richard M. Helms. The Church Committee established that Helms acted “in response to White House pressure.”
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Although the director issued no written order, the next day, August 15, 1967, a memo from Thomas Karamessines, Angleton's direct superior, shows that both men conferred with Helms about the project. In the memo Karamessines instructs Angleton to create a unit for domestic surveillance and discusses its mission as well as candidates to lead it. Most important, top CIA officials clearly anticipated operational activity—not mere intelligence analysis—and detailed a mechanism to conduct it, with the counterintelligence unit furnishing guidance while field activity would be carried out by CIA area divisions. The project was given the cryptonym MH/Chaos the following year. An update for management two weeks into the initiative reveals that Chaos had been given priority equal to that with which the CIA went after Russian and Chinese spies—in other words illegal domestic activity was
as important as the CIA's main Cold War mission
. This high priority combined with very tight security. Domestic spying, in CIA parlance, became a “special access program.” Chaos offices were located in a secure vault in the basement at Langley headquarters.

The first tasking to stations overseas went out on August 31, 1967. A November cable from the new unit shows the surveillance program up and running. Agency stations and other CIA staffs were told Chaos was developing information on whether American individuals and groups had foreign connections. The field effort was considerable. For example, CIA operatives followed Black Power advocate Eldridge Cleaver in Conakry, Guinea, and elsewhere, as The Family Jewels acknowledges. Unacknowledged were attempts to infiltrate
the Black Panther organization in Algiers, the attention paid to various Panther activists during their trips to Europe, and the huge effort to track Americans' contacts with Vietnamese in Europe. Eldridge Cleaver may or may not have noticed CIA surveillance in Sub-Saharan Africa, but his colleague and competitor Stokely Carmichael did. In and out of Conakry at the time, and also at Dar Es Salaam in Zanzibar, Carmichael notes: “In my experience, in Dar people and things were not necessarily who or what they seemed. . . . from the moment I got there all kinds of people are in my face. Some I now know to have been sent by the CIA.”
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Project Chaos officer Frank Rafalko confirms Langley's interest in Conakry, Dar Es Salaam, and Algiers.

Chaos tapped elements throughout the CIA. Agency reporting to President Johnson in 1968 clearly indicates close surveillance of American peace activists visiting the North Vietnamese mission in Paris. Indeed, Chaos first came to the attention of the CIA Inspector General when a routine IG survey of the European Division disclosed that this surveillance was absorbing a significant portion of the division's labor effort. The same was true of the East Asia (then Far East) Division in Hong Kong, Japan, and even Saigon. When American activists Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark visited North Vietnam in 1972, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service put a round-the-clock watch on Radio Hanoi.

The Chaos staff was known as the Special Operations Group. Angleton selected Richard Ober, among those first mentioned at Helms's meeting, to run the project. An eighteen-year veteran with service in Germany and India, Ober was an experienced CIA operations officer. Director Helms liked him as a third-generation oarsman at Harvard. With a master's in international relations from Columbia, just finishing the course at the National War College, Ober also offered potential as an analyst. Best of all, Ober had headed the CIA's
Ramparts
magazine investigation (see
Chapter 8
),
whose files were bequeathed to Project Chaos. By Summer 1967 Ober had collected hundreds of names for additional case files—he put the number at 50 to the Church Committee, but other data indicate the agency assembled at least 127 files from the
Ramparts
investigation alone. Ober began to build a computerized database. In short, he became the CIA's recognized in-house expert on American political dissent.

Although housed in James Angleton's Counterintelligence Staff, Ober's unit had an unusual dispensation to report directly to Helms. Angleton, a notorious micromanager who rode herd on his subordinates, ordinarily would never permit the existence of such a channel. Associates of the Great Counterspy later told Chaos officers they believed Angleton was attempting to distance himself from Special Operations Group activities. Personally quite close to Helms—they often drove together to work—Angleton may have reasoned that if a big issue came up the director would tell him about it, while the less Angleton had to do with the Chaos operation the better it would be for him if something went wrong.

Frank Rafalko, who joined the unit two years later, mounts a spirited defense of Project Chaos in the only extant insider account of this operation.
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Rafalko repeats the standard formula that the Special Operations Group had the simple purpose of collecting and disseminating information and maintaining a database. This is a misleading claim. Rather, the very first paragraph of Tom Karamessines's founding directive specified that the unit would be the focal point and coordinator for operational activity. Dissemination of intelligence came second. To give Ober's unit its due, most of what it accomplished
was
in the creation of files and circulation of “intelligence,” but that was how the story unfolded, not the unit's purpose, which was to target “subversive student and related activities.” Equally to the point, where the directive attempted to stay within the bounds of the CIA charter, explicitly noting operations were to be overseas,
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the major
focus quickly became domestic instead, and the Group's main customer the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Ober's unit not only provided general information, it responded to specific FBI queries, targeted protesters as per those calls, and added names to its lists or opened files in accordance with FBI requests. Each of those activities was illegal.

Rafalko's defense is that there was a real security problem (he cites huge numbers of bombings and other incidents), that counterintelligence work necessarily entails compiling large-scale files, and that the CIA acted in accordance with presidential orders. But his raw bombing statistics lump together all manner of incidents beyond war protests and differ significantly from Justice Department figures given at the time. Moreover, the agency possessed no police powers whatever, yet its reporting aimed to assist federal and local authorities in suppressive efforts against American citizens—also off-limits to the CIA. No presidential “order,” as such, exists. Lyndon Johnson's “directive” was oral. In his memoirs, Richard Helms cites LBJ's constant pressing for proof the antiwar movement was financed and directed from abroad, and President Johnson's rejection of the CIA director's objection that this task would take the agency beyond its charter.
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This would not be the only time Helms took a presidential concern and turned it into a CIA program. The most notable other case was Chile—and there Helms's effort to shield his agency project from oversight led to the destruction of his career.

As for presidential demands, the question of their legality continues to intrude. CIA officers take an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States, not the power of a chief executive, whether Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. The FBI knew, even if CIA did not, how thin the ice was. When Ober's unit opened a dedicated communications net and began sending the FBI messages regarding its assignments, Frank Rafalko quickly got a phone call from a Bureau
counterpart begging CIA not to put any of this on paper. The FBI man couched his plea in terms of Bureau director J. Edgar Hoover exiling people to Siberia—in this case, Fargo, North Dakota—if he saw any of the message traffic.
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There was a very good reason why Hoover would not want any paper records. Investigation without probable cause was as improper for the FBI as was domestic spying for the CIA.

The episode of the Huston Plan illustrates Hoover's concerns perfectly. An aide in the Nixon White House in the summer of 1970, Tom Charles Huston proposed a mechanism to unify government action against dissenters. Legal obstacles were to be revoked or ignored, and a wide variety of measures taken: break-ins, wiretaps, mail-opening, infiltrations, and more. The program would be implemented under the aegis of an interagency committee. Mr. Nixon approved verbally. He, too, did not want his signature on a written order of this kind, or to have a session with security agency chiefs and openly demand action. Nixon had his chief of staff put his verbal approval in a personal memo. The FBI's Hoover scuttled the Huston Plan by complaining to Attorney General John Mitchell. Wiser heads at the White House put this scheme to rest. Richard Helms, on the other hand, commented favorably during the meetings where Huston sounded out the agencies on his proposals, and Helms designated Richard Ober as his man on the interagency committee. Its creation became the sole result of Huston's machinations.

Antiwar activists, student leaders, and black militants were the quarry in all this. To keep Chaos small, Director Helms demanded it use data processing, which involved another CIA unit, the Office of Computer Services, located in the support directorate. Rafalko, who had signed on as a specialist on black radicals, ended up as the wizard behind the Chaos computer system called “Hydra.” The data went to the Office of Current Intelligence, in the Directorate of Intelligence, which formulated a series of reports—all of which
found no trace of foreign (read Soviet, North Vietnamese, or Chinese) control over the protesters.

Failure to discover control by some enemy was not for lack of effort. Ober's group formed part of the Directorate of Operations. Its European Division was heavily embroiled with Project Chaos due to the fact that numerous international events opposing the war took place there. Spying on the North Vietnamese and People's Revolutionary Government (National Liberation Front) missions in Paris was undoubtedly the single most productive source of leads, since any American activist who visited became a target. That was no problem for John L. Hart, a former station chief in Saigon, who led the division at the time. Like Karamessines and Ober, he believed in the mission. The Near East Division, when it was under David Blee, resisted Ober's taskings at least until 1971, an annoyance since black militants were forging links with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Many Chaos collection demands went to the directorate's Soviet Bloc Division. That unit's reporting mentioned various expressions of Soviet solidarity and affinity with protesters, and occasional evidence of concrete assistance, as in furnishing Soviet aircraft to carry delegations of American antiwar activists on visits to North Vietnam. Except for that last, all the information was perfectly apparent to anyone who read the newspapers. There was at least one instance in which the Communist Party of the United States of America paid for the airline tickets activists used to attend an international conference. There were indications that Cuban intelligence assisted black militants in moving to Algeria. But there was no evidence of actual control.

In June 1968 a cable sent over Karamessines's signature asked European CIA stations to enlist host country spy services in the quest for data on American dissidents. This represented an advance over his orders the previous year, which had recognized the potential value of data from foreign allies
but issued no order. Former Canadian intelligence officers also affirm that their “D Operations” group was in regular contact on these matters, primarily with the FBI but with the CIA as well. Another question was American draft resisters fleeing north. The Canadian Secret Intelligence Service kept a general watch on them. During periodic visits to Langley, the Canadians exchanged information with all agency elements. Jim Angleton would have had his counterintelligence matters to discuss, Richard Ober his Chaos business.
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Project Chaos was given its cryptonym at this time, when separate channels for intelligence on antiwar activists and black nationalists were merged. Ober seconded Cord Meyer, Jr., as Langley's liaison to the 1968 Kerner Commission on civil disorders. Group staff were also on the telephone to the National Security Agency (NSA) constantly to confirm persons' identities and related information, and occasionally in touch with a liaison officer regarding assignments and an exclusive series of NSA reports about its Project Minaret (see
Chapter 4
), a parallel domestic activity. The NSA reports were hand-carried to the Ober group, which received an average of two a day, more than 1,100 pages in all. The CIA added thirty Americans' names to the Minaret “watch list,” but also those of seven hundred foreign individuals or groups.

Richard Ober discussed the possibility of a direct channel to the State Department with Director Helms, but nothing ever came of it. The Justice Department requested access to the CIA name file on several occasions in 1971, including when Weatherman radicals bombed the Capitol Building, in the Catonsville Eight case, and in the Pentagon Papers leak. There was also case-by-case contact with the Secret Service and the Naval Investigative Service (now the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS). Ober wanted to build a relationship with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (now the Drug Enforcement Administration), but that never went beyond preliminaries. On the other hand, the Special
Operations Group and U.S. Army intelligence jointly ran agents against the antiwar movement.

The Family Jewels documents convey the impression that only a handful of reports on political dissent were candidates for “flap potential.” The first, for which Chaos coordinated the flow of information from the operations directorate and the FBI, was “International Connections of the U.S. Peace Movement,” completed on October 31, 1967. Its principal author was Office of Current Intelligence (OCI) analyst Paul Corscadden. The focus on American citizens was plain. The CIA cable requesting data for this report, sent on November 2, 1967, provided that “COVERAGE SHOULD BE LIMITED TO CONTACTS BETWEEN ELEMENTS OF US PEACE MOVEMENT AND FOREIGN GROUPS OR INDIVIDUALS. VIETNAM PROTEST ACTIVITIES IN YOUR AREAS SHOULD BE REPORTED ONLY INSOFAR AS DIRECT CONNECTION WITH US ORGANIZATIONS OR CITIZENS IS INVOLVED.”
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