PRESS: UNMASKNG THE CIA
Powers, Thomas
to conduct a complete inquiry, The role of the press, however, is not to nail down the details but to focus public attention and create the political pressure with- out which no...
...That, he seems to have hoped, was that...
...In practice "rooting out" meant the wholesale arrest and interrogation--often by torture---of South Vietnamese civilians who might, or might not, know anything about the local Vietcong cadre...
...perhaps not...
...The danger now is that the investigation of violence sponsored or actually conducted by the CIA will be limited to sensational plots against specific foreign leaders such as those already mentioned in news reports, including Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Hgo Dinh Diem, the Haitian dictator Francois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier and the dictator of the Dominican Repubfic, Rafael TrujiUo...
...The federal Drug Enforcement Agency, at one time partially funded by the CIA, has been active in many foreign countries...
...In the Dominican Republic, for example, a right-wing terrorist group called La Banda assassinated at least 200 political opponents in the years immediately following the withdrawal of U.S...
...Hersh knew only the barest outline of what had happened, but that was enough...
...R probably would have been if some of the results of Schlesinger's private inquiry had not reached Seymour Hersh at the New York Times...
...Last December 22 he published a major story charging that the CIA had conducted a "massive" domestic intelligence operation against anti-war activists...
...Left to themselves the various officials involved would have quietly buried the matter but, again prodded by public disclosures, they had to respond...
...forces in 1966...
...One of his first acts, a precautionary one in the spirit of the times, was to formally ask agency employes to report to him any "questionable activities" in which they had been involved...
...FoUowing are four areas which repoRers ought to investigate now, while there is still a chance of influencing the official investigations by the Rockefeller Commission and the Senate committee headed by Frank Church: 9 The Phoenix program in South Vietnam, corn ceived and run by Colby...
...Suspects were routinely killed, more than 20,000 of them in the first 30 months of the programs existence, according to Colby's own figures...
...On March 4 the Washington Star reported that Ford's concern was based on Colby's oral briefing at the January 3 meeting...
...The CIA has provided money, arms, training and in some cases even American "advisors" to local armies fighting guerrillas in Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia...
...The program, and Colby's involvement, have already been the subject of congressional hearings but they ended inconclusively...
...Originally called the Counterterror Program, and later associated with the Provincial Reconnaissance Units, the Phoenix program was intended to "root out" the Vietcong infrastructure...
...Perhaps the charges are fair...
...9 Rumors that the CIA planned, and perhaps even carried out, the assassination of major drug dealers...
...On Friday, February 28, Daniel Schorr reported on CBS television that Ford was concerned that investigations of the CIA would uncover agency involvement in at least three assassinations of foreign leaders...
...Later, on January 3, Ford met with Colby and received a private, oral expansion on the written report...
...The current director of the special operations section of the DENs international intelligence division is Lt...
...Eventually press initiative made the substance of that conversation public, too...
...The process of revelation began in 1973 when flames R. Schlesinger was appointed director of the CIA after his predecessor, Richard Helms, was implicated in the Watergate scandal...
...Latin American counter-insurgency efforts have often been brutal in the extreme and the CIA has been charged with complicity in torture and assassination...
...At every stage of the controversy it has been public disclosure which has prodded officials to take action...
...The members of vigilante groups were mostly local policemen and there is evidence that at least some of them attended a CIA-financed and -directed "counter-terror" school for foreign police in Texas...
...Since there was no "legal" process involved, and since the killings were not in the heat of battle, the Phoenix program was terrorism pure and simple...
...Conein recently admitted to Nicholas M. Horrock of the Times that in May, 1974, he was briefed at length on electronic assassination equipment by a salesman from the now disCommonweal...
...These charges are bad enough, and certainly demand a thorough airing, but there are other kinds of CIA violence which are in danger of being forgotten, involving humbler victims, but a great many more of them...
...President Ford, reacting to Hersh's initiative, asked for a report and received a 50-page document from the current CIA director, Wiliam E. Colby...
...Other similar groups have opero ated in Brazil, Guatemala and Argentina...
...9 Counter-insurgency campaigns, also in South America...
...This was the primary role of the press in Watergate and it is the role so far played in the current investigations of the CIA...
...In either case now is the time to investigate them...
...Lucien Conein, a former CIA agent who worked closely with the plotters who eventually toppled and killed Diem in South Vietnam...
...Apparently they were forthcoming--700 pages' worth, according to one reportmand in August, 1973, Schlesinger issued a formal directive telling them not to do it again...
...to conduct a complete inquiry, The role of the press, however, is not to nail down the details but to focus public attention and create the political pressure without which no sensitive investigation of this sort can be pursued...
...In Bolivia it armed, trained and accompanied the Ranger Battalion which hunted down Che Guevara in I967, although the CIA agent on the spot, according to Victor Marchetti, tried to prevent the Boilvians from killing Che after they captured him...
...9 Vigilante groups in South America...
Vol. 102 • April 1975 • No. 2
