PRESS: Bombs, Spies & Loch Ness
Powers, Thomas
PRESS BOMI~, SPIES & LOCH NESS The mills of the press may grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine. If you've got a capacious memory, and a fulltime file-keeper, you can sometimes put the...
...is in John Barron's book, KGB, which he wrote with a good deal of help from the CIA...
...The question here is what the Russians intended to do if the Chinese resisted pressure for talks...
...And that, so far, is that...
...CIA counterintelligence specialists were apparently suspicious of Lipavsky from the first, but the CIA was hungry for information about the Soviet scientific community and apparently decided to use him anyway...
...One final clue...
...CIA officers say no member of the Agency has ever defected, except one--Philip Agee...
...Whom did they ask...
...Who killed David Holden...
...For one thing, it's clear ,that Moscow at least threatened China with an attack...
...And finally: What ever happened to the New York Times's search ]or the Loch bless Monster...
...Secretaries of State William P. Rogers and Henry Kissinger, and of course Russia itself, which called the story "a lie from beginning to end...
...For another, the Russian dissident movement represents an almost irresistible temptation for the CIA...
...This is a story which has been slowly percolating for nearly a year...
...But Holden was a distinguished reporter...
...His family launched an investigation, but although it eventually prodded the U.S...
...Back in July, 1976, the government of Chile provided two menmJuan Williams Rose and Alejandro Romeral Jara_-~-with official documents so they could travel to the United States...
...The plutonium for the bombs was presumably manufactured at the Israeli reactor in Dimona built with French help in 1963...
...Gonzalez told Omang that he had been present when Gen...
...THOMAS POWERS Commonweal: 213...
...Haideman right when he said the Soviet Union was planning a preemptive nuclear strike on China back in 19697 Just about everybody immediately denied Haldeman's claim--former U.S...
...Two months later a Chilean opponent of the military regime of Gen...
...Now it seems Scharansky is about to go to trial and off• in Washington have quiotly conceded that a former roommate of Scharansky's, Dr...
...Sanya L. Lipavsky, was a CIA agent for a time in 1975...
...Could this have been Michael Vernon Townley...
...According to Roger Morris in his book about Kissinger's foreign policy, Uncertain Greatness, Kissinger ordered a special study of the Sino-Soviet conflict in July, 1969, but was so dissatisfied with what he got in November that early in 1970 he "commissioned, in secret from the rest of the government, his own NSC staff study of contingency plans for a Sino-Soviet war, including the use of nuclear weapons...
...the U.S...
...It would take great self-discipline to leave such a group alone...
...Most of the agents recruited are walk-ins, but they present special problems, since the odds are always pretty good that a walk-in is a provocation, someone whose purpose is either to discredit or to penetrate the service to which he volunteers his help...
...At ,the time of his arrest Moscow charged he was working for the CIA...
...Where did Israel get the plutonium /or its bomb...
...The sole reference I've found to a Russian overture to the U.S...
...But even so I suspect there's something in it...
...ficial to kill Horman because he know .too much...
...51q, the name of every CIA officer or agent he'd ever met or even heard of for his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary, published in Britain in 1975...
...Augusto Lutz ordered a second intelligence of...
...The C~A at that time believed the reports of Russian inquiries about Warsaw Pact reaction to a strike, and these, along with other evidence of a Soviet buildup along the border, convinced General Daniel O. Graham and two other analysts on ehe CIA's Board of National Estimates that war was a very real possibility...
...ficially cleared up and his family remained convinced that the CIA was somehow involved...
...For one thing, the Russians have been masters of provocation since the time of the Czars...
...The security services of the Soviet state are extremely efficient...
...According to news stories Townley was investigated by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975 as a possible a~ent of the CIA...
...I'd like toknowif the Egyptians caught the men who did it, who they were, and what's going to be done with them...
...If Palestinians murdered Seymour Hersh, say, we would expect more than a couple of paragraphs on page 92, and Holden deserves better than he has received...
...In August he was expelled from France, in December he was refused entry into West Germany, and in January of this year the Netherlands told him he had until the end of March to leave the country...
...Then a whole movement appears hostile to the governmerit and seeded throughout Soviet society, including generals, scientists and political leaders from oppressed national minorities...
...Holden recognized one of the Palestinians and they killed him to keep his mouth shut...
...Within a year the CIA dropped him as a dry hole, but by that time the damage had already been done: the KGB had established a connection between the CIA and dissident circles, and was in a position to discredit the latter as a foreign plot...
...Until his arrest by the KGB last March Scharansk~ was a leading Jewish dissident in the Soviet Union and one of a small group gathering information on the Russian failure to comply with the human rights agreement signed at Helsinki...
...Did the CIA inadvertently set up Anatoly Scharansky...
...More ogten stories simply get lost...
...Would the Soviets really "stack" their warheads in plain view near theborder...
...Commonweal: 211 Israel claims to have purchased its uranium on the open market, just like all other countries r With plutonium-producing reactors...
...The best intelligence agents, I am told, are the ones you recruit yourself, but that is a problematic business, especially where the Soviet Union is concerned...
...Barron claims that in early August, 1969, a Russian embassy official believed to be a KGB otficer named Boris Davidov asked an American expert on SinoSoviet affairs with government connections what Washington's response would be to a Russian strike...
...A couple of years ago the Washington Post published a story of an American working with DINA, and it occurs to me it may be the same man...
...When the Russians and Chinese began serious talks later that fall it was generally concluded the Russian threats had only been a war of nerves to get Peking to the conference table...
...Haldeman's account, contained in his Watergate memoir, The Ends of Power, is spongy with improbabilities...
...According to published accounts such untraceable uranium could have come from two sources, a freighter which disappeared with 200 tons of uranium ore in the Mediterranean in November, 1968, and diversions of enriched uranium from a plant in Apollo, ,Pa., in 1965..Published stories indicate that President Johnson told Richard Helms not to investigate the alleged diversions in 1966, and later, in 1968, told him to keep the CIA's estimate that Israel had nuclear weapons secret even from Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara...
...On top of that, we are in genuine sympathy .with the dissidents and they need help, especially in communicating with the outside world...
...The Justice Department assured him a year ago that he had nothing to fear if he returned to the United States, but for some reason Agee doesn't wan~ to come back...
...government must be playing a part...
...Here are seven stories which raise questions deserving an ansr~ver...
...Just how did they "ask" ,the United States to join or acquiesce in the plan...
...This is not a story which should be allowed to disappear...
...In Aug31 March 1978:210 ust rumors came back from Eastern European political circles that Russia was quietly asking what their reaction would be to a preemptive strike on the Chinese testing facilities at Lop Nor in Sinkiang province...
...Agee's expulsion from so many countries can hardly be spontaneous...
...Back in March, 1969, at the time of the first military skirmishes between Russi.an and Chinese soldiers along the Amur and Ussuri rivers, Moscow openly warned China it was not a "paper tiger with false ~eeth," citing its nuclear arms...
...On December 7 last year the chief correspondent of the London Sunday Times was found dead near the Cairo airport, although his body was not identified until three days later...
...Something tells me we may be hearing a lot more about this...
...On December 18 the London Sunday Times said it had learned that Holden's killers were Palestinian terrorists who shared .Holden's plane from Amman to Cairo, where the Palestinians were planning some sort of action to disrupt Israeli-Egyptian peace talks...
...On August 29 Pravda warned that a Russo-Chinese war would "inevitably" involve nuclear weapons...
...Then, on June 9, 1976, Joanne Omang of the Post, obtained an interview with a former Chilean intelligence official, Rafael A. Gonzalez Verdugo, who had been granted asylum in the Italian embassy in Santiago...
...penetrating it with spies is an all but insuperable task...
...In February of this year the State Department o~eially asked the Chilean government to produce the two men for questioning in connection with Letelier's murder...
...On September 18 the Russian correspondent of the London Evening News, Victor Louis, hinted that a Chinese underground party might "invite" intervention by Russia, and that an attack on Lop Nor was nothing more than "a question of strategy...
...If we don't plan to prosecute him, why are we helping to dislodge him from one country after another...
...Government into reluctant action, Horman's murder was never of...
...Holden, something of an expert on the Arab world, had just arrived from Amman, Jordan...
...A lot of Patria y Libertad members were recruited by Chile's secret police, DINA (recently renamed the National Information Center), and Rose was apparently one of them...
...At first the Chileans said they knew nothing of the two men, then they promised an official investigation, and finally the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio identified Rose as an American citizen named Michael Vernon Townley, a shadowy figure connected with the right wing group Patria y Liber:ad which had agitated for .the ouster of Salvador Allende before Pinochet's coup in September, 1973...
...But if Israel wanted to protect the existence of its bomb from potential international investigators it would need untraceable uranium which showed up in no official records...
...A few days after the ~coup...
...The story at the moment is that Lipavsky was a "~,alk-in"--intelligence jargon for someone who offers his services as a spy pretty much out of the blue...
...Also in the room, according to Oonzalez, was a third man dressed in American-style clothes whom Gonzalez assumed was an American intelligence agent...
...Where will Philip Agee's odyssey end...
...Was H.R...
...Barron says Nixon decided to give no answer to the question, but it is known that Richard Helms quietly briefed reporters on the danger a few weeks later, and I have been told he was instructed to do so by Kissinger...
...I suspect the ultimate purpose is to ,force him to seek refuge in a Communist country and thus tacitly concede he is something more than an ordinary whistle-blower...
...In late 1976 Britain declared Agee an undesirable alien and after a long, losing battle he was deported last june...
...George J. Kcegan Jr., an intelligence officer in Hawaii in 1969, said that he had, indeed, sent a message in the clear .to Washington predicting a huge number of deaths from fallout in Siberia, China and Japan if the Russians should strike...
...It's clear that Haldeman doesn't know the details, even if he's basically right...
...in 1973.a young American film, maker named Charles Horman was murdered in Santiago...
...Who is Michael Vernon Townley...
...But why...
...Part of Haldeman's account was confirmed when Gen...
...A perfect tool for espionage...
...But all the same, once my imagination has been aroused I find myself wan~ing to know what happened, and hoping some editor will assign a reporter to find out...
...In June, 1977, President Carter flatly denied it...
...Something more is going on here than meets the eye...
...Ten days after his " murder unofficial reports said the Egyptian police had arrested three young Arabs, never identified, in connection with the killing...
...Augusto Pinochet, Orlando Letelier, was killed when his car blew up in Washington...
...This is not an easy story to break, but it says a lot about the warmindedness of .the world's leaders, aggressive and untiring in their pursuit of "security," and it's worth investigating...
...It is darkly suggested that Agee got something more than help from the Cuban intelligence service, and that he may even be under the control of the KGB...
...But in the present climate, who would believe CIA protestations of innocence if it should turn out they have been helping .to smuggle manuscripts out of Russia, or books in...
...Since then he has been looking for a home, but nobody seems to want him...
...Maybe so, but that only suggests that gahe Chinese, at least, took them seriously...
...They may be mad at Victor Marchetti, Frank Snepp and Joseph Burckholder Smith for spilling unauthorized beans, but the man they really hate is Philip Agee, who dredged up :Pf I B ~ / . la~D...
...Despite frequent Israeli denials it would be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle ,East, it is now generally accepted that Israel does, in fact, have such weapons...
...But where did the raw materials come from...
...Even the biggest papers have only so many reporters, and their editors, like the rest of us, find more grist for conversation in what happened yesterday than last year...
...If you've got a capacious memory, and a fulltime file-keeper, you can sometimes put the pieces together and figure out what happened...
Vol. 105 • March 1978 • No. 7
