CIA Subversion on the Rise
Is the CIA starting to spy on Americans at home-turning talents and money against students, blacks, others? That is one of several key questions raised in a wide ranging criticism. A direct...
...I don't have very much to go on," he said...
...I believed in what we were doing...
...This, according to Marchetti, is how the United States first began active fighting in Vietnam...
...Most things are right or wrong, good or evil, moral or immoral...
...Most of them, he said, got their start in the intelligence business during or shortly after World War II, when the cold war was going strong...
...rThe Director made a speech to the National Press Club where he said, 'You've just got to trust us...
...There's no reason the intelligence community shouldn't have its budget ex- amined...
...Marchetti said there is also waste in almost every technical intelligence-gathering program-such as spy satellites, special reconnaissance aircraft, and over-the-horizon radars-because when either the military or the CIA makes a new advance the rival agency follows suit with something almost the same but just different enough to justify its existence...
...River from Washington...
...The offer came during a secret meeting in a hotel room, set up by a stranger who telephoned and identified himself only as "a friend of your brother...
...They're not immoral...
...They even used to send weapons buyers around to buy arms from the (Soviet) bloc countries...
...Fearing today that the CIA may already have begun "go- ing against the enemy within" the United States as they may conceive it-that is, dissident student groups and civil- rights organizations-Marchetti has launched a campaign for more presidential and congressional control over the entire U. S. intelligence community...
...MIarchetti's first impulse after quitting the CIA was to write a nonfiction account of what was wrong with the U. S. intelligence community...
...So you find out what they were thinking 20 years ago-so what...
...It is the type of activity now going on in Cambodia and Laos, where recent congressional testimony revealed the CIA is running a 450million-dollar-a-year operation, he said...
...military and CIA estimates of the number of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in South Vietnam during the late 1960s...
...Just bits and pieces that indicate the U. S. intelligence community is al- ready targeting on groups in this country that they feel to be subversive...
...So is the war in Southeast Asia, except for Laos...
...I know this was being discussed in the halls of the CIA, and that there were a lot of people who felt this should be done...
...The CIA Diretcor, he said, wrote a memorandum recommending the program stop...
...He quit...
...For three years he worked as special assistant to the CIA chief of plans, programs and budgeting, as special assistant to the CIA's executive director, and as executive assistant to the Agency's deputy director, V. Adm...
...The CIA reported far too many Communists in South Vietnam to support this military desire, he said...
...They continue to listen all over the world...
...DocumentThrough a professor secretly on the CIA payroll as a talent scout, Marchetti netted the prize all would-be spies dream of-an immediate job offer from the CIA...
...Marchetti spent one year as a CIA agent in the field and 10 more as an analyst of intelligence relating to the Soviet Union, rising through the ranks until he was helping pre- pare the national intelligence estimates for the White House...
...But two years ago, after reaching the highest levels of the Central Intelligence Agency, he became disenchanted with what he perceived to be amorality, overwhelming military influence, waste and duplicity in the spy business...
...He said this was possible for Nitze because, although the Director of the CIA is officially in charge of all the nation's intelligence activities, 85 per cent of the money is hidden in the Defense Department budget...
...Somehow, some way, you've got t keep your intelligence objective...
...For your own protection you need to know what other people are thinking...
...In addition to Air America, Marchetti said, the CIA has set up both Southern Air Transport in Miami and Rocky Mountain Air in Phoenix for possible use in paramilitary operations in South America...
...But you've got to remember, too, they're amoral...
...They can start up a private war in a country clandestinely and make it look like it's just something that the local yokels have decided to do themselves...
...The military wanted a low figure "to show they were killing the VC and North Vietnamese and were winning the war...
...of foreign governments-wastes about half its 1-billion-dollar yearly budget...
...He pronounces his name the Italian way-MAarketti...
...The clandestine attitude, the amorality of it all, the coldwar mentality-these kinds of things made me feel the agency was really out of step with the times," Marchetti said...
...Marchetti did not complete the sentence...
...But Marchetti said the need for intelligence reform continued to gnaw at him, and as his first novel was about to come out he came into contact with others who agreed with him, including Representative Herman Badillo (Dem...
...Then he was promoted to the executive staff of the CIA, moving to an of- fice on the top floor of the Agency's headquarters across the Potomac...
...11, 197124 "I told him I thought the intelligence community and the intelligence agency were too big and too costly, that I thought there was too much military influence on intelligence-and very bad effects from that-and that I felt the need for more control and more direction...
...He may have a program going with the police in this country or the military in that," according to Marchetti...
...There's no reason for so much secrecy...
...But the nature of the business is such that it is amoral...
...With many of his lifelong views about the world shattered, Marchetti decided to abandon his chosen career...
...It can be done for a lot less, and perhaps done better when you cut out the waste...
...U. S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, Oct...
...nThe cold war is fading...
...So they just keep collecting the stuff and putting it in boxcars...
...This change of perspective during those three years had a profound effect on me, because I began to see things I didn't like...
...At the same time, we're getting a lot of domestic problems...
...When they start setting up private air companies and everything else that goes with the wherewithal for support- ing a government or an antigovernment movement, this is very, very dangerous, because they can do it in a clandestine fashion and make it difficult for the public to be aware of what is going on...
...The following was written by Edward K. DeLong of United Press International, based on an interview with a Central Intelligence Agency official who has resigned...
...To fully understand why the CIA conducts semilegal oper- ations around the world, why it might begin to conduct them in the United States and why more control needs to be exercised over the Agency, Marchetti said it is necessary to understand the men of the CIA...
...These people are superpatriots," he said...
...He gave as an example a conflict between...
...During this period, Mar- chetti says, "I was a hawk...
...This put me in a very rare position within the Agency and within the intelligence community in general, in that I was in a place where it was being all pulled together," Marchetti said...
...The dispatch was distributed by UPI for publication on October 3. Victor Marchetti embarked 16 years ago on a career that was all any aspiring young spy could ask...
...You have the danger of intelli- gence turning against the nation itself, going against the 'the enemy within.' " Marchetti speaks of the CIA from an insider's point of view...
...It can't be a private tool of the militarynor, for that matter, a private tool of the White House...
...that are 10 years old-boxcars fulll-because in intercepting Soviet (radio) communications, for instance, the Soviets are just as sophisticated as we are in scrambler systems...
...Now, Marchetti said, the second novel has been laid aside so he can devote full time to a campaign for reform...
...For instance, Marchetti said, the National Security Agency -charged in part with trying to decode intercepted messages...
...We are honorable men.' 'Well, they are honorable men-generally speaking...
...But Paul Nitze, on his last day in office (as Deputy Secretary of Defense), sent back a memo in which he said he had received the recommendation and considered it, but had decided to continue the program," Marchetti said...
...I could see how intelligence analysis was done and how it fitted into the scheme of clandestine operations...
...Browbeating, Pressure" to Change Reports "Whenever you're working on a problem that the military is deeply interested in-because it's affecting one of their programs or their war in Vietnam or something-and you're not saying what they want you to say, the browbeating starts: the delaying tactics, the pressure to get the report to read more like they want it to read," he said-"in other words, influencing intelligence for the benefit of their own operation or activity...
...The inbred CIA re- action, he said, would be to launch a clandestine operation to infiltrate dissident groups...
...Needed: "More Controls by Congress" With the lack of control that exists now over the Agency, Marchetti said, an extremely reactionary President could perhaps order the CIA's clandestine activities to go beyond mere infiltration...
...The novel, "The Rope Dancer," was published last month...
...That is so if the President says, 'Go in and do something...
...This is going to get to be very tempting," Marchetti said in a recent interview at his comfortable home in Oak- ton, [Va.], a Washington suburb where many CIA men live...
...One of the things the CIA clandestine people can do is start up wars," he said...
...A direct response starts on page 81...
...Marchetti L. Taylor...
...It is almost a technical impossibility to break a scrambled, coded message...
...Well, the CIA is not only monkeying around in Vietnam and in Laos," Marchetti said-"they're looking at other areas where these sorts of opportunities may present them- selves...
...And there are people in the CIA who- if they aren't right now actually already running domestic operations against student groups, black movements and the like-are certainly considering it...
...You can have your national security-with controls-and you don't need 6 billion dollars to do it...
...It's a fact of life," he said...
...That, said Marchetti, may already have started to happen...
...It just bothers the hell out of me to see this waste going on and this hiding behind the skirts of national security...
...And I started to see the politics within the community and the politics between the com- munity and the outside...
...I cried all the way home...
...of New York...
...But, he said, he could not' bring himself to do it then...
...By the time someone can break it, a decade or two has gone by...
...It also gave me an opportunity to get a good view of the intelligence community, too: the National Security Agency, the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), the national reconnaissance organization-the whole bit...
...They have boxcars full of tapes up at Fort Meade (Md...
...Because the men of the Agency are superpatriots, he said, it is only natural for them to view violent protest and dissidence as a major threat to the nation...
...Marchetti said at one time a national intelligence review board tried to cut out an expensive NSA program that analysts agreed was useless...
...Upheaval, he said, is what prompts the CIA Director to begin planning possible clandestine activities in a country...
...Intelligence Business Is Just Too Big" Although now a dove-particularly on Vietnam, which he calls an unwinnable war to "support a crooked, corrupt regime that cannot even rurn an election that looks honest"Marchetti says he still believes strongly in the need for intelligence collection...
...The Southeast Asia clandestine operations years ago caused the CIA to set up a phony airline company, Air America,CONCIEN CIA INTELIEN CIA which now has as many employes as the 18,000-member working staff of the CIA itself, he said...
...Marchetti said he is convinced the CIA not only engineered the 1963 overthrow of the Diem regime in [South] Vietnam, which President Nixon also has said was the case, but was also responsible for the coup that ousted Prince Norodom Sihanouk [of Cambodia] in early 1970, making possible the U. S.-South Vietnamese raid on Communist sanctuaries in that country several weeks later...
...They continue to spend fortunes trying to duplicate the Soviet (scrambling and encoding) computers," he said...
...It is a thinly disguised view of the inner struggle over Vietnam and Russian strategic advances as Marchetti saw them within the CIA, the Pentagon and the White House under President Johnson...
...Writing the novel took a year...
...If you murder...
...Instead he wrote a spy novel-"a reaction to the James Bond and British spy-story stereotypes"-which he says looks at the intelligence business realistically from the headquarters point of view he knows so well...
...they're amoral...
...At Pennsylvania State University he deliberately pre- pared himself for an intelligence career, graduating in 1955 with a degree in Russian studies and history...
...Rufus Mr...
...Similar fake airlines have been bought and sold all over the world, he said, including one in Nepal and another in East Africa...
...He also said the CIA has a big depot in the Midwest United States "where they have all kinds of military equip- ment, all kinds of'unmarked weapons...
...This, said Marchetti, gives the military considerable power to shape intelligence estimates...
...Then came two tries at nonfiction articles-one rejected as too dull and the other turned down as too chatty-and a start on a second novel...
...The CIA People Can Start Up Wars" The thing that troubles Marchetti most about the CIA is its penchant for the dark arts of clandestine paramilitary actions-an area made doubly attractive to the Agency because the military scarcely can operate in this field...
...But intelligence is now a 6-billion-dollar-a-year business, and that is just too big...
...Ultimately, Marchetti said, the military won and the CIA issued an estimate in which "tricky wording" seemed to make its views agree with those of the generals...
...Marchetti said areas where the CIA might launch future clandestine paramilitary activities include South America, India, Africa and the Philippines-all places in the throes of social upheaval...
...One of the last things he did at the CIA was to explain to Director Richard Helms why he was leaving...
...Marchetti, 41, hardly looks the stereotype of a man who spent 14 years in the CIA...
...Over the years they have bought everything they can get their hands on all over the world that is untraceable-to prepare for the contingency that they might want to ship arms to a group in a place like Guatemala," Marchetti said...
...His dark-rimmed glasses, full face, slightly stout figure, soft voice, curly black hair and bushy sideburns would seem more at home on a college campus...
...Therell be a great temptation for these people to sug- gest operations and for a President to approve them or to kind of look the other way...
...We parted friends...
...I think we need to do this because we're getting into an awfully dangerous era when we have all this talent (for clandestine operations) in the CIA-and more being de- veloped in the military, which is getting into clandestine "ops" (operations)-and there just aren't that many places any more to display that talent," Marchetti says...
...he's already got his fake airlines to fly in people...
...I don't think the likelihood of this is very great," Marchetti said, "but one of the ways to prevent this is to let a little sunshine in, to have some more controls by the Congress...
...The nature of intelligence is that you do things because they have to be done, whether it's right or wrong...
Vol. 5 • October 1971 • No. 6
