Without Cloaks or Daggers

...From early on in his tenure, Colby found himself at odds with the other OSS veterans who peopled the CIA...

...Moreover, writes Colby, "Angleton had never accepted the Sino-Soviet split as genuine," and under his influence, "we seemed to be putting more emphasis on the KGB as CIA's adversary than on the Soviet Union as the United States' adversary...

...He was not one of those who "cliqued together, forming a sealed fraternity...

...Colby's testimony before a "blue ribbon" commission-whose purpose was "to still the outcry and thus prevent a full investigation" by Congress-was so forthcoming that the chairman, Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, admonished him, "Bill, do you really have to present all this material to us...

...For William Colby must be, by all odds, the most candid American spymaster in history...

...One of these has been a struggle for the soul of America's espionage empire...

...This world view is found in particularly concentrated form in the CIA's "sealed fraternity...

...But as the volumes accumulate they merely seem to add to the mystery, reinforcing an impression that Watergate was only one incident in a more complex and longer-lasting abuse of governmental power than we had imagined...

...Because of Angleton, says Colby, the CIA turned down, as a suspected provocateur, the biggest Soviet catch in history -colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who was eagerly scooped up by British intelligence...

...Their books sell well because we feel that we have not yet gotten to the bottom of the matter, that maybe the next memoir will answer the still unanswered questions...

...So Bob Haldeman snipes at Charles Colson, John Ehrlichman at Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon at everybody and cruel fate...

...The author, William E. Colby, had the dubious fortune of being swept into the office of Director of Central Intelligence in 1973 by the backwash of Watergate...

...Instructions to redirect the surveillance operation were Daniel Schorr, our guest columnist, is a long-time New Leader contributor and the author of Clearing the Air...

...He contends, for example, that two CIA officers were irresponsibly tagged as possible Russian agents, that spies behind the Iron Curtain were undermined by being branded as double-agents, that valid information and useful defectors were rejected...

...However, the time when the CIA could correct its mistakes and cover its tracks without telling anyone-Including the President-was about to end...

...you go to confession...

...ignored, for they were misconstrued as a new cover storyan example of how far the institutionalized wink can go...

...Colby, who never mentions Nosenko, says he fired Angleton when he came to realize the counterintelligence chief was doing more harm than good...

...an inbred, distorted, elitist view of intelligence that held it to be above the normal processes of society...

...He is James Angleton, who had headed CIA counterintelligence since the Agency was created...

...Angleton maintained-and maintains-that Nosenko was a KGB plant...

...Small wonder, given these circumstances, that Colby fell victim to the "Sunday morning massacre" of November 1, 1975, for going too far in his effort to purge his agency of its past misdeeds: There were simply too many people still around, like Kissinger and Helms, who felt threatened by his candor (although it was Ford's own indiscretion at a press luncheon that exposed the assassination plots, the biggest secret of all...

...The catalysts were disillusioned officers and former officers privy to information in the Inspector-General's report, wryly titled "The Family Jewels...

...For Nixon, the danger of penetration remains the justification for the admittedly illegal Tom Charles Huston surveillance plan...

...The cool twilight recollection of ancient battles has been replaced-at least on the government-conspiracy front-by late afternoon salvos from vanquished combatants who have one eye on the market, the other on the target...

...By his portrait of Angleton, Colby has brought into focus an issue that reaches beyond the intelligence community-namely, the counterintelligence syndrome in American life, which tends to define the unknown as hostile, the enemy as omnipotent...

...And all of them blame each other-and the CIA-for our national trauma...

...It is illumined in the latest of the memoirs, Honorable Men (Simon and Schuster, 493 pp., $12.95), the first authoritative view from inside the CIA...

...a line from Watergate leads back to the Bay of Pigs, from there to Vietnam...

...The names of Richard Helms, Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Howard Hughes, James Angleton and Nixon swirl in some turbulent eddy...

...Perhaps he was able to maintain his distance because his wife, Barbara, made sure "my off hours were filled with normal affairs having nothing to do with secret operations," though I suspect more was involved than that...

...that led to a conflict with subordinates and superiors, and eventually got him ousted as well...

...Inward-looking, it concentrates on what "they" are doing to us, sometimes at the expense of what we could do to "them...

...But there is one villain in his book-the individual who personified the "old guard" in the central struggle...

...Depersonalizing issues is probably part of being an intelligence professional?the traditional gray man," as he describes himself...

...It was Colby's conception that, in the post-Watergate atmosphere, the CIA had to be brought out of its cave into the daylight of legality...

...To limit the damage, he ordered these practices discontinued or phased out...

...He was reprimanded for not consulting the White House before authorizing release of a statement to a Senate committee, and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger needled Colby, an observant Catholic, by suggesting that "when you go up to the Hill...

...There has been a strange interplay between the visible government in the White House and the invisible government of intelligence-the schemes of politicians crossing the schemes of spymasters-and in the hidden recesses of power bitter conflicts erupt of which we know virtually nothing...

...After working him over for three years, the CIA finally concluded that he was authentic...

...Still, Colby was enough a part of the "sealed fraternity" to perceive a problem of "flap potential" rather than morality when a post-Watergate internal investigation uncovered improper activities such as mail-opening, drug experiments on unwitting subjects, surveillance of antiwar protesters, and assassination conspiracies...

...Colby proposes that it should finally be unsealed...

...the CIA's Operation Phoenix, against guerrillas in Vietnam, merges with Operation Chaos, against dissenters in America...

...Feathers were then ruffled when Colby, heeding the obstruction of justice warning of Acting Attorney General Lawrence Silberman, turned over files for possible prosecution-Implicating Helms, among others...

...Intelligence," he says, "must accept the end of its special status in the American government...

...increasingly separated themselves from the ordinary world and developed a rather skewed view of that world...

...James Schlesinger, who succeeded the ousted Richard Helms, was suddenly moved to the Pentagon to replace Elliot Richardson, who was replacing ousted Attorney General Richard Kleindienst...

...Colby avoids discussing who did him in and why...

...in fact, he generally glosses over personal conflict and shuns vendettas...

...Colby's recommended strategy for coping with the deteriorating situation-public confession of past misdeeds and emphasis on safeguards for the future-was vetoed by President Gerald Ford, who refused to release the explanatory report the CIA director prepared for publication...

...In its broadest sense, fear of penetration prompted the internment of the Nisei after Pearl Harbor, Senator Joseph McCarthy's witchhunt, and the FBI's warrantless-and mostly unwarranted -break-ins on obscure Left-wing groups...

...That depicts Angleton as having been fired in December 1974 because he refused to accept the authenticity of a Soviet defector named Yuri Nosenko-a heavily symbolic issue...

...Nosenko was the KGB officer whose 1964 defection seemed a shade too coincidental when he turned up in Geneva, 10 weeks after President Kennedy's assassination, with word that he had handled the Oswald file in Moscow and could give assurance that the assassin had no KGB connection...

...Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald...

...One suspects that, in his proposals to place intelligence under Constitutional controls, he will have more influence with the American public than with the intelligence community that made him the odd man out...

...The public can no longer be expected to follow Helms' 1971 admonition that it 'must take it on faith that we too are honorable men devoted to the nation's service.' " It is clearly with intentional irony that the author draws his conclusion, and his title, from his disingenuous adversary who wears his deceptions as a "badge of honor...

...Angleton, operationally subtle and ideologically simplistic, has already fired off his own rocket by proxy, through Edward Jay Epstein's book...

...Epstein suggests that his real mission was to divert attention from Oswald's prior connections with the KGB, and therefore that the CIA's continued use of Nosenko as an informant represents blindness, or worse, Soviet penetration of the Agency...

...Some of the jewels landed on the front page of the New York Times in a story by Seymour Hersh that plunged the once-immune agency into a nightmare of investigation and obloquy...