THE SPY WHO WENT OUT IN THE COLD WAR
Bethell, Thomas N.
THE SPY WHO WENT OUT IN THE COLD WAR The problem of choosing wars wisely by Thomas N. Bethell Cold wars have a way of making people very nervous. “While we are sleeping,” Dean Rusk once...
...Should anyone learn of its existence, it would prove most embarrassing for all concerned...
...Adams piled fresh printouts on his desk and went back to work...
...did I think my superiors were treating me unfairly, or weren’t they promoting me fast enough...
...They don’t want to hear we don’t know...
...Quick Fix Covert action wasn’t included in the CIA’s original mandate...
...Honorable Men But Helms, like his predecessors, wore more than one hat...
...He asked me what was bothering me...
...Earlyin 1971,”Powers writes,“the CIA told the White House that the North Vietnamese did not have reserves enough in Laos to put up more than light, sporadic resistance to a South Vietnamese foray across the Ho Chi Minh Trail...
...Americans were losing their lives to an enemy that the Pentagon had tried to eliminate with the stroke of a pen...
...More than 600 American helicopters were hit by North Vietnamese fire and 100 were shot down outright...
...In theory, the CIA’S mission was to guard against nasty surprises like Pearl Harbor...
...But it could have cost Richard Helms his job...
...He wanted to keep his job...
...It would be better to turn on the lights and read The Man Who Kept me Secrets...
...He also knew how to make sure Adams’s accusations went nowhere...
...The officer wrote the speech...
...The exposure may have troubled Cord Meyer, but it didn’t spur him to change careers...
...Intelligence is the most pohtical of professions,” Powers writes, “subject to endless attempts at meddling by every sort of special interest across the spectrum of domestic politics: by Republicans who want to blame the Democrats for ‘losing’ China, Air Force generals who suspect CIA analysts are deliberately underestimating Russian bomber production, liberals who think the CIA has a positive preference for right-wing military juntas, conservatives convinced Castro would never have come to power if the CIA weren’t soft on communism, State Department Arabists who think the agency is blinded by the intimacy of its ties to Israel, Jewish organizations which are sure the CIA deliberately ignores a fundamental Arab intention to destroy Israel...
...like his predecessors, he concluded that no principle was worth the risk...
...It’s in the book, pages 178-180, won’t take long...
...The Central Intelligence Agency-in which Richard Helms spent nearly his entire professional life-came into being in 1947, a time when bears and eagles threatened each other in very real and serious ways, a time when idealism had its back to the wall...
...What about someone like Hitler...
...Its essence was simple: “containment...
...That sounds ominously familiar...
...In the midst of this exercise, a telegram arrived from Helms ordering Adams to bag it...
...If discovered, it can compromise one and precipitate the other...
...The only honest answer was simple: “We don’t know what kinds of weapons the militia at Son Tay have...
...this tape will self-destruct . . .phhhhhht...
...We thought we had long since learned the lessons of appeasement-lessons learned at the expense of Czechoslovakia-and it would never happen again...
...President, think again, this is a nutty idea, I know it’s a nutty idea, you have to trust me...
...During World War 11, when he was in the Navy, Helms had a chance to join the CIA’S derring-do prototype, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was being cobbled together by a loose collection of former Ivy Leaguers-an old-boy organization full of people who were easily bored by the paperwork of managing a war...
...Audience-Participation A close reading of The Man Who Kept The Secrets suggests that the solution to the CIA’s problems lies beyond the reach of any congressional committee...
...Honesty might have saved lives in Vietnam...
...He chooses whether to accept its numbers, its estimates, its educated misgivings...
...My problem was that he caved in on the numbers right before Tet...
...Walter Lippmann defined that as “a policy of holding the line and hoping for the best...
...Helms thereupon appointed a committee to look into the situation...
...But Walsh stuck to his numbers and Helms stuck by Walsh...
...Helms knew, from direct experience, that classic intelligence was far more important than covert action in making the CIA a valuable navigational aid for the White House...
...Who knows-we might even be able to hear the sound of the flute, and the day might come when we could put words to paper like E.B...
...You could give some fellow a sterile gun and send him out to pull the trigger, but the agency would have to live with the danger for the rest of time, and it wasn’t worth it...
...all we should do was to send up the right numbers, and let them worry...
...they disappeared...
...In the beginning, a few hundred Meos were organized and trained bya handful of CIA officers in 1962 to harass the North Vietnamese traffic along the Ho Chi Minh trail...
...It failed, not only because the prisoners had been moved but because the militia turned out to be armed with modern submachine guns, with which they mounted a spirited and successful defense, a defense that cost the lives of many of the raiders...
...A wave of vitriolic anti-communist propaganda washed across the country, followed closely by an extraordinary outpouring of money to buy votes...
...When the CIA’s numbers came out wrong, or when its covert operations failed, the president washed his hands...
...Later, they continued to supply information suggesting that the war was not being won, could not be won...
...Without so much as a shred of supporting evidence, he edited the report so that it came out saying that the militia at Son Tay are probably (standard CIA protective word) armed with pitchforks, machetes, and a few old Japanese and French rifles...
...That was precisely the subtle attraction of the CIA’s covert-action capability...
...It was Helnis’s pen...
...Having learned that, the question is: What are we going to do about it...
...The solution...
...Of perhaps a quarter of a million Meos in 1962, only a pitiful remnant of 10,000 escaped to Thailand in 1975...
...Some of these are legendary by nowmost conspicuously the Bay of Pigs...
...In a sense, covert action is best understood as the dark side of the drive toward world government after World War 11...
...That is a very demanding standard, as events have long since demonstrated...
...Studying the map of Afghanistan, he doubtless feels the urge for a quick fix right now...
...Dean Rusk’s counterparts on the other side of the world slept the same way, afflicted with the same fears...
...But espionage isn’t very conducive to idealism...
...Getting Hitler would be the moral thing to do...
...They also surrounded their porches with plainclothesmen who went abroad under cover of darkness to do unmentionable deeds...
...The cold war was a hard time for innocent bystanders living in a community where, in due course, nobody could get a good night’s rest-a place where irritable neighbors snarled at each other’s children and heaved bricks through each other’s windows...
...Very early they warned of the quagmire ahead...
...Nobody,” as one of them said, “was going to go into the Oval Office, bang his fist on the table, and say we won’t do it...
...He might go crazy, he might go through a conversion and succumb to feelings of guilt, he might begin to blubber in his cups or send a letter to a congressman or brood over fancied ill treatment and decide to blackmail the agency...
...Classic intelligence consists of three key functions: assembling information, verifying it, and analyzing it...
...That was the estimate still in use when the North Vietnamese unleashed the Tet offensive early in 1968...
...A suffocating cloud of mutual distrust descended on Moscow and Washington, snuffing out any hope of communication or accommodation...
...Within the agency there have also been men who were inherently skeptical of quick fixes, distrustful of the adventurers, and much more committed to classic intelligence...
...White, writing one of his unsigned “Notes and Comment” pieces in The New Yorker: “One thing we can be glad of is that the conference is to be held in thiscountry,” he wrote, in terrible ignorance of the days and years to come...
...But then in March 1948 the Russians overthrew the democratic government of Czechoslovakia, which had never been anti-Soviet, and that was a different story entirely...
...It was also wildly wrong...
...Composed entirely of Helms’s immediate subordinates, the board delayed action for inore than seven months...
...Meyer stopped writing passionate, hopeful pieces for the Atlantic and dropped out of sight...
...For one thing, neither the CIA nor any president willever really trust Congress, nor vice versa, and with good reason...
...Back in the early days of the cold war, when nearly everyone in Washington thought they heard Russians clomping across the front porch, the president announced what came to be called the Truman Doctrine...
...In the tumult of cold wars old and new, those words sound frail and misty now, like a flute in a hurricane...
...It was one thing to be exposed as a spy...
...Like Richard Helms, he would probably have hesitated before giving an unqualified thumbs-up to the staying power of democracy...
...The attempts to kill Castro-Helms opposed them, too...
...In short, we do not target on American citizens...
...submarine would surface off the coast of Cuba and litter the sky with star shells, which would convince the Cubans that The Hour was at hand...
...Two years earlier, for example, Helms had delivered a CIA report on radical American college students to Henry Kissinger with a cover note: “This is an area not within the charter of this Agency, so I need not emphasize how extremely sensitive this makes the paper...
...we have never sought any...
...He was opposed on purely pragmatic grounds: you couldn’t keep it a secret...
...he did his job and advised reluctant subordinates to do theirs...
...Like Cord Meyer and so many others, Helms worked out his own way of dealing with the real world...
...This was because CIA covert action seemed to be able to deliver what it promised-in the beginning, at least...
...The adventurers thought of the world as being infinitely plastic,” Powers writes...
...Adams thought about going to see the new president-elect, Richard Nixon, but cooler heads told him to wait...
...He listened without expression, and when 1 was done, he asked me what I would have him do-take on the whole military...
...Knopf ($12.95...
...The CIA’s audience, like it or not, is the solitary occupant of the Oval Office...
...So he buttoned his lip, and led the CIA into one questionable undertaking after another, exactly in the manner of his predecessors...
...Although it stretches the imagination to assume that Nixon would have demanded reform at the CIA if he had known of the games Helms was playing-after all, Nixon didn’t want to know the truth any more than Johnson, and Helms was just trying to survive-the fact remains that the White House continued to be given bad data and continued to make policy on the basis of that data...
...Lyndon Johnsonasked for a CIA briefing on the agency’s clandestine activities not long after the assassination of John Kennedy...
...The Man Who Kept The Secrets is filled with examples...
...1 said we weren’t the ones to decide about policy...
...The point seemed terribly obvious and urgent...
...he came to believe that Kennedy’s assassination was somehow an act of retaliation, on the part of people who knew we had arranged the overthrow and murder of Diem in Vietnam and were trying to do the same thing in Cuba...
...These people were called KGB on one side and CIA on the other...
...THE SPY WHO WENT OUT IN THE COLD WAR The problem of choosing wars wisely by Thomas N. Bethell Cold wars have a way of making people very nervous...
...The massive intervention in Chile that ended with the death of its elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende- Helms had grave doubts about that, too, but he kept his doubts to himself...
...the military’s numbers werefaked...
...Paraphrasing Helms, Powers writes: “Somebody would have to do it, and no one could predict with confidence how that somebody would feel about it later...
...Seen in hindsight, these enterprises were open to question, but there was little questioning at the time-because few people knew about the CIA’s involvement in them...
...Consider, for instance, the case of CIA analyst Anthony Riccio...
...The CIA had the manuals because, years previously, it had painstakingly cultivated a highranking Russian who had diligently microfilmed 10,000 pages of secret documents...
...When the CIA finally came under scrutiny, and investigators wanted information on the agency’s testing of mind-altering drugs, Helms simply shredded his files...
...For Truman, the plainclothesmen slipped quietly into Italy on the eve of the 1948 elections...
...It was Pearl Harbor all over again...
...You couldn’t ask for better than that-and that, to Richard Helms, was what the CIA was all about...
...At the time, Riccio didn’t know what his report was going to be used for...
...Frustrated, they will want to do more...
...covert action would give the president a snub-nosed .38 to carry in his bathrobe pocket...
...There he will find what happened to a group of Vietnamese when they ran afoul of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House...
...Riccio said no,” Powers writes, “but added, his voice rising, that there was something which did matter...
...Even the CIA’s own people in Vietnam failed to see it coming, lulled into complacency by the widespread belief that the enemy was on the ropes-had to be, the numbers said so...
...No amount of well-intended reform is likely to change this pattern...
...What they want, they get...
...Generation Gap So we learn that Richard Helms was our own home-grown version of a Good German...
...and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world...
...Helms kept his doubts to himself even when he knew the CIA charter was being flagrantly violated...
...Nixon never heard of Adams...
...covert action depends on compromising their sovereignty involuntarily...
...it was the aggregate OB number, which ‘the Pentagon had decided was 270,000...
...With the cooperation of the inspector general, he appointed a board of review to look into the charges...
...We might learn something valuable about ourselves, something useful about the neighborhood we live in...
...The rationalization is: “They do it, so we have to do it, too...
...Jimmy Carter’s White House didn’t want to hear any bad news about turmoil in Iran, so the CIA didn’t give it any, and as recently as February 5 The Washington Star carried a report by Henry Bradsher that CIA director Stansfield Turner “has been known to change analytical conclusions before sending them to the White House...
...Including the chapter notes-which should not be missed-Powers’s book is 376 pages long...
...If he was a master of classic intelligence on the one hand, he was a quintessential bureaucrat on the other...
...CIA men who worked with the Meos are still bitter about what happened when the Washington experts moved in, and their bitterness is understandable...
...This was classic intelligence at its very best, all the pieces linking as tightly as lovers’ fingers: the spy planes brought back the pictures from the Caribbean, the photo-interpreters identified the missiles, the people with the horn-rimmed glasses worked the computers and brought up the vital data from the quiet man with the microfilm camera in Moscow...
...There, for the first time, Johnson learned that the CIA had been trying for three years to assassinate Castro-at the direct and insistent orders of President Kennedy and his brother Robert...
...You never know when someone in a flapping bathrobe might come lunging off a porch, mistaking you for a bear or a bird of prey and filling you with nuclear buckshot...
...He could hardly have been more explicit- or less truthful...
...In 1970 Riccio was asked by his superiors to prepare a report on the defenses of Son Tay, a North Vietnamese prison where captured American pilots were being held...
...Or even sensible...
...Ignoring the limitations of the CIA charter, the National Security Council in June 1948 specifically authorized covert operations, to be “so planned and conducted that any United States government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and that, if uncovered, the United States government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them...
...In any case, Helms had ample reason to be cynical about the value of speaking up...
...It isn’t hard to assume he must have been partly motivated to do so by learning of the sheer size and incompetence of the anti-Castro operation: 600 CIA case officers running 3,000 agents in Miami...
...Adams was to analyze the enemy’s Order of Battle (OB)-providing a detailed assessment of fighting strength, based on breaking out all the different units that were known to be in the field, assessing their structure, whether they were operating at full strength, how much they were affected by desertions and casualties, that sort of thing...
...This doesn’t fall within the scope of our charter, he said: it’s illegal...
...Except this was the real world...
...Within the CIA from its earliest days there have been adventurers-men who love the intrigue, the danger, the exhilaration of running a jungle guerrilla operation under the very nose of a hostile government...
...As challenges go, this was straightforward enough...
...The place was guarded by militia-what were they armed with...
...Among all the numbers that Adams had at hand, there was one that never seemed to change...
...Neither of them revealed a fact that both knew: the CIA had a spy at Sihanoukville, an agent recruited years previously in Hong Kong in the best intelligence tradition, and he had access to bills of lading...
...All of this was ostensibly the work of Italian centrists...
...It wasn’t covered by the National Security Act of 1947, the law that formally brought the CIA into being...
...Riccio didn’t know, and the files were no help...
...To take a stand like that, Helms believed, would simply mean he would lose access to the president...
...Paranoia is the natural bedfellow of insomnia...
...Nearly everyone in the upper reaches of government asks himself that question at one time or another, and nearly everyone arrives at the same answer...
...The CIA at that time had been spying on Americans for years...
...Running the numbers again, he came up with an overall enemy OB of 600,000-nearly three times the size of the Pentagon’s estimate...
...Applying his own brand of logic to the situation, McNamara reasoned that if a program could succeed using a few hundred tribesmen, it would succeed thousands of times better using tens of thousands of tribesmen...
...They wanted to make the new CIA, in Powers’ words, “the president’s most accessible arm in the conduct of foreign policy,” to be used as “a navigational aid or a Saturday Night Special...
...Adams...
...plots to blow up Castro on the ocean floor with an exploding sea shell, plots to give him a toxic wet suit, plots to poison his cigars...
...Riccio told his boss that...
...It was only much later-after the Bay of Pigs, after the assassination attempts, after the disasters in Laos and Vietnam, after the overthrow of Allende in Chile-that one CIA operation after another lost its cover and stood naked before the world, confirming the worst suspicions of anti-Americans everywhere, embarrassing the CIA’s allies in the White House and on Capitol Hill and in the press, and shocking the American people out of our lingering childlike belief that We were not like Them...
...The Kremlin was, of course, a place straight out of Central Casting, a place where the sun never seemed to shine, inhabited by shapeless men in one-size-fitsall overcoats, men who seemed somehow to speak without moving their lips and to see without moving their eyes...
...In such a place the streets are not safe...
...When the chill night slipped silently across the steppes, it was assumed in Moscow that the fading light and the drifting snow were somehow engineered in Washington...
...It had nothing to do with what Helms calls “the soggy mass of morality...
...He then told me that I didn’t know what things were like, that we could have told the White House there were a million more Vietcong out there, and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference in our policy...
...Much later, after the invasion of Cambodia, incoming military reports told the White House what Helms had not-and the White House demanded an explanation...
...Within the CIA this particular scheme was known as “elimination by illumination...
...If so, he has certainly learned that the rebels are loosely organized and poorly armed...
...The CIA was able to assemble precise information on these missiles because it had microfilms of the actual training manuals the missile crews used...
...the zoning laws were very strict...
...Richard Helms was one of them...
...At the time he did so, nobody was anticipating a missile crisis in Cuba-but when it happened, the files were ready, the films were in them, the information could be retrieved and analyzed and the reports brought quickly to the Situation Room at the White House...
...It couldn’t hurt...
...It might have saved lives but it also might have cost him his job, and he knew which was more important...
...A surprise raid had been staged at Son Tay-a dramatic rescue attempt...
...That was Helms’s view...
...In the spring of 1967 it was Adams’s job to contribute a five-page section to a 30-page report on “Capabilities of the Vietnamese Communists for Fighting in South Vietnam...
...Some time later he was reading his morning newspaper and found out...
...It was the Pentagon’s number, not the CIA’S...
...He and his experts-the Bundys, the Rostows, the Kissingers, the Brzezinskis-would speak scathingly of the CIA among themselves, but that would be that...
...After all, Kissinger could not have been more plain (“I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible”) and so Helms, the loyal soldier/ bureaucrat, proceeded to turn Chile on its head, as though it were just another banana republic that had gotten uppity with the United Fruit Company...
...It’s not at all clear that any of this has changed...
...They did the job well-so well that they came to the attention of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and President John F. Kennedy...
...Flashes of insight flicker through the book, illuminating the neighborhood softly in ways we’ve rarely seen...
...the Navy was a known quantity, OSS seemed bizarre and temporary...
...The very fact that the new United Nations organization was being located in the United States seemed a good omen to E.B...
...The more important and more widely overlooked fact is that Helms, in his dedication to the art of bureaucratic compromise, very nearly destroyed the CIA’S ability to carry out its fundamental mission, the mission that he himself believed in: classic intelligence...
...we do not exercise any...
...Covert action is, in short, the no-man’sland between diplomacy and war...
...preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures...
...The initials stood for different words and, in theory, for different philosophies, but sometimes the distinctions tended to blur...
...In short order, the young men like Cord Meyer became disenchanted...
...They then moved on to Guatemala, to overthrow a duly elected government which had threatened to nationalize the United Fruit Company...
...It was not Helms’s job, as he saw it, to argue with the president of the United States...
...Nixon assured Helms that he could continue in his job...
...What would be gained from speaking up if the price you paid was to be frozen out...
...That was too bad-not just for Adams but for the White House as well...
...So much for that...
...He did not subscribe to the idea that “the shortest distance between two points was violence...
...When the military came up with hard evidence of major weapons traffic through Sihanoukville, Walsh showed them aerial photographs of a jungle trail which, he said, accounted for the supplies...
...For Eisenhower, the plainclothesmen went into Iran, to topple a prime minister who had the appalling cheek to challenge a British oil company [see box, page 381...
...It seemed to him a questionable substitute for a policy based more on understanding why people chose to become communists, and on showing them why this country offered something better...
...Over a period of more than five years, a senior CIA analyst named Paul Walsh insisted that the North Vietnamese could not possibly be getting significant supplies through the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville...
...And that was really all that nourished Richard Helmsthe same broth that feeds so many people in political Washington...
...But the quickest and by far the most inexpensive way to assure the proper use of the Central Intelligence Agency would be to require each president to read The Man Who Kept The Secrets...
...But this later image of the CIA as the Keystone Kops of the spy world-and that is now the image most people probably have-is only partially accurate and, at best, incomplete...
...in fact the propaganda was prepared and written in Washington, and the votes were bought by the United States Treasury...
...Richard Helms was one of the plainclothesmen on our side, and Thomas Powers has written a remarkable book about Helms and the CIA* which goes a long way toward clarifying the blur...
...The way things have been happening out there, we really don’t have the luxury of continuing to wring our hands over the painful discoveries of the past two decades, when we learned that we were not what we thought we were...
...At first, Adams accepted the number uncritically, but then it got him into trouble...
...Helms hesitated, thinking, then said, ‘Well, I guess 1 do...
...Classic intelligence would provide the navigational aid, a combination of compass and radar...
...they should learn, once and for all, that there are limits to what can be done with an intelligence agency...
...They looked out into a bleak world where the Russians seemed to be everywhere, subverting everyone, and they wanted to be able to meet the Russians on equal terms-# the Russians can subvert, why can’t we...
...The neighborhood on nights like these is obviously a dangerous place, and it is tempting to flip the safety off the .38 and go out on the porch, ready for whatever we find out there...
...They had to be able to provide their mysterious “Secretary” a quick fix...
...They thought they could do anything with funds and a broad okay from the top, and they offered policymakers in the late 1940s and early 1950s an irresistible promise: that they might achieve secretly what the United States felt it could not achieve openly...
...Wake Up And Read Tonight, for example, the president might profitably read about the Meo tribesmen and the CIA...
...These were not idle matters, since a single surviving missile could take out any American city east of Chicago...
...If their total OB was 270,000, they were obviously close to defeat...
...The analysts looked at the pictures: Are you kidding...
...As defined by a 1948 National Security Council directive, the term covers “propaganda, economic warfare...
...When he came back from a meeting with Nixon where he was told to spend $10 million if necessary in Chile to “make the economy scream,” he did not type out his resignation...
...and now this message from Kellogg’s...
...Now it was happening again and we were powerless to stop it...
...He went on to become chief of the CIA’S London station, and whatever he thought about what had happened to his earlier idealism, he kept it to himself...
...He was also interested in surviving...
...While we are sleeping,” Dean Rusk once wrote, “two thirds of the world is plotting to do us in...
...He had calculated that the North Vietnamese and the NLF were losing perhaps as many as 100,000 deserters a year, and suffering 150,000 casualties...
...political compromise not only robbed him of his effectiveness but also damaged the CIA in very fundamental ways...
...It was significant to Adams, however, when he read about Tet and saw the bloody battles on television...
...So the man he named to chair the committee was: Paul Walsh...
...Nobody could figure out a way to make the principal householders resolve their differences...
...The first part involves everything from reading the foreign press (“What use are they...
...Then there was the Sihanoukville story...
...No, I said...
...Helms was cautious by nature...
...It was a generation gap that also afflicted a young CIA analyst named Sam Adams, an academic sort who liked nothing better than a desk piled high with reports and printouts full of numbers...
...It turned out that they had reserves aplenty, and the operation, Lam Song 719, was adisastrous failure...
...Helms read the speech, then looked quizzically at the man who had written it and asked, ‘Do you really believe that...
...But the UN had been crippled at birth by a charter reaffirming rather than compromising the idea of absolute national sovereignty, and nations lost little time learning how to ignore the UN with impunity...
...together they became the basis for formulating foreign policy on both sides of the global community...
...He can get weapons to them, of course...
...His reports were simply ignored, destroyed...
...Neither Johnson nor Nixon wanted to listen to the CIA’s gloomy assessments...
...the Russians say it’s already being done, and they may be telling the truth...
...In the end, when Helms had been caught perjuring himself in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the master of the CIA would be reduced to plea-bargaining-agreeing to confess his guilt, as long as the government would agree to give him his pension...
...He described the phony estimate of Son Tay militia armament, said the militia turned out in the event to have been armed with submachine guns, and then, pointing his finger directly at Helms, said, ‘People’s lives were at stake!’ Helms sat poker-faced throughout and when Riccio was done began talking about the generation gap...
...The third partanalysis- is the easiest for a layman to visualize...
...The history compiled by Powers bears this out...
...When the White House demanded an explanation for the botched estimates, Adams went to the CIA inspector general and filed formal charges against Helms...
...That’s a good day’s work for a president, and if he doesn’t quite get finished, he would be well advised to keep on reading before he goes to sleep...
...Ramparts identified him as a CIA officer of long standing who had been bankrolling and controlling the National Student Association for I5 years...
...News stories said nothing about the CIA, of course...
...Nixon complained of the CIA to Ehrlichman: They’ve got 40,000 people over there reading newspapers”-actually, the CIA has about 15,000 people) to planting spies within the Kremlin walls, sending spy planes over Cuba and spy satellites over everywhere, bugging embassies, and taping millions of hours of coded foreign radio transmissions in the hope that someday our cryptographers will break the codes so the “back traffic” can be played back and understood...
...Quietly, veteran CIA analysts slipped Adams the word: Our estimates are much higher than the Pentagon’s, but Helms doesn’t want a fight, so he’s using theirs...
...For nearly 30 years-from the end of the second global war in 1945 until the first murmurings of detente in the early 1970s-Rusk and the other political householders of Washington slept fitfully, hearing burglars whenever the wind shifted, padding downstairs at all hours to check the locks, going out on the porch and peering anxiously into the darkness, listening for wolves and jumping when the cat rubbed up against their legs...
...Oh, he might-but never to the point of saying: Mr...
...This was Mission Impossible stuff, straight out: “Jim, should you or any of your agents be discovered, the Secretary will disavow...
...Helms asked mildly if that really mattered...
...The men and women of Mission Impossible had to get theirjobs done in less than an hour (seven minutes for commercials) every week...
...But Helms was not about to adopt that kind of approach to his job...
...They offered a quick fix-and president after president accepted the offer...
...It lies, at least in large part, within the White House...
...This is not to say that Congress shouldn’t have a more active oversight role with the CIA...
...So the Meos were assembled into a 30,000-man army, with battalions and field headquarters and transportation and communication and flags...
...He also asked for a meeting with Helms...
...There were feeble efforts to keep the Russians from subverting the governments of Eastern Europe-but many people thought they understood the way the game was played: most of these nations, after all, had allied themselves with Hitler against the Soviet Union, and it wasn’t entirely unrealistic for the Russians to be making sure it wouldn’t happen again...
...on the contrary, he said with a straight face: “The nation must to a degree take it on faith that we too are honorable men...
...White’s, without being embarrassed to read them later...
...Last year Jimmy Carter told a group of visitors to the White House: “You know, I read 300 pages of government documents every day...
...The obvious lessons never seemed to be learned, even though the CIA’s shortcomings could be politically disastrous for the White House-as Tet was for Lyndon Johnson and as the pictures of soldiers clinging to helicopter skids nearly were for Richard Nixon...
...It won’t-it may keep the CIA’s adventurers on a tighter rein, it may protect against domestic surveillance and exploding cigars, but it will not address the real legacy of Richard Helms, because that legacy has been obscured by the more spectacular foul-ups of the CIA’s clandestine warriors...
...Well, that was worth it, yes...
...Moscow, not Washington, would define the issues...
...The Vietnamese would know how it happened, “and they’d probably be in a position and mood to retaliate...
...He must be desperate to do something that will make life really uncomfortable for all those furry Russians squatting in their tanks in Kabul...
...The United States is regarded by people everywhere as a dream come true, a sort of world state in miniature...
...With someone like Ho, how could you be sure that his successor wouldn’t be worse...
...When the CIA’s final report went to the White House, over Helms’s signature, it contained the Pentagon’s OB estimate...
...The record shows that every president from Truman to Nixon abused the CIApaying too little attention to making it into a functional radar system, and counting on it too much as a quick-fix Saturday Night Special...
...Adams reported this, and his assessment made its way to the White House, where it was the source of great cheer...
...The world is, as it was before, a place where some of the sounds we hear in the night are imagined and some are very real...
...When he would demonstrate the accuracy of his numbers, they would simply respond by flat-out deleting enemy units so that their total OB stayed the same...
...But among the president’s advisers will be men who think this is not enough...
...Helms wasn’t the only one in Washing- . ton to believe that...
...It was only ten years earlier, after all, that Neville Chamberlain had given Czechoslovakia to Hitler at Munich...
...There is a tacit truce between nations on such matters: once you start killing them, they start killing you...
...You can barely hear the music against the reverberating cacophony of the recent past-a time when we learned, the hard way, that not everybody abroad or at home had any reason to regard the Unites States as a dream come true...
...The Man Who Kept The Secrets: Richard Helms and The CtA...
...and to the effectiveness of the CIA’S internal safeguards against abuse such as its inspector-general system-which Powers shows has invariably worked to the disadvantage of CIA officers who objected to wrongheaded policies and tried to channel their objections through the system, playing by the rules, only to find themselves without an ombudsman...
...Here dwell the world’s emigrants under one law, and the law is: Thou shalt not push thy neighbor around...
...it was his job to receive orders from the Oval Office and carry them out...
...and the most bizarre plot of all: “Cuba was to be flooded with rumors that the Second Coming was imminent, that Christ had picked Cuba for his arrival, and that He wanted the Cubans to get rid of Castro first...
...It was only when the Navy assigned him to OSS that Helms became a spy, and over the years he never did much field work-he visited Vietnam personally only twice, for example-because his strong preference was for deskwork in Washington...
...In the absence of communication, the adversaries took extraordinary precautions to protect themselves from the real and imagined terrors of the night...
...But to leave it at that would be to leave an important part of the story untold...
...This brought them to the attention of the North Vietnamese, who assigned a high priority to their total eradication...
...He was, of course, interested in the truth-but he already knew the truth...
...That was what it all came down to, for Richard Helms, finally...
...He read reports, he edited them for style (it was okay to use the word “however” but not to begin a sentance with it), and he took the reports to the White House...
...The first time the agency was asked to do a covert job, its general counsel balked...
...The chemistry between the CIA and the White House is, in one respect, simple...
...its tone was calm: Don’t be alarmed by Soviet intriguing, be patient, totalitarian systems are inherently weak, democracy will prevail in the end because it speaks to something abiding in the nature of man...
...Russia seemed to do it all the time...
...How the agency conducts itself is, in the end, up to him...
...The man in the Oval Office should remember the Meos the next time he looks around for a quick fix...
...By some curious divinity which in him lies, Man in this experiment of mixed races and mixed creeds has turned out more good than bad, more right than wrong, more kind than cruel, and more sinned against than sinning...
...He even went to Saigon, to struggle with the military’s number-crunchers face to face...
...The difference is readilyapparentor is it...
...And besides-how could you do it in secret...
...His reports told the CIA that weapons traffic through Sihanoukville was more than three times what Walsh was reporting...
...This is the world’s hope and its chance...
...To his surprise, however, he couldn’t get anybody in authority to accept his figures...
...For example: “In 1960 Helms asked one of his officers to write a speech he had agreed to deliver before a group of retired military officers on the subject of Communist espionage and subversion...
...To exceed those limits is to destroy it...
...But murder is seldom so morally defensible...
...And when the word got out, as it inevitably would, the CIA’s credibility and its effectiveness-its access to the White House-would be compromised...
...Yes,’ the officer said...
...In a 1971 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, a speech intended to shore up public support for the CIA, he went to great lengths to assure his audience that the CIA had no interest in domestic surveillance: “We do not have any such powers and functions...
...Revelations about the CIA have been just one small part of a very bad dream-a dream that has seemed endless, like any self-respecting nightmare...
...His objections were dismissed out of hand-by that time, the cold war was on, there was no interest in legal hair-splitting...
...Within the White House there is always a lonely man beset by global problems that share one common characteristic: they yield, if at all, only incrementally, grudgingly, glacially...
...Helms opposed it, but quietly...
...If the adventurers offered the president a quick fix, and the president said “do it,” Helms would not object...
...Throughout the course of the war in Vietnam, the CIA’s analysts-the purveyors of classic intelligence-had been the bearers of bad news to the White House...
...The urge is understandable, and perhaps there is much that can be done-but they, too, should read The Man Who Kept The Secrets...
...It was the in the rapidly chilling climate of 1947 and 1948 that America began building its first peacetime foreign intelligence agency...
...Better to make a perfunctory objection, or none at all, and then say Yessir and be on your way...
...It can be done...
...subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups...
...We might even feel encouraged to go out into the neighborhood with our eyes wide open, prepared for anything-bad or good-and prepared to let the neighbors see us for who we are, and were, and might yet become...
...By now he has probably talked at length with aides who know whether the CIA has any contact with the Afghan rebels...
...Johnson never fully accepted the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted on his own...
...But quietly...
...When you strain out all the exotic CIA seasonings, you are left with the bare, ugly soup bone of surviving: getting along by going along...
...Intelligence is not written for history,” the saying goes...
...It’s written for an audience...
...A young man named Cord Meyer came back from the battlefields and shared his widely held coriclusions in the pages of the Atlantic: “The institution that is ultimately responsible for two world wars within a generation is the sovereign nation-state,’’ he wrote...
...Thomas N. Bethell is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Helms decided not to make the shift...
...Mention the CIA in connection with Cuba, for example, and most people will think only of the Bay of Pigs fiasco or the abortive efforts to assassinate Castro...
...The few publishers and editors who knew anything about clandestine operations kept mum...
...The second part of its job-verification-gets the CIA into the tricky business of counterintelligence: spying on our own sources to make sure they’re not double agents, checking the information coming to us from the Soviet bloc to make sure it’s not being falsified, and putting out disinformation of our own to confuse the people who are trying to do to us what we’re trying to do to them...
...His boss, to his surprise, refused to accept the report...
...It was not at all hard to believe that men like these, uttering guttural sounds in a very distant land, were really and truly bent on world domination...
...When first Johnson and then Nixon ordered the surveillance of American citizens at home, Helms knew it was illegal...
...the warnings were ignored...
...Like Helms, Johnson had little use for the soggy mass of morality, but he also had little interest in finishing up the way Jack Kennedy did-so he terminated what he called “our Murder Incorporated operation in the Caribbean...
...An idealist might object that a man with the job of defending democracy shouldn’t have to hesitate before endorsing its inherent superiority...
...He did not see this as a contradiction in terms, but it was, and in the end his dedication to the fine art of...
...He can even arrange, perhaps, to help them with training (although there’s probably no one on hand who speaks the language...
...So he lied...
...Helms tired quickly of being berated by people like Walt Rostow and McGeorge Bundy...
...The report went on up through channels, and gradually Riccio came to understand that this was the way the game was played: get along, go along...
...When he next appeared, it would be a long time later-in 1967-and involuntarily, in the pages of a very different magazine...
...At vast expense, they maintained forces equipped with the latest tanks, planes, bombs, missiles and ships...
...The policy can be implemented only by recruiting, subsidizing, and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents, and puppets-a coalition of disorganized, disunited, feeble and disorderly nations, tribes, and factions around the perimeter of the Soviet Union...
...On the very morning of the offensive, while the attacks were already under way in the north, the CIA in Saigon was telling Washington by cable: “There is nothing of significance to report...
...it was quite another thing to be, exposed as the backstage manipulator of thousands of college students who thought they belonged to an independent organization...
...Briefly there were a few hopeful signs...
...And cold wars have a chilling effect on democracy...
...But the planners wanted something more than a bunch of deep thinkers locked up in a room somewhere, cracking codes and reading cables...
...Things happen to people...
...Many people would have moved out if they could have, but there was nowhere to go...
...Helms knew that to push too strongly meant being ostracized...
...It should certainly pay much closer attention to the agency’s overall appropriations and staffing requirements (do we really need 15,000 people over there...
...The newly chartered United Nations in 1946 prevailed upon the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops from Iran-a deed accomplished by negotiation, without bloodshed...
...But how many Hitlers come along-terminal tyrants that everybody can agree on...
...The first thing he said to me,” Adams recalled later, “was, ‘Don’t take notes.’ To the best of my recollection, the conversation then proceeded along the following lines...
...He was opposed, for example, to assassinating hostile leaders like Castro and Ho Chi Minh...
...This was the total number of soldiers and guerrillas that the Pentagon believed the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front were capable of throwing against the combined forces of the Americans and the South Vietnamese...
...It was the most important number there was...
...Thomas Powers...
...If he does not-if he makes it clear that he finds such reports offensive-the spymaster/ bureaucrat will go back to his office, brood for a while, and then, if the risk of ostracism seems to be looming, he will contrive ways to protect himself...
...Nobody in the White House wanted to hear that...
...in any case, Helms got there ahead of him...
...There is no certainty among us on the question of whether the nightmare is over or, if not, when it will be, But the rest of the world doesn’t wait for us to decide such questions...
...The result,” Powers writes, “was the destruction of the Meos as a people...
...The idealists of 1945 would have been aghast, but it was not their world that Richard Helms lived in and accommodated...
...By that time, the presidential elections were over...
...But, during the missile crisis of 1962, it was quiet, classic, mosaicconstructing intelligence work that enabled the CIA first to identify with precise accuracy the missiles being emplaced and then to report in amazing detail the capabilities of the missiles-not just their range and destructive power, but the speed with which they could be readied for firing and the odds of their surviving an American bomber attack...
...Everybody could agree on Hitler...
...I enlarged on the theme for about ten minutes...
...Then, on the night foretold, a U.S...
...The South Vietnamese came back in wild disorder holding on to the helicopter skids, and a great many did not come back at all...
...World government depends on nations voluntarily compromising their individual sovereignty...
...For this reason, there have always been people within the CIA who object to covert action schemes-not on moral or ethical grounds, but because they can be “as dangerous as nuclear weapons,” in the words of Lyman Kirkpatrick, a former CIA inspector general who believes that no covert operation should ever be authorized unless secrecy can be guaranteed “from inception to eternity...
...Either some measure of world government will be achieved by voluntary consent or our particular civilization will be destroyed...
...Covert action”fal1s outside the range of these three activities...
...In front of the editors, two years later, Helms said nothing of all that...
...No matter how true, this argument would never hold up in a court of law-but nations have arranged things so that they don’t have to observe the same laws as citizens...
...They want something hard...
...This isn’t a truck route-it’s covered with grass four feet tall...
...When Jan Masaryk, the prime minister, “accidentally” fell to his death from his office window, Americans were deeply disturbed...
...I said that, under the circumstances, that was the only thing he could have done...
...The idealists of 1945 thought, fora time, that the United States really could lead the world out of the abyss into which it had fallen twice within a generation...
...Conventional wisdom holds that a new charter and expanded congressional oversight will strip the CIA of tarnish...
...He realized with horror that the Pentagon’s expunged enemy units-the ones that had been arbitrarily deleted to keep the overall OB-at 270,000-were doing much of the fighting...
...What then...
...The idealists of 1945, sifting through the rubble of war, thought that the only way to prevent another one was to build a system of world government under which every nation would be compelled to forfeit some of its sovereignty for the common good...
...Riccio decided to get out of the CIA, and asked for a meeting with Helms to explain .w-h -y . At first they talked of the trivia of Riccio’s job-the feckless assessments of North Vietnamese agricultural production, the attempts to quantify things that could not be quantified...
Vol. 12 • March 1980 • No. 1
