The Family Jewels (10 page)

The development that sharpened Project Lingual's challenge to constitutional rights occurred at this time. The CIA created a “watch list” to improve efficiency. This document was not permitted outside the Office of Security. Agency officers memorized it there and used the list to cull mail. They received no other guidance on what to select for the steam bath. Only one step separated watch-listing Russian spies and doing the same for Americans, and since the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) was already an FBI target, that barrier fell immediately. From there it was but a short step to watch-listing other American political groups and citizens. Updates to the watch list were made every few months at first, but demand accelerated so much before the end that the lists were being changed twice a month. The watch list contained three to four hundred names.

In late 1960, when Lingual was photographing roughly 1,800 covers and examining 60 letters a day, the CIA Inspector General (IG) did its first project evaluation. According to Thomas Abernathy, one of the team on this review, the IG did not discuss legality. Its report observed that Project Lingual had not been formally approved, its cost could not be established with precision (expenses were split among CIA units and there was no overall budget line), and “no tangible operational benefits had accrued . . . as a result.”
⁷
The IG report recommended that the DCI take a deeper look and have CIA ready a cover story for the moment when Lingual's existence was revealed. Allen Dulles took no action. His successor, John McCone,
was never even told about Lingual
. The only response to the IG report, after the passage of a full year, was a memorandum from James Angleton's deputy on the CI Staff, Raymond Rocca, which frankly admitted: “Since no good purpose can be served by an official admission of the [CIA criminal] violation, and existing Federal statutes preclude the concoction of any legal excuse for the violation, it must be recognized that no cover story is available.”
⁸

In the meantime the CI Staff had requested—and Richard Helms approved—an
expansion
of Project Lingual under which the CIA's Technical Services Division established a laboratory at Idlewild (soon Kennedy) Airport that enabled both more letter examinations and chemical tests on those opened. The lab was up and running by early 1961. That year 14,000 letters were subjected to intrusive examination.

It is worth pausing a moment to comment on Helms's role. His fingerprints are all over Project Lingual. The only declassified CIA documents approving any aspect of Lingual bear his signature. Helms attended the original—and subsequent—meetings between CIA directors and postmasters general, approved the initial Lingual budget, and sanctioned its expansion. Helms would be at the center of the action later as director in his own right. Allen Dulles obviously knew
about Lingual, but the Church Committee established that neither of his immediate successors—McCone and William F. Raborn—ever did. As for postmasters general, the Summerfield meeting record—Helms's record—is ambiguous. A Raymond Rocca memorandum for the CI Staff on January 27, 1961, contended, “There is no record in any conversation with any official of the Post Office Department that we have admitted to opening mail.”
⁹
Soon afterwards Helms was among the group who met with President Kennedy's Postmaster General, J. Edward Day, and recorded that “no relevant details” were withheld.
¹⁰
But a decade later the Lingual project chief commented on this same record, “The wording of this memo leaves some doubt as to the degree to which Day was made witting.”
¹¹
The Church Committee concluded that between 1961 and 1971
no
Post Office chief was informed of the CIA mail-opening. Similarly, no attorney general knew of Lingual except for John Mitchell in the Nixon administration, and no president of the United States ever knew of or approved the CIA mail-opening. Suggestions inside the CIA in 1965 to tell Lyndon Johnson were rejected. This gives new meaning to Thomas Powers's view of Helms as “The Man Who Kept the Secrets.”
¹²

It is in the period of the Vietnam war protests that Project Lingual began to run flat out. In 1967, the year Helms ordered creation of the Chaos domestic surveillance unit, the mail-openers reached their peak volume, prying open 23,617 letters.
¹³
In 1969 Project Chaos chief Ober actually solicited the FBI for names of Americans to include on the Lingual watch list. An Ober memorandum argued that “
‘the Bureau should not overlook the utilization of the agency's Hunter project [the FBI name for Lingual] for the development of leads in the New Left and Black Nationalist fields.'
”
¹⁴
It was also during 1969 that the CIA dispensed with the inconvenience of shuttling mail in and out of Manhattan, doing all its processing work in Building 111 at Kennedy Airport. By the end of
1972 the FBI had added 289 more names. A third of the 600-odd people on the list by then were nominated by the Bureau. It is difficult to avoid the impression that by this point
the main focus
of CIA mail-opening was on Americans exercising constitutionally protected speech.

Richard Helms would later defend himself variously. With the Church Committee he actually prevaricated—or came preciously close to that—telling the inquisitors that he
assumed
that Allen Dulles had made some arrangement with Arthur Summerfield regarding legality, and that his place was not to question Mr. Dulles, a lawyer, on a matter of law.
¹⁵
But Helms had been present at the only meeting with Summerfield, he
knew
what had been said, and he had made a contemporaneous record. And in any case Summerfield had no power to waive federal criminal statutes. As with J. Edgar Hoover and the Project Chaos records, there was a reason why Dulles never put his name to a Lingual approval. He
was
a lawyer. Only Helms's signature appeared. And Helms stuck to the Soviet spy rationale. But the mail-opening went far beyond that, as will be seen shortly, and Helms himself (in his memoirs) could credit Project Lingual with uncovering no more than
two
Russian agents. That is not much to show for CIA's invasive prying into 215,820 pieces of first-class mail plus recording over 28
million
covers. In his memoirs the former spy chieftain presents the Department of Justice's decision not to prosecute agency officers for mail-opening as an
affirmation
of his course, and continues to maintain that Lingual had been “cleared” by the postmaster general.
¹⁶
Justice's reluctance to serve up a criminal indictment in the superheated atmosphere of Watergate and the Year of Intelligence should not be mistaken for a judgment of innocence.

Others, including officers at the CIA, had a much different impression of Lingual's value. “We got no benefit from it
at all,” observed Howard J. Osborn, whose Office of Security actually ran the mail-opening. “The product was worthless.”
¹⁷
In 1969 Osborn went to CIA Deputy Director Karamessines to shut it down—budget reductions had him under pressure and Osborn wanted to preserve other valuable staff slots. Jim Angleton showed up to support Lingual. Karamessines sided with Angleton. By then the illegality and domestic surveillance aspects had reached the point where they were contentious within the CIA itself. In an agency oral history, Director Helms countered those who objected: “[On] mail-opening and a couple of other operations, these young people [that is, agency junior officers] didn't know anything about them, so there was no basis for their criticizing.”
¹⁸

The Inspector General, meantime, conducted a fresh review of the CI Staff in 1969 and “came across” Project Lingual, which he proceeded to examine. John Glennon headed the team for Inspector General Gordon Stewart. Glennon found that hardly anybody at Langley was actually using the Lingual material; its main consumer was the FBI—for domestic surveillance purposes. The IG report explicitly noted: “
‘Most of the officers we spoke to found it occasionally helpful, but there is no recent evidence of it having provided significant leads or information which have had positive operational results. . . . The positive intelligence derived from this source is meager.'
”
¹⁹
Glennon told the Church Committee that his team never mentioned legality, “because we assumed that everyone realized it was illegal.” Gordon Stewart agreed, adding that when briefing the IG report he told Helms the project had no legal basis and recommended the CIA get out of mail-opening, handing it over to the FBI.
²⁰
Only Angleton disagreed.

In 1971 the CIA team screened 4,375,000 pieces of U.S. mail at Building 111. They chose about half (2,269,000) to examine, culled 25,000 of those for covers and 10,500 for recording of contents. A quarter (6,500) of the letters taken
for photography (thus
about 60 percent of those recorded
) were selected on the basis of the watch list. Over 80 percent of the intrusions were exploited for “intelligence” purposes, with two thousand reports sent to the FBI and five thousand circulated within CIA. The statistics for 1972 are similar: 2,308,000 letters selected (out of 4,350,000 that passed through CIA hands), 33,000 covers photographed, 8,700 letters recorded, 5,000 of them based on the watch list. About half the 1972 disseminations went to the CI Staff, a high proportion of them to Project Chaos, and a quarter to the Soviet Bloc Division. Project Lingual prying was nothing if not massive.

The Office of Security tried to drop mail-opening again during 1971 with no success. Karamessines took its side this time, but Director Helms overruled him. Neither Howard Osborn nor Gordon Stewart were naïve young intelligence officers. But not only did Richard Helms refuse to shut down Lingual, in exchanges with the FBI over the next two years he extolled the mail-opening project as one of the CIA's major contributions to domestic intelligence. The CIA's official history of Helms's tenure as director observes that the man almost always agreed with Jim Angleton—and it offers Project Lingual as an example.
²¹

The Church Committee eventually concluded that “a significant—perhaps the primary—portion of the product related to domestic, rather than foreign, intelligence concerns.”
²²
Mail-opening watch lists had doubled in size and were modified frequently. They were compiled by the CI Staff, which meant major inputs from Richard Ober's Chaos staff. Again from the Church Committee: “The Watch List, in short, originated with a relatively few names which might reasonably be expected to lead to genuine leads for intelligence or counterintelligence information, but soon expanded
well beyond the initial guidelines into the area of essentially domestic intelligence.”
²³
Among those turning up on the list were congresswomen Bella Abzug and Patsy Mink—again—writers John Steinbeck and Edward Albee, religious groups like the American Friends Service Committee, peace groups and political activists, scientific groups like the Federation of American Scientists, even a former deputy director of the CIA, Herbert Scoville. Anyone who had visited the Soviet Union or Cuba was fair game. (That included a member of the Rockefeller family.) A curious inclusion was that of the publisher Frederick A. Praeger, a participant in CIA-subsidized book projects intended to purvey agency propaganda. Between a quarter and a third of the mail CIA opened belonged to the people and groups on the watch list. The rest was selected at random—an equally distressing proposition.

Stopping Project Lingual proved impossible, at least while Helms led the CIA. Inspector General reports in both 1960 and 1969 were ineffectual. The 1962 realization that concocting a cover story would be pointless had no impact. The CIA had a near-death experience in the mid-'60s when its illegal program came near to being revealed by a congressional inquiry—the episode that led managers to consider telling President Johnson—but that had no effect either.

What finally cracked the nut was the possibility the Post Office might move against Langley. In April 1969 William Cotter, a former CIA person, now the chief postal inspector, complained to Jim Angleton's special assistant about Project Lingual. Cotter was an experienced agency officer with eighteen years' service, ending at the Office of Security. He was not some neophyte, and he knew all about the mail-opening. Cotter's predecessor as postal inspector had known only of photographing envelopes, and nothing regarding actual mail tampering. But Cotter agreed to consult the CI Staff before going to the postmaster general, and Angleton, according to the Church Committee, persuaded Cotter that his CIA
secrecy agreement precluded his telling the postmaster general of the mail-opening.

That understanding held for about a year and a half. Then, early in 1971, Dr. Jeremy J. Stone, president of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), filed an inquiry with the Post Office—in fact directly to Cotter—specifically asking whether FAS mail was being tampered with. Of course, FAS was on the Lingual watch list. The “flap potential” was obvious. On May 19 Director Helms convened the officials concerned. They tried to figure out how Jeremy Stone could have found out and decided he must have been warned by Herb Scoville, a former CIA deputy director, who was on the FAS board. Since Scoville had left the agency in the mid-'60s, that is an indication of how long CIA had been watching the Federation. Tom Karamessines expressed “grave concern” that “any flap would cause the CIA the worst possible publicity and embarrassment.” An inspection by Bill Cotter raised that danger. To head off that possibility Director Helms met with Postmaster General Winton M. Blount on June 2, 1971. The evidence on how much Helms told Blount about the mail-opening is disputed.
²⁴
Helms nevertheless sought to impress him by citing letters from Black Power advocate Eldridge Cleaver.