The Family Jewels (26 page)

7

CLOAKING THE DAGGER

The standard Central Intelligence Agency response to all its problems is to try and keep them from the public, partly through secrecy, partly by means of manipulation. Attempts to influence opinion belong legitimately in an examination of the Family Jewels because only public concern induces the spooks and their overseers to scrub down and legitimate operations. The subject here is not so much “spin doctoring” per se or public relations—though these undoubtedly begin with the fear that a negative impression will inhibit CIA freedom of action—as it is active measures to shape the CIA's image. The spooks minimize flap potential by currying favor with journalists or other well-known figures, giving them privileged access and selectively releasing material favorable to itself while suppressing more disquieting knowledge. These are efforts to forestall the emergence of data the spy mavens consider damaging to their interests. Americans are the target. Citizens can debate whether these are charter violations, but taken together the record is chilling even where it is not illegal.

Agency interactions with the media, broadly conceived to include not only newspaper reporters, magazine writers,
authors, broadcast journalists, and so on, are a huge and thorny subject. In the past it has been almost entirely viewed in one of two ways: as a question of how the intelligence agency produced propaganda for the Cold War—which often had repercussions on domestic opinion—or as one of the CIA's use of media outlets as cover for its officers on mission. Yes, there was an operational side in how the CIA used media to cloak the identities of its operatives. This has received nearly all the attention given to the subject and will not be rehashed here. There was also an operational effort to plant books, articles, films, and other items to further CIA propaganda aims. Simply circulating the artifacts of Western culture behind the Iron Curtain—by no means limited to CIA's own doctored or inspired products—did weaken the hold of communist ideology.
¹

But much more sinister is the issue of what the CIA did to influence the ways in which it, itself, is portrayed. As will be seen, this has been a direct, constant effort that reached far beyond press releases or spin doctoring and has been a domestic activity from the start. It has included attempts to shape what is known about international events, to secure the dismissal of journalists or discredit commentators considered unfriendly; the active surveillance of American citizens; the suppression of works by the CIA's own employees (see
Chapter 8
); meddling in authors' research to limit what can be discovered about the intelligence services; manipulation of the Freedom of Information Act and other declassification regulations; lawsuits; and even intervention in the marketplace. These things have been done in the name of protecting intelligence “sources and methods,” which the CIA has a responsibility to do under a 1949 law. But that authority has been used to justify a host of actions that have nothing to do with protecting the technical secrets of intelligence, but everything to do with flap potential. Just to put this record in one place is stunning. Preventing disclosure
has meant near-malevolent actions. This discussion will adopt the term “suppressive maneuvers” to describe the whole gamut of these activities.

From the perspective of Family Jewels, our concern is not the wider CIA cultural Cold War, but the interactions where CIA operations had or intended to have an effect on American public discourse. This is distinct in another way also. In this area the CIA played defense. With the exception of the agency role in Watergate, many of the Family Jewels documents described programs or projects, activities of clear or potential criminality as perceived by the agency's own officers, dubious suppressive maneuvers, or plain violations of a charter prohibiting domestic activities. Those were the products of CIA units pursuing projects they were instructed to carry out. But in the public arena Langley sought to shape, moderate, or ameliorate what Americans thought and said about the Central Intelligence Agency.

Over the longer arc of CIA history, this is the persistent struggle of an assortment of CIA components to influence what Americans said or did about the agency, and in some instances public opinion about United States government policy. Only a small part of this was public relations. More often it amounted to strong-arming media moguls or U.S. corporations, or the employment of methods that, had they been directed against a foreign country, would fairly be seen as part of a psychological warfare campaign. In certain instances suppressive maneuvers involved wiretapping persons who wrote stories the CIA considered threatening, in others the muzzling of former agency officers. One became the object of an active covert operation. With a magazine, the agency grasped every straw in its effort to silence a critical voice. Multiple episodes show CIA sensitivity regarding the Kennedy assassination. Here, the agency planned actions with respect to books on that tragedy, as it did with at least one book on the war in Southeast Asia.

Suppressive maneuvers began very early in the CIA's history. Allen Dulles, the agency's director from 1953 to 1961, famously manipulated the
New York Times
during the 1954 paramilitary operation in Guatemala. Having decided that
Times
reporter Sydney Gruson's presence would be inconvenient—both headquarters and the CIA station leading the effort compiled analyses of Gruson's articles that claimed he was friendly to the government the CIA intended to overthrow—the spooks tried to neutralize him. Capitalizing on the Guatemalans canceling Gruson's visa after a story they disliked, forcing the reporter to move to Mexico, Director Dulles went to
Times
publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger and the paper's general manager to claim that Gruson could not report objectively and should be kept in Mexico. Of course, what the agency meant by “objective” was journalism shaded to present the Guatemalan government as somehow illegitimate. The
Times
actually acceded to Dulles's demand, though Sulzberger's suspicions grew and a few months later he confronted the CIA director. Gruson himself broke with instructions and got back to Guatemala. But by then the agency had done its work, and the CIA stood on the verge of paramilitary success.
²

Some CIA actions in this back-alley struggle, illegal because they were domestic activities, would have been subject to criminal penalties had they been carried out later. In 1959 Shef Edwards's security mavens tapped the phones of Charles J. V. Murphy after the journalist published articles on the “Missile Gap” intelligence dispute. Warrantless wiretapping next took place with Project Mockingbird, which CIA Director John A. McCone, Dulles's successor, ordered on the telephones of Washington reporters Paul J. Scott and Robert S. Allen in March 1963. McCone's executive assistant Walter S. Elder recounts that initiative came at the instigation of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. The CIA Office of Security records that both journalists, a team who wrote
the “Allen-Scott Report” published by the Hall Syndicate, had published columns that at times quoted Top Secret documents and even communications intercepts. Scott's son believes that stories they wrote about the Cuban Missile Crisis were the catalyst. With the telephone company's help (shades of recent controversy over giving the companies legal immunity for this kind of intrusion), taps were installed at the reporters' offices at the National Press Building and both their homes.

Scott and Allen quickly learned they were being wiretapped—Paul Scott's son James was at home playing with a friend when the phone rang. When he picked it up he could hear voices in an undertone talking about changing the audiotape. His father immediately told James to be careful and that someone was listening in on their telephones.
³
No doubt Scott drew the appropriate conclusion. The CIA overheard a number of sources and identified many of them, including a plethora of people on Capitol Hill, an assistant to Bobby Kennedy, a White House staffer, and an aide to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, but no one from the intelligence community. CIA maintained the wiretaps for three months. Paul Scott felt chilled enough to leave the United States. He took his journalism to Mexico.

“Journalist” was given the widest possible definition for suppressive maneuvers. Bernard B. Fall was an academic expert on Vietnam, one of the best in the United States, teaching at Howard University. Fall produced a wide variety of both scholarly and journalistic writing. When he published a piece on the war in South Vietnam in the
Christian Science Monitor
in early 1962, it raised eyebrows at the Kennedy White House. President Kennedy made inquiries about Fall, to which John McCone responded with a memo crafted by his analysts. The heavily redacted version of this paper currently available appears to show the CIA had a high opinion of Fall's work, but it also notes that “Fall now holds the view
that the only real solution to the problems facing the United States in South Vietnam is a negotiated settlement.”
⁴
Shortly thereafter, Fall and his wife Dorothy noticed they were being followed, and their phones tapped. Bernard Fall became a casualty of the Vietnam war, killed by a mine in 1967 while accompanying a U.S. Marine patrol. Years later, using the Freedom of Information Act, Dorothy Fall applied to see Bernard's FBI file. After repeated requests and two decades of pushing, Dorothy got the file. It revealed the surveillance had gone into high gear with wiretaps in July 1963, around the time of Kennedy's inquiry to the CIA. The excuse was that U.S. authorities were trying to establish whether Fall was a
French
spy.
⁵

The records of CIA Director John McCone's interactions with President Lyndon B. Johnson are eye-opening in terms of the agency's sense of vulnerability to the media. This vein opens as early as November 29, 1963, a week after LBJ succeeded the dead Kennedy. Bringing Johnson that morning's President's Daily Brief (PDB),
⁶
in commenting on one of its items McCone noted press “distortions,” very likely on Vietnam, and accepted the president's instructions to see the chairman of the
New York Times
and complain that its supposedly skewed reporting damaged U.S. interests.
⁷
McCone reported back on December 3 that the
Times
had tempered its coverage. This was a sequel to efforts Kennedy had made previously with
Times
editors to silence their reporters Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam. Six days later, waiting to enter the Oval Office for another PDB presentation, national security advisor McGeorge Bundy asked McCone whether the CIA was doing damage assessment on an article regarding reconnaissance satellites that had appeared in the
Washington Post
. McCone answered “yes,” then immediately ordered an investigation when he returned to Langley.
⁸

McCone blamed the well-known aviation writer, Charles J. V. Murphy, now a repeat offender. The agency considered his piece objectionable—so McCone invited him over to give Murphy chapter and verse on why he was wrong. Note that, in the furor that erupted after the Bay of Pigs, Murphy had been considered reliable enough that CIA leaked information to him for an account favorable to the agency that he published in
Fortune
magazine.

In January 1964 Senator Eugene McCarthy wrote an article critical of the CIA in the magazine
Saturday Evening Post
. President Johnson saw the piece and mentioned it to Director McCone, who agreed “to see McCarthy to discuss the article . . . and try to put an end to this type of criticism that he has been directing toward the agency.”
⁹
Senator McCarthy's transgression was simply that he advocated a joint congressional committee to oversee U.S. intelligence. When the Soviet Union tried and failed at a space shot toward the planet Venus, both the
Times
and
Post
reported in terms very similar to those used in U.S. intelligence reports. Director McCone brought this to the president to ask if he would accept the intelligence community doing an investigation of the leak. LBJ had no problem with that.
¹⁰

A striking episode in this intricate dance took place over 1965–1966, when the
New York Times
prepared a five-part series on U.S. intelligence generally, and the Central Intelligence Agency in particular. In the fall of 1965,
Times
managing editor Turner Catledge, mystified at the shady schemes of America's spooks, had exclaimed, “For God's sake let's find out what they are doing.”
¹¹
That led to a months-long project worthy of the agency itself—the
Times
queried its correspondents in far-flung corners of the world and put a team together to compile the results. It was, says Harrison Salisbury, “the first big venture by the
Times
into the journalism of the late sixties.” Reporter Tom Wicker took charge of the investigative team.

Agency counterintelligence guru James Angleton discovered the
Times
's inquiry in short order from CIA officers under cover at the newspaper, no doubt from the interview that Timesman John Finney did with McCone, and from field reporting as well. By October 1 CIA media monitor Stanley Grogan was addressing Richard Helms about a
Times
“threat to the safety of the nation.” The proposed solution?—have both Helms and recently appointed Director William F. Raborn intercede with the publishers. The buck went as high as Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who spoke to Catledge and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. The
Times
finally agreed to let John McCone (now retired) review the article drafts before its series went to press. That happened in February 1966. McCone raised issues the newspaper dealt with one way or another. But like Rusk, McCone opposed any publication at all. The
Times
went ahead anyway.