The Family Jewels (31 page)

There is a marked contrast between these grants of privileged access and the CIA's relationship with the larger community of authors and historians. Those on Langley's good side are coddled just as the agency's Covert Action Staff laid down in 1961. The most favored writers may submit their manuscripts to review, CIA scrubs them, and the result looks
pretty. As for the others, they struggle to obtain the declassification of records for their research. And CIA is among the most zealous guardians of its secrets, both in its responses, or the lack of them, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and in what Soviet apparatchiks of an earlier age would have called “active measures.” Agency FOIA processors refuse to confirm or deny that records even exist. Or they call up historians and tell them what they seek will never see the light of day. Or they stall—a favorite tactic. For example, in the early 1990s, in preparation for a biography of William E. Colby, this author filed an FOIA request for a variety of Vietnam-era records, including agency histories by or about Colby. My book eventually appeared in 2003.
After
the book was out, CIA staff inquired as to whether I was still interested in the documents requested under FOIA a decade earlier. This is not the only time this has happened. Naturally I was still interested in the material. It was never released, at least not to me. In August 2011 the CIA declassified its official history of Bill Colby as CIA director in response to another researcher. It had been finished and published in 1993.

It needs to be noted, to take another example, that it took the statutory powers and authority of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board to spring free even a few paltry excerpts of the documents Evan Thomas and Peter Grose had used. The agency continues to maintain that this whole category of materials—
histories
by its own writ—are actually operational
records
. Equally distressing, the CIA obtained its 1984 FOIA operational records exemption using the argument that in exchange it would expedite the release of
histories
—which it now claims form part of the operational record. Moreover, the specific language of the 1984 exemption provides that operational records, no matter what they may be, are no longer exempt once used or cited in a declassified monograph or study. Such studies from the CIA have now appeared but the source documents remain secret, and,
in the face of FOIA requests, the agency as of this writing has yet to apply the statute except to insist it has a blanket exemption.

The Kennedy review board actually had unique advantages in opening up secret records. Under the law creating it, the board had the authority to make the actual release decisions, which put CIA in the position of having to explain why something needed to remain secret, instead of peremptorily denying requests to declassify material. The board required the CIA to certify,
under penalty of perjury
, that it had supplied all records relevant to its requests. But Langley played games even so. It was reluctant at first to make materials available, then disputed access to full files for investigators to check compliance, then resisted actual declassification. The board finally had to go to CIA Director George Tenet to obtain a formal directive ordering all elements of the agency to cooperate. Despite those orders, some officers of the operations directorate did all they could to impede the process and prevent compromises. In 1998, with the board winding up its work, it uncovered evidence that called into question the thoroughness of supposedly comprehensive inventories the CIA had carried out six years earlier. Board members satisfied themselves in the end when Tenet's executive director swore under oath that the agency had complied fully with the Kennedy Assassination Records Act.

To get the flavor of this, consider the word “station,” the term of art for the unit of agency officers assigned to any country. The usage was very familiar. CIA stations were everywhere—in movies, novels, and histories. They were even in declassified documents. “Station” appears in official reports on the CIA and Watergate. In the Year of Intelligence, Langley objected to the appearance of the word in the Church Committee assassination report, that was released by the Senate. As a matter of legal record, CIA stipulated the existence of “stations”—and certain specific ones—in the trials
that came out of the Iran-Contra affair (see
Chapter 9
). Here, nearly a decade later, Langley fought the Kennedy records board over “revelation” of the word station. This was at the same time that CIA official statements on the Guatemala death squad controversy openly used the word. The agency lost its fight—and the Kennedy board's determinations carried the force of law. Yet ten years
after
this defeat should have changed declassification practice, agency censors typically delete mentions of CIA stations when releasing documents, and frequently when approving texts for publication by former officers.

Langley's active measures have been even more disturbing. When the Rockefeller Commission was on the point of releasing its findings, CIA's Office of General Counsel ordered the destruction of the files from Project Chaos. In the late 1970s and early '80s, a historian used a combination of materials, including legally required archival “withdrawal sheets”—which specify papers kept secret in open files—to identify the particular White House meetings in which President Eisenhower decided to move ahead with reconnaissance satellites (today the CIA officially brags about these programs). Agency security officers subsequently visited that archive and literally razored out the identifying information on the sheets. Defacing a government document is a Class C felony in the United States Code. Another time a historian wrote about the Truman administration's Psychological Strategy Board based upon properly declassified documents held in a government repository. The CIA sent an armed security team to that archive and repossessed the entire set of documents—the first known instance in U.S. history in which a full archival collection open for research at an official facility had been “reclassified.” It has taken two decades for these documents to dribble back into the public domain.

When historian James Bamford found a set of unclassified National Security Agency newsletters at a university library
and relied on them for his NSA history
The Puzzle Palace
, a security team went there and seized the material. Under the Freedom of Information Act, Bamford received documents delineating NSA's legal vulnerabilities for its domestic surveillance programs in the 1960s and after. Once the material appeared in his book, the author was threatened with arrest for possession of classified documents. In 1990 CIA attorneys intervened again to mandate destruction of the files on the controversial mail-opening Project Lingual. Even quite recently, when the family of deceased CIA officer Philip Agee donated his papers to a university institute, agency security officers were waiting on the dock when the shipment arrived. They extracted whatever they wanted from the Agee papers.

Active measures can go beyond attempts to fiddle with the documentary record. Frank Snepp has written about how senior officers at Langley warned employees that he was at work on a CIA book and cautioned them against speaking to him. At least Snepp was a former CIA officer, but the agency applied the same logic in the late 1980s to a private individual, author Douglas Valentine, who was researching a book on the notorious “Phoenix” program during the Vietnam war. The historian collected numerous interviews for his research, and at first Langley had been cooperative, with CIA's Retirement Division even forwarding his letters to former officers, and a number of them speaking with him on the strength of his early contacts with William E. Colby.

Valentine's initial interviews proved the most productive. Elements at Langley became uncooperative after one retiree asked CIA lawyers, in the summer of 1986, what things were safe to talk about. When a Publications Review Board lawyer checked to see whether Phoenix was off-limits (the Board had previously cleared Phoenix material in works by Colby himself and agency officer Ralph McGehee), he was advised to caution interviewees not to talk to Valentine. The lawyer pointed out that the most he could do was warn veterans
against unrehearsed, unprepared interviews and suggest that they “obtain the questions from Mr. Valentine in writing in advance and draft a written response for the Board to review.” Board lawyers gave this advice repeatedly, noting in an April 1987 instance that when Valentine's questions were solicited and answers reviewed by the Board, “virtually all were found to be classified.” Some months later the same lawyer complimented an agency veteran for refusing to be interviewed.

By April 1988 the Publications Review Board was advising clandestine service officers of a concern that Valentine's “forthcoming book will contain so much detailed information about Agency operations and officers that . . . it may cause damage,” and asking that senior management of the Directorate of Operations have the entire matter brought to their attention. Spooks, including some in the ostensibly impartial Inspector General's office, were ranging the halls telling each other that the author was bad news and hoping they might escape his attention. Valentine eventually discovered this stonewalling due to the reticence of CIA veterans—and the materials quoted here emerged in the course of legal discovery in the lawsuit Douglas Valentine brought against the Central Intelligence Agency.
⁵⁶

It would be a relief to write that this type of behavior represents ancient history, but the opposite, unfortunately, is the case. The experience of James Scott is typical. Scott, who had worked for the U.S. government for thirty-four years, much of that time as a public affairs officer for the navy, was the son of journalist Paul Scott, whom the CIA had wiretapped in its Project Mockingbird back in 1963. When the Family Jewels documents were finally declassified, Jim Scott quickly discovered its mentions of his father's case and applied under the Freedom of Information Act in January 2008 for release of text that had been deleted from the Jewels or was never mentioned in the report—in other words, the details of this affair. The CIA stalled, first by considering the request as one
for a personal file rather than for the subject “Paul Scott.” Given a copy of the death certificate, in December 2008 the CIA reported that it had completed a thorough search of its files—and then declassified a few documents that had nothing to do with the Mockingbird wiretapping.

James Scott appealed. In the summer of 2009 the CIA summarily rejected his request. The reporter's son waited almost a year and then used a different release procedure called “mandatory declassification review” to request that the redactions be removed from the specific pages of the Jewels that related to the Mockingbird affair. Scott enclosed copies of the pages to make sure there was no mistake. A month later the CIA sent Scott copies of his own pages, no changes made, terming them the result of a recent review of the documents. The reporter's son thought the CIA was simply acknowledging his request; after all, in its letter the agency had assigned it an index number. But when nothing happened, in early 2011 he checked with the agency's information and privacy coordinator, only to be told that CIA's June 2010 letter had been its final response to his declassification request.

Thoroughly frustrated, James Scott wrote to then-CIA director Leon Panetta criticizing the agency's entire record on release of the Mockingbird records. A subordinate signed the reply in which the CIA reaffirmed the decisions it had made on the documents, inviting Scott to submit a fresh request after another interval or take his case to an interagency appeals board. In the meantime, James Scott never even received acknowledgment of a separate declassification request—required by regulations—he had made for unexpurgated versions of the documents it had partially released in 2008. During this time the FBI declassified to Jim Scott more than half of its own file on his father and, in January 2011, sent fifty more pages to the agency for its check on CIA “equities.” Langley has completed no action on the material as of
this writing. The presidential executive order that controls government secrecy explicitly forbids the use of classification to shield illegal activities—which the Project Mockingbird wiretaps certainly were.

More often than not the manipulations remain invisible. But this record clearly shows an atmosphere in which maneuvers to affect information are considered business as usual. Public relations and spin doctoring were only minor resources in a toolbox that includes such energetic Central Intelligence Agency measures. Provision of materials to shape products, behind-the-scenes tampering with research, interventions to quash some coverage or encourage something else, surveillance of “dangerous” journalists, and retaliation against both officials and private citizens thought to have harmed the agency in some way are domestic activities and have not ceased. Meanwhile, CIA friends received preferential treatment. This was not protecting national security, but playing with “security” to show the agency in the best possible light. Langley's media activity manifests an arrogance of power similar to that exhibited in other areas documented here. The journalists were fortunate in that they were not agency employees and thus less vulnerable to its mailed fist. The most exposed victims would be the Central Intelligence Agency's own rank and file.

8

PLUGGING THE DIKE

A disturbing episode in the CIA's war on books concerned one of its own, Victor Marchetti, who resigned in frustration during 1969. A fifteen-year veteran, Marchetti had wide experience, including as a photo interpreter and as special assistant to the CIA director. In retirement he wrote a novel called
The Rope Dancer
, portraying CIA machinations in a harsh light. Then Marchetti teamed up with John D. Marks, a former State Department intelligence analyst, to offer publishers a nonfiction exposé of the agency's roles and missions,
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
.
¹
Meanwhile, in conjunction with the appearance of his novel, Marchetti had given a highly critical interview to the wire service United Press International, printed in the newsweekly
U.S. News and World Report
. That put him on Langley's radar screen. In late 1971 the Marchetti interview became a point of contention among agency officials concerned the CIA had become excessively involved in domestic activities.