The Family Jewels (32 page)

Director Helms ordered Marchetti placed under surveillance on March 23, 1972. Under Project Butane, Howard Osborn's Office of Security kept the Marchetti watch up for
a month. Hysteria increased another notch in early April when the former spook put an article in
The Nation
depicting the CIA as the loyal tool of presidents. Again, Langley saw national security damage where, just a couple of years hence, it would come under wide attack as the infamous “rogue elephant” careening out of control. More reflective officers must later have wished Marchetti's arguments had survived CIA's attempts to discredit him. Meanwhile, Langley soon learned the agency veteran and his coauthor Marks were planning a more ambitious manuscript.

Worried sick, the CIA acquired a copy of Marchetti's book proposal. Helms secured the cooperation of Nixon's White House, enlisting the Department of Justice for a Pentagon Papers–like effort at prior restraint. Agency lawyer John S. Warner went to U.S. District Court with an affidavit from deputy director Tom Karamessines, arguing the CIA's special duty to protect “sources and methods” under the Central Intelligence Act of 1949. Warner obtained a court order compelling Marchetti to submit his manuscript to prepublication review. The filing was made without even notifying the defendant, and the temporary restraining order of April 18, 1972, would be the first Marchetti knew that his writing was at issue.

The authors, so far at work for only a few months, subsequently encountered numerous roadblocks. Marchetti had to clear each piece of his work with Langley, which slowed down John Marks as well. The agency called for deletion of roughly 20 percent of the entire text. Marchetti's lawyers tried to quash the injunction and suppress the demands. The Justice Department argued it was enforcing the contract Marchetti had signed as a CIA employee, not abridging Marchetti's First Amendment rights. A hearing took place on May 15. Karamessines appeared in a wheelchair, demanding his testimony be taken in secret, and the federal judge went along. Historian Angus Mackenzie obtained the trial transcript
and reports Karamessines “insisted that Marchetti had to be censored so the other U.S. intelligence agencies' foreign allies would continue to trust the CIA. At stake, he said, was the CIA's reputation among the world community of spies.”
²
Judge Albert V. Bryan, Jr., granted a permanent injunction. Bryan did provide for a review process, however. Forced to justify its national security claims, the CIA abandoned half its demands, compromising on 168 deletions that still subtracted vast amounts of material. Melvin Wulf, the authors' lawyer, recalls as very painful the night they met to scissor out swaths of text. Among passages the CIA claimed would “damage” national security, but later relented upon, was one noting that Richard Nixon had mispronounced the name of a country at a meeting, the comment that Henry Kissinger was the most powerful figure on the unit that approved CIA covert operations, the remark that spy satellites were very expensive, plus notes on CIA activities in Tibet and Chile, including the fact that national intelligence estimates had cautioned against the kind of scheme mounted against Salvador Allende. Since the Marchetti-Marks book appeared in 1974, after Allende's overthrow, these passages were of historical note but had no operational significance.

The authors had already appealed the court order, and their hearing before the Fourth Circuit took place on May 31, 1972. On the eve, presidential counselor John Ehrlichman forwarded to Mr. Nixon a letter from Richard Helms thanking the White House for its assistance. Ehrlichman reminded Nixon of their provision of “the necessary help to file an action against Marchetti” and observed that agency lawyers were confident of the outcome on appeal. The president scribbled “Good” in the margin.
³
The Helms letter itself, sent a week earlier, expressed his pleasure at the help “in what I consider historic litigation on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
⁴

Judge Clement F. Haynsworth, whom Nixon had nomi
nated for the Supreme Court several years earlier, and who had failed to obtain Senate confirmation, headed the circuit court panel. In mid-September Haynsworth issued the panel's decision, which continued the permanent injunction, merely requiring the CIA to respond “promptly” to anything Marchetti might submit for approval, since the effect of its order was to impose a prior restraint on Victor Marchetti's freedom of speech. Marchetti and Marks appealed again, now to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. The writing—and final negotiation of deletions—delayed the book for two years. Even though the American Civil Liberties Union provided its legal services for free, the case cost publisher Alfred A. Knopf more than $630,000 (in 2012 dollars).

Undoing the damage—not to national security but to citizens' national interest—took many years and remains incomplete. A first edition of
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
was published with graphic representation of the deletions. Litigation went on for years, and the courts finally judged legitimately secret only 27 of the 339 passages the CIA had originally excised. In the meantime officers who might have written about the agency were dissuaded. Langley looked pathetic anew when some of the things it had insisted seriously damaged national security appeared: the “secrets” were completely routine descriptions of CIA offices, functions, and activities. Similar descriptions had long been in print from authors like Harry Howe Ransom and David Wise. None of the material seemed especially sensitive with respect to the CIA's alliances with foreign services. The Marchetti and Marks book contained notes on CIA operations too, but these went only a short way beyond what the public already knew. Apparently what was sensitive was an agency veteran speaking authoritatively on allegations previously made by authors or journalists. National security was an instrument wielded to inhibit public discussion, avoid inquiry, and evade accountability.

Richard Helms was right. The Marchetti case cannot be overemphasized as a milestone in the expansion of CIA dominance of discussion of its business, intelligence matters. Until
United States v. Marchetti
there was no requirement for formal review of public writings by CIA officers and no mechanism to accomplish that. Agency officials like Allen Dulles, George Carver, and Miles Copeland had put out books and articles with, at most, cursory once-over from a busy special assistant, a quick look by the Office of Security, and often with nothing but encouragement. The Marchetti case marked construction of the first pillar in what became an edifice of information ascendancy, restricting discussion by means of limiting the knowledge available from the most authoritative commentators—former intelligence officers.

If Langley wanted a truly dangerous adversary, it had not long to wait. The enemy would be one of its own, Philip Agee. In the CIA pantheon he became something close to the devil incarnate. In fact, Agee ultimately became the poster boy for the agency's brand of suppressive maneuvers. What is not so well known is that Langley helped create this enemy and then exploited his existence for its own ends. The Agee case put in place the second pillar of the CIA's fortress of secrecy. Its reverberations were heard once again even as the finishing touches were put to this manuscript, as will be seen later in the experience of John Kiriakou.

A Florida boy, product of Catholic schools straight through Notre Dame, and raised in comfortable circumstances, Phil Agee was considered prime CIA material. He turned down the agency when it first approached him, before graduation, but joined after all in 1957, when law school did not suit Agee and the alternative was the draft. Over a dozen years, Philip Agee served honorably in what was then the Western Hemisphere Division of the clandestine service, participating in
almost every kind of operation, primarily in Ecuador and Uruguay, but with short stints in other nations as well. After a tour on the Mexican desk at Langley his last assignment was to Mexico City, slated to host the 1968 summer Olympics, with cover as the ambassador's special assistant to the Olympic commission. Agee recollects that he began with idealistic hopes—reinforced by John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress—that Latin America would reform and the CIA could be part of that solution. He became disillusioned in the mid-'60s, realizing that agency efforts to neutralize the Latin American left played into the hands of oligarchs by reducing political pressures on them to reform. Agee writes that he did that last tour in Mexico already having the intention of leaving the agency. Marital problems exacerbated by his service, plus disaffection, were major concerns. A Mexican girlfriend who wanted no part of the CIA sharpened that intention—and when superiors insisted she be investigated before they marry, that sealed Agee's determination to resign.

Beyond that origin story, nearly everything about Philip Burnett Franklin Agee is controversial. That is because he wrote a book highly critical of the CIA that revealed how it worked in Latin America and identified over 250 agency officers—the beginning of a long crusade against U.S. intelligence. Former colleagues dispute how good a spy Agee had been; whether he was a whistleblower or an agent for Cuban (or Soviet) intelligence, hence a traitor; whether he was a communist. Critic or villain? Forests of trees could probably be slaughtered in disputing the “truth” about Phil Agee. The more interesting—and more important—question is discovering the degree to which CIA suppressive maneuvers made Agee into the thorn he became, just as agency training had turned him into the spy he had been. There is an element of meanness in the CIA's efforts to track Agee and then counter him that had to have had an effect. Agee died in 2008 and can no longer speak to his motives, but the record of suppressive
maneuvers against him can be established. The CIA not only battled Philip Agee, it used him.

The Mexico City Olympics came and went. Philip Agee left the agency in 1969. According to later CIA director William E. Colby, Agee's resignation letter was not negative at all, but a text expressing esteem for the agency and regret at leaving it. By Agee's own account, he had political reasons for leaving—he opposed the Vietnam war and saw CIA actions there as cut from the same cloth as those in Latin America—but he had no intention of speaking out, writing a book, or anything else. He worked in a commercial firm for a year and attended the Autonomous University of Mexico City. It was there, exposed to Latino perspectives on the Americas, to fellow students who had suffered at the hands of CIA-backed military juntas, and to even more vociferous opposition to America in Vietnam, that Philip Agee began toying with writing a critique of U.S. policy in Latin America, expressed through CIA actions, framed in relation to the Vietnam war. The idea was vague and inchoate, and Agee recalls it took form slowly and without his ever making a concrete choice.

The difficulties were research and writing. At a certain point Agee exhausted the material available in Mexico City, still without having found much of the socioeconomic data he needed for background, as well as files of the Uruguayan and Ecuadoran newspapers from when he had been assigned to those places. And once Agee quit his job and turned to writing, he lost his salary and had to depend on savings. A writer friend counseled the former spook not to draft his anti-CIA book in Mexico, a country the agency had wired up tight. The friend put him in touch with the French publisher François Maspero, who advanced Agee some money and arranged to get him into Cuba. Phil Agee spent some time there, returned briefly to Mexico to wind up his affairs, and returned to Cuba for more research. Eventually he had gone through everything available in Havana and moved on
to Paris, leaving behind requests for additional data that were going to take time to compile, plus a paper on CIA methods to be forwarded to Allende's Chile and a letter to the editor of an Uruguayan leftist journal. The Cubans warned Agee not to publish those things, but he did not care.

These details are important because of what happened later. In Mexico, there had been a very active MH/Chaos branch at the CIA station, but Agee's spiral into opposition never came to its attention. It was publication of Agee's letter in the Uruguayan magazine
Marcha
that raised warning flags at Langley. Some time later in Paris a knock came at Agee's door, and he opened it to find a CIA colleague, a man who had been with him in training and also in Latin America. The former colleague happened to be visiting London, he related, and thought to pop over and see how Phil was doing. Agee knew the man's story of getting the address from his estranged wife was impossible. Once they were alone, the fellow admitted that he had, in fact, gotten the address from the agency's Paris station. Langley knew of Agee's letter in
Marcha
, the CIA man said, and added, “Helms sent me to ask what this is all about.”
⁵

Philip Agee answered by criticizing CIA covert action, added he was writing a book, and, foolhardy or defiant, let drop that he had been to Cuba and was in touch with Maspero. No doubt Helms's eyebrows rose when he heard that. François Maspero was the publisher of Che Guevara's Bolivian diary, and CIA regarded Cuba as an archenemy in league with the Soviets. Director Helms initiated a full-scale operation to penetrate Agee's activities. Not long after, at the café Agee frequented, he met a young American, a man with New Left journalistic credentials who had arrived in Paris in September 1971. Sal Ferrera had been groomed by the Project Chaos project and had infiltrated the antiwar movement (
Chapter 3
). Ferrera now ingratiated himself with Agee. He found the budding author a typewriter, and won his trust by
spotting a CIA surveillance team and helping Agee evade it. Later Ferrera steered Agee to a bar where a pretty woman picked him up. She found common ground with Agee, waxed enthusiastic about his work, and, claiming to be from a monied family, began to supply him cash. Agee photocopied his draft manuscript for the woman, who wanted to read what he had written. Dollops of money, an offer to stay at her apartment, and the loan of another typewriter followed. At a certain point Agee discovered the typewriter had been bugged. No doubt the apartment was too.