The Family Jewels (5 page)

President Ford accepted the blue ribbon commission immediately. Thus, within seventy-two hours of the submission of the Colby Report, the Ford White House had settled on a strategy. Days of frantic phone calls and letters, and pages of Dick Cheney's scribbling, detail the push. Governor Ronald Reagan of California quickly accepted. Dean Rusk
was asked but turned down the Ford White House. Representative Samuel Stratton volunteered but was not chosen—in fact, no one from Congress was selected. Lawyer Lloyd Cutler was mentioned favorably but not chosen. General Andrew Goodpaster was considered but rejected on grounds he would need protection from the Left. Generals Matthew B. Ridgway and Maxwell D. Taylor both passed the first muster, but neither was selected; the White House went instead with retired general Lyman R. Lemnitzer. The intended chairman was former solicitor general of the United States Erwin N. Griswold. President Ford's fingerprint is visible there, for the actual chairman would be Vice President Rockefeller, who appears on none of the candidate lists. Griswold would be a member but not the chairman. The others would be labor leader Lane Kirkland, financier C. Douglas Dillon, and political figures John T. Connor and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr.

By New Year's Eve the Ford White House had a list of prospective members of a commission and a draft executive order establishing it. The Rockefeller Commission would have narrow limits on its inquiry and a short interval in which to conduct an investigation. Everything was arranged for a whitewash. Another plank was laid that day too, when CIA Director Colby and his chief counsel met anew with Justice Department officials to lay out the extent of CIA's vulnerabilities, which were significant.

Two conversations with Gerald Ford are especially significant. The first took place between the president and Henry Kissinger, who spent the morning of January 4, 1975, closeted with him, going over the allegations. “What is happening is worse than in the days of McCarthy,” Kissinger complained, “worse for the country than Watergate.” Kissinger added that former CIA director Richard Helms had warned him “the stuff out in public represented just the tip of the iceberg,” that if the rest came out “blood will flow.”

Reaching for a specific instance, the national security
advisor added, “For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.” Here Kissinger expressed a personal opinion best calculated to convince the president that Ford's next guest, Richard Helms, would require protection. In his brother's administration, Bobby Kennedy had been careful not to leave records of any murder plotting against Fidel Castro, and the truth about Kennedy's involvement remains murky to this day. Kissinger next speculated on why charges regarding the CIA's covert operation to overthrow the government in Chile were
not
among the disclosures rampant in the media. The national security advisor had been widely credited with being a leading proponent of that effort. Chile's absence from the public discussion, Kissinger thought “sort of [a] blackmail on me.” Bill Colby had been “a disgrace,” and once the ill winds had subsided, he ought to be moved and replaced by someone with “towering integrity.” Kissinger worried the CIA could be emasculated.
¹³

The other crucial encounter is President Ford's talk with former CIA chieftain Richard Helms. As early as Kissinger's initial phone contacts, he had been asked whether Ford would summon Helms, now ambassador to Iran, for consultations. Kissinger opposed that move. But by December 27 President Ford had told Cheney he wanted to see Helms, and the meeting was arranged. To prepare the president for this encounter, the previous day Deputy Attorney General Lawrence H. Silberman had sent Ford a memorandum regarding “certain items that may come up” during his conversation with the former CIA director. Silberman was careful to note that the Department of Justice had not yet begun to look into most of these matters and that he himself had not made up his mind about them. The sensitive issues included allegations of violations of United States postal laws, charges of illegal break-ins and entries, and possible violations of U.S. wiretapping strictures. One issue, “which, to say the least,
present[s] unique questions,” lay in “plans to assassinate certain foreign leaders.” Another—which Justice had already begun investigating—was “the possibility that Mr. Helms may have committed perjury during the confirmation hearings on his appointment as Ambassador to Iran.”
¹⁴

President Ford and former CIA director Richard Helms met on January 4, immediately after the chief executive had finished with Dr. Kissinger.

“You and I have known each other for a long time,” Ford told Helms. “I have only the most admiration for you and your work. Frankly, we are in a mess.” The president informed the CIA veteran that he was going to appoint a commission and invited Helms to say anything he wanted. The spy chief first questioned why the shenanigans of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were being excluded. President Ford said he would consider it.

“I hope they will stay within their charter,” Ford said of the Rockefeller Commission, “but in this climate we can't guarantee it.” Ford pleaded with Helms to understand his position.

“I have been in the service 32 years,” Richard Helms replied. “At the end all one has is a small pension and a reputation—if any.” The basic charges, he reported, stemmed from orders to him to discover foreign connections to American dissidents. The spook then put an implied threat on the table. Though he felt deeply for the president, remained a member of his team, and, Helms said, did not intend to foul the nest if it could be avoided, “If allegations have been made to Justice, a lot of dead cats will come out. I intend to defend myself. . . . I know enough to say that if the dead cats come out, I will participate.” Helms felt the mood in the country was ghastly, but he had no intention of taking the fall for CIA actions carried out on his watch.
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President Ford announced the Rockefeller Commission the next day, January 5.
¹⁶
The commission held its first
hearing a week later with current and former agency directors William E. Colby, James R. Schlesinger, and Richard Helms as witnesses. Vice President Rockefeller took aside Colby, who would testify at many of these sessions, and asked him not to divulge so much. Colby, under oath with a legal responsibility to be fully responsive, was startled. The direction of this “investigation” is evident.

But Congress was not to be mollified. Its own suspicions led the Senate to act. Senator John Pastore and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana put together a resolution creating a select committee to study the whole expanse of U.S. intelligence activities. On January 27 the Senate passed that legislation by a vote of 82 to 4.
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The House of Representatives followed suit on February 19.
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President Ford—and Dick Cheney—got their Year of Intelligence after all. And the point of departure for these new investigations would be the CIA Family Jewels. In the Senate, Idaho Democrat Frank Church, a member of that august body for almost two decades without ever leading a major committee, would be Mansfield's selection for chairman. Walter Mondale asked to be a member. “This wasn't just a matter of a few little spy capers,” Mondale recalls. “This was a question of whether large, powerful agencies of the executive branch and even the White House were going to obey the law and make themselves accountable.”
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3

DOMESTIC SURVEILLANCE

Protecting its college recruiters had been a concern of the Central Intelligence Agency since the 1950s. This function belonged to its Office of Security. The rise of Vietnam antiwar protest made enrolling trainees more sensitive, to the point agency recruiters ceased to meet prospective candidates on campus. Worried about the agency's access to campuses, in February 1967 the Office of Security conducted a nationwide survey of potential challenges to CIA enlisters. Managers decided that Langley needed to know more about the antiwar movement. Project Resistance followed that December, assigned to Howard Osborn's security office. The idea was to study campus dissidence on a systematic basis. Within months the project had accumulated so much material that chiefs created a Targets Analysis Branch to sift the data. Had the project been limited to inquiries, and simply related to facilitating recruiters' campus visits, this might not have been so egregious. At a certain level recruiting could be seen as a support to foreign intelligence operations. The agency could argue that domestic activity intended to facilitate recruiting was entailed in its mission. But Project Resistance viewed potential threats with a
wide-angle lens, and it moved from simple research to field operations directed at Americans. By law and by custom the CIA was prohibited from carrying out domestic activities. The agency crossed that Rubicon without much thought for the consequences.

Questioning standard agency contacts at the universities, the CIA learned the names of individuals opposed to its activities, looked at those persons' contacts and found organizations with which they were affiliated, and then investigated those groups to discover more organizations and individuals deemed hostile. Langley recruited informants to dig deeper. Project Resistance ended up opening files on between six and seven hundred American persons and organizations and indexing twelve to sixteen thousand more individuals' names. Resistance was not supposed to infiltrate CIA personnel into political groups, but offers from local police and even directly from police informants soon induced it to accept this kind of help. On at least two occasions, in May 1968 and November 1969, Project Resistance was
ordered
to collect intelligence on specific persons or groups. In early 1970 CIA managers were commenting favorably on the project's use of its existing contacts and new informants.

By year's end Langley worried that its field units were going too far. On January 6, 1971, security division chief Osborn issued specific orders that “No attempts should be made to recruit new informants or sources such as campus or police officials for the express purpose of obtaining information regarding dissident groups, individuals or activities.”
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Nevertheless, an entirely new stream of data developed as a result of CIA's Nixon-era assistance program for local law enforcement. Under this government-wide initiative, training and equipment were furnished to police entities (for example, CIA trained a dozen New York Police Department officials in the use of computerized data processing to build case files). Grateful police officials then tipped off the
CIA to developments in their localities. The temptation for agency officers to ask for more, in effect tasking police informants, became enormous. Evidence is lacking for how often they succumbed, but the Osborn directive indicates this had become a problem.

Project Merrimac was another Office of Security initiative. This was simply supposed to help secure CIA facilities, warning of protests that might threaten headquarters. Merrimac began in February 1967 when division chief Osborn assigned a CIA proprietary to seek advance information, first regarding a march on Washington that took place that April, then a broader effort to monitor four “target groups”: Women Strike for Peace, the Washington Peace Center, the Congress on Racial Equality, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Four CIA contract employees—none a professional—later expanded to a much larger force. Again the quest for information led to infiltrations of domestic political groups.

The CIA surveilled meeting places and members, took photographs, looked into financial support for the organizations, collected license plate numbers, attended meetings, and more. On September 14, 1967, the CIA's top operations boss, Thomas Karamessines, ordered Merrimac to utilize “available covert assets” to “very discreetly determine” this kind of data for the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, then planning an October protest at the Pentagon,
not
the CIA. At that demonstration CIA security personnel staffed a Special Activities Division Duty Office to assist Johnson administration security officials. There would be CIA participation at almost every major subsequent protest event, including the Chicago Democratic Party convention in August 1968, the Fall 1969 marches on Washington, and the Cambodia protests of May 1970. In each case the CIA provided sophisticated technical equipment plus personnel to run it. In the Family Jewels documents only
one
of these
operations is mentioned—one that bothered agency rank and file, who were likely unaware of the wider effort. That was the help provided to federal security forces at the Chicago convention. Top agency officials Karamessines and his boss, Director Richard Helms, professed ignorance of this involvement. With that act, CIA operational security rose to the level of officials lying to their own employees.

As for the sequestering of the “take,” to be expected in an activity designed merely to ensure the safety of CIA facilities, security chief Osborn conceded the opposite: “Over the course of this project we reported pretty much . . . everything we got.”
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Mission creep widened in pace with the growing controversy in America over the Vietnam war. Agency documents indicate the CIA placed an informant within the Washington public school system to warn of black militants, and it infiltrated such African American events as the 1968 Resurrection City encampment and a rally for Malcolm X Day.
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According to the Church Committee investigation, Project Merrimac continued through September 1970. Supposedly terminated, in fact it went on. That October 3, division chief Osborn told Helms at the morning staff meeting that Weatherman dissidents had decided to launch a fall “offensive” and were thinking of targeting the agency. CIA personnel again worked to counter protesters at the May Day event of 1971. Then the CIA lent a Miami safe house and film equipment, provided technical expertise, and furnished false identity material to the Secret Service for use at the political conventions in that city during 1972. There is also at least one instance of the CIA passing intelligence regarding an American to Washington-area (Fairfax County) police, and another of a CIA officer actually participating in a Montgomery County police raid. All of these were prohibited domestic activities. Merrimac operations were not finally prohibited until August 1973.