The Family Jewels (8 page)

Despite—or because of—its extensive activity, the CIA domestic spy project became increasingly controversial
within
the agency—long before revelation ignited the major public firestorm that led to congressional investigations. In the spring of 1971 the agency's Management Advisory Group expressed serious concern over “possible repercussions which may arise as a result of CIA's covert domestic activities.” These senior managers believed that fine-grain explanations for how such activities might be legal “will be lost on the American public,” and that “there is probably nothing the Agency could say to alleviate a negative reaction from Congress and the U.S. public.” Any flap threatened serious damage to the agency's relations with Congress, as well as its real intelligence mission.
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CIA leadership rejected these prescient warnings. That spring Director Helms, speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, insisted, “We do not target American citizens,” and in the fall at Langley, speaking to employees during the agency's annual awards ceremony, he assured them, “You can rely on those denials.” The charges were “silly ideas” perpetuated by “jokes.” Agency officers should speak up when they had occasion to do so “and set the facts straight.”
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On December 21, 1971, the Management Advisory Group met with Deputy Director Karamessines again. He spent more than an hour insisting CIA responsibilities “make it mandatory for us occasionally to take an interest in American citizens overseas.” Karamessines denied the “scuttlebutt” that Project Chaos had a function “to keep book on Black Power adherents.” Ober's unit had precisely such a function. The management advisors stuck to their guns and took their case to agency executive director William E. Colby, because their concerns went beyond the clandestine service. He too attempted to quiet their fears. On April 21, 1972, Mr. Colby sent a memo to all CIA directorates purporting to explain
the domestic activities. Colby avoided discussing the spying against African Americans or the antiwar movement.
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Still under budget pressure, the CIA sought places to cut dollars and slash staff positions. The Special Operations Group was one possibility. In 1972 Cord Meyer, Karamessines's deputy, assessed this project. The Chaos briefings referred to here were compiled to document its mission for Meyer, who had once been a candidate to head the unit. In the early days Ober had been instructed to consult Meyer for leads. They had been colleagues in dealing with the Kerner Commission, and Meyer was not inclined to cut Chaos now. Despite its own analytical opinion that American protest had burned down to dying embers, the project sailed through. In his memoirs Meyer would write, disingenuously, that due to its highly compartmented nature the project “did not come before me for review,” and that “I had only marginal knowledge of the specific activities undertaken by the Special Operations Group.”
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The cult of secrecy ran deep.

In the fall of 1972 CIA Inspector General (IG) William V. Broe conducted a periodic review of the operations directorate's European Division. The IG team preparing its survey discovered even before its inspection trip that Chaos accounted for a good deal of the workload, though Archie Roosevelt, the new division chief, did not seem to mind. When the IG team asked Ober for a briefing, he resisted on grounds they had no “need to know.” This backfired. The IG inspectors were sensitized. In Europe they encountered bothersome Project Chaos paperwork, found physical surveillance of Americans a drain on staff, and discovered that appeals to foreign intelligence services were ticklish at several CIA stations. According to inspector Scott Breckinridge, a member of this team, “As we moved about from post to post, we found the MHCHAOS operational burden excessive. . . . We began to conclude that there was an indiscriminate
character to the names on the Bureau's lists, which seemed to have been accepted indiscriminately by the MHCHAOS people. . . . The apparently indiscriminate nature of the program raised broader concerns on the part of personnel in the field as to whether the agency was being made part of some sort of thought police program.”
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After completing the European survey, Broe, on November 9, sent Colby a separate letter raising questions about Chaos. This went beyond complaints by CIA management advisors and forced Helms into a specific review. Colby and Karamessines discussed the results with the director on December 5. Helms agonized over flap potential. He wanted Chaos continued, but in a way that avoided controversy. On December 20 Colby ordered Karamessines to redirect Project Chaos toward terrorism: “This should bring about a reduction in the intensity of attention to political dissidents in the United States not, or not apt to be, involved in terrorism.”
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This marked the beginning of CIA's shift away from domestic spying. On August 29, 1973, William Colby, having himself become CIA director, issued an omnibus order on domestic activity that imposed fresh restrictions, including strict definitions of who could be targeted by Chaos, and a prohibition on agency personnel taking the lead in physical surveillance abroad. Seven months later Colby terminated Chaos altogether.

Three staffers were trained in procedures for destroying the Chaos records at a cost of $60,000 ($310,000 in 2012 dollars). Over a long, frustrating summer, their instructions changed repeatedly. Though files may have been liquidated, reports were not. Indeed, reams of the original Chaos reporting on antiwar groups survived to be declassified. When the Hersh revelations broke the dam, senior officials ordered the destruction—now of evidence—terminated. Then the Year of Intelligence almost swept away the agency. At the point when the Rockefeller Commission was about to disclose its
findings regarding domestic surveillance, the CIA's General Counsel suddenly ordered the destruction of files regarding “dissidents.”

What is it that made CIA domestic surveillance a Family Jewel? First, the operations were clearly illegal under the law that created the agency and the regulations supposed to govern it. In addition, the operations were acknowledged, in-house, to fall in that category, but were excused by appeal to higher authority. Many intelligence operations are unlawful on their face because that is the nature of the business, but in most situations of conventional espionage, the activity lacks the quality of being offensive to society or of serving the interests of the political leadership. Equally important, the goal of domestic spying was information-gathering that infringed on the constitutionally protected rights of citizens. In addition, opportunities were afforded to change course, but agency leaders rejected doing so. Next, the CIA tried to protect itself through secrecy, eventually extending to the destruction of records. Family Jewels are characterized by activity that goes beyond boundaries, refusal to rein in the operators, and then covering up the behavior.

Unlike some other matters in the Family Jewels documents, the Central Intelligence Agency's operations against American citizens are fairly well represented,
except
that the papers only touch the surface. The truth is that CIA aimed at the antiwar movement in America widely enough and deeply enough for this to become controversial within the agency itself—at the time, not later on. Top management repeatedly resisted change until the Paris ceasefire agreement in 1973 extracted the United States from active combat in Vietnam. By then war protests had largely ceased. The record of domestic surveillance is a cautionary tale demonstrating a real problem.

A preliminary point directly bears on what is covered here. This was not Indians off the reservation or a few bad apples. The CIA had multiple programs aimed at Americans. They were conducted by both the intelligence and operations directorates of the agency and cut across traditional boundaries. Infiltration of agents occurred under several programs. The Office of Current Intelligence of the Directorate of Intelligence produced the reports most often cited when CIA analysis of the antiwar movement is discussed. But Directorate of Operations reporting clearly had the same purpose. The term “mission creep” emerged in the 1990s to describe how programs begun for one purpose subsume different goals. Mission creep certainly affected the CIA's domestic spying of the 1960s.

Another point: these kinds of activities are so intrusive and controversial by nature that government has an almost irresistible temptation to lie about them. Director Helms would be indicted on perjury charges in the late 1970s, but the bill of particulars concerned his statements to Congress on CIA covert operations in Chile. Yet Helms's testimony regarding CIA domestic surveillance had been equally mendacious. At a congressional hearing on February 7, 1973—
before
the Seymour Hersh revelations and the Year of Intelligence—Senator Clifford Case (D-NJ) asked Richard Helms about Nixon White House demands that U.S. intelligence agencies “pool resources to learn more about the anti-war movement.” Helms said he could not recall whether
any
president had ever asked the CIA to spy on Americans, then he continued: “We were not involved because to me that was a clear violation of what our charter was.”
And
Helms added that, if asked, he would have told a president that such activity was not “advisable.”
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But CIA domestic spying had not started with Nixon. In his memoirs, Helms himself records that President Lyndon B. Johnson had listened to his protestations against involvement for about fifteen seconds before ordering action.
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Disclosed for the first time in the declassification of the Family Jewels documents—and apparently noticed by no one even then—the CIA also lent itself to a crass Nixon White House attempt at open manipulation of American public opinion. At the time of Nixon's 1970 invasion of Cambodia, the president gave the usual speech justifying his action, which was predictably followed by a flood of mail to the White House. Officials organized an effort to answer that mail. The Nixon White House then asked Langley to
pay for this program
. An administration hostile to the agency, gleefully cutting its budget, here demanded the CIA's money as a token of its loyalty. Helms acquiesced. The political mail caper was not only a domestic intrusion on CIA's part—and thus a charter violation—it represented an instance of a line agency caving to White House demands to act in a directly political role, a breach of
any
ethical understanding of separation of powers, administrative practice, or constitutional role. The CIA compounded this transgression when it permitted Nixon officials to dip at this well a second time, to the tune of more than $33,000 (over $195,000 in 2012). The CIA understood this move was beyond bounds: telephone call transcripts show that agency officials strove to get the Nixon White House to submit paperwork in a form that would not reveal the purpose of these payments.

Today, the CIA's illegal domestic snooping seems an artifact of a bygone age. Except . . . so much of what has happened in the war on terror remains shrouded in secrecy. The situation with respect to government accountability and public knowledge, comparing the Vietnam era with now, is stuck somewhere around the 1969 time frame. Certainly the temptation is there. As with the mass of protesters and militants then, the United States now has a large resident population of individuals—the cleavage this time being ethnic and
religious—that government has deemed suspect. And we know that in other ways the Vietnam experience has been repeated. The United States military, local police, and FBI operatives have infiltrated a wide variety of activist groups in the guise of counterterrorism. Muslim social groups and mosques have been put under watch. The FBI's “national security letters” have been abused in the same fashion as were its investigative powers in the 1960s and 1970s.

As army intelligence did during Vietnam, the military resumed domestic spying. Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon created an entity called the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA). The army's intelligence chief argued in a November 2001 memorandum that, “contrary to popular belief”—a breathtaking sally—“there is no absolute ban on [military] intelligence components collecting U.S. person information.”
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Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz ordered establishment of the unit in February 2002, and by the end of 2003 it had expanded like Topsy into a proliferated entity with directorates, staffs, and a database called “Talon,” into which CIFA funneled data on a variety of Americans exercising their constitutional rights. As with Project Chaos, the Pentagon unit enjoyed access to data from all federal agencies—and it got reports from local police as well.

Counterintelligence Field Activity agents infiltrated local chapters on both the east and west coasts of a university group advocating gay and lesbian rights and Quakers who sought to discourage military recruiting and thereby oppose the Bush wars. CIFA even demanded videotapes of academic conferences to identify persons who seemed of Middle Eastern origin. Other times operatives took their own pictures, as during a public protest in front of the headquarters of Halliburton, the corporation formerly headed by then–vice president Richard Cheney. Thus military security was helping protect a private business. This does not seem to have bothered Field Activity officials. Investigation by the Pentagon's
inspector general found that CIFA had compiled data on 180 organizations, and that if subsequent demonstrations were included the number reached 263. Talon became an embarrassment when it turned out that, contrary to the military's own regulations, old information was not being purged from the files, and CIFA was eventually abolished. The only good aspect to all this was that the intrusive security never attained the scale of that of the Vietnam era. But its similarity to those abuses is evident—and the military effort was exceeded by that of local police and the FBI.