The Burglary (36 page)

If the required prohibitions were not being adhered to, the MAG members warned in their memorandum to Helms:

“One day the public and the Congress will come to have grave doubts about our role in government, and may severely restrict our ability to perform those tasks properly assigned to the CIA.”

When written responses to the MAG from Helms were unresponsive to the concerns they stated, the group submitted more warnings. Helms, through other top officials, insisted in comments to the group that the CIA had no domestic operations.
One official,
Thomas H. Karamessines, wrote after he met with the group that he was “irritated” with them and had told them that “we must expect all kinds of irresponsible accusations in the press.” Actually, no such accusations had been made about the CIA in the press yet; they were being made inside the CIA.

Less than a month later,
Helms, in the only public speech he gave in his seven years as CIA director, told the annual convention of the
American Society of Newspaper Editors, a venue guaranteed to result in widespread coverage of his remarks, that the CIA did not conduct domestic operations.

Stories about his speech appeared on the front pages of many newspapers the next day, including the
New York Times,
where the headline included the phrase “Rare Speech.” Extensive excerpts from the speech were published in the
Times
. Helms made the case for an intelligence agency being essential in a democratic society. He said that “the nation must to a degree take it on faith that we too are honorable men devoted to her service. I can assure you that we are.”

Helms insistently told the editors that day, “I emphasize at this point that the statute specifically forbids the Central Intelligence Agency to have any police, subpoena, or law-enforcement powers, or any domestic security functions. I can assure you that except for the normal responsibilities for protecting the physical security of our own personnel, our facilities, and our classified information, we do not have any such powers and function; we have never sought any; we do not exercise any. In short, we do not target on American citizens.”

His speech to the editors was strange not so much because he was lying, which he was, but because the question he insisted on answering—whether the CIA had domestic operations—had not yet been asked publicly. It had been asked only within the agency, where compartmentalization of duties and secrets left many employees unaware of what happened beyond their realm of responsibility but now very worried about what was going on outside their immediate realm.

A few months later, in September 1971, Helms made similar remarks to
an audience that probably was more skeptical than the editors were. At the annual CIA awards ceremony at the agency's headquarters, the director told CIA employees that he had spoken to the editors, “as you know, and I did it for only one purpose. That was to try and put in the record a few of these denials that we've all wanted to see put in the public record for some time. And you can rely on those denials. They're true, and you can use that as any text that you may need to demonstrate that we're … not trying to do espionage on American citizens in the United States, and we're not tapping telephone lines, and that we're not doing a lot of other things which we're accused of doing.” As he spoke to those colleagues, Helms made a peculiar request. He told them he thought the “silly idea” that the CIA conducted domestic operations was perpetuated by jokes about the CIA and domestic espionage. “Although the jokes have no basis in fact,” he said, “they nevertheless give us a name which we don't deserve.…I would like to suggest that if you have it in your hearts to do so that you speak up when the occasion arises and try and set the facts straight.”

Helms said all this despite knowing that some of the colleagues in the audience that day at the awards ceremony knew the jokes were true and that his claims were not. Some of them knew the truth.

The CIA had been conducting domestic operations since at least 1959, and since 1962 Helms had been in charge of these operations. The illegal domestic operations had in fact become so large by 1964 that the agency—in defiance of its charter that forbade domestic operations—had created a new branch called the Domestic Operations Division. And since 1967 these illegal domestic political operations had been given the highest level of priority, ranking with Soviet and Chinese operations.

Congress, playing no role in intelligence oversight, knew nothing about these operations. When Congress investigated the FBI and the CIA in 1975, it would become known that the CIA had created files on more than 300,000 Americans, compiled detailed profiles of more than 7,000 U.S. citizens and 1,000 organizations, and placed thousands on a watch list to have their mail opened and their telegrams read. Like the FBI, it had spied on, burglarized the homes and offices of, and carried out other criminal acts against thousands of American citizens, primarily because they were antiwar activists. Like the FBI, it also had placed antiwar members of Congress under surveillance.

Six months after their first memorandum to Helms, the MAG members wrote to him again, even more forcefully than they had before. The group
had no power except to ask questions and state concerns. It did so, even boldly suggesting in its November 1971 memorandum to Helms that the viability of the CIA was at stake if he did not confront this issue. Noting that in Helms's speeches to the editors and to CIA employees he had made “rather categorical denials of Agency covert targeting on U.S. citizens,” the group pointed out that “Agency employees aware of the various sensitive operations in question know that there is qualifying language explaining CIA involvement.…MAG believes that in the event of an exposé, such esoteric qualifiers will be lost on the American public and there is probably nothing the Agency could say to alleviate a negative reaction from Congress and the U.S. public.”

Emphasizing the very serious potential damage his misleading statements could cause, the MAG wrote, “It is MAG's fear that such negative reaction could seriously damage our Congressional relations, affect our work against priority foreign targets and have significant impact on the viability of CIA.”

They urged the director to review and halt illegal domestic operations in order not to damage the agency's ability to carry out its mandated responsibilities. They warned there “are indications that the Agency … is collecting information on selected U.S. citizens both at home and abroad. In operational areas which are highly sensitive and potentially explosive—domestic radical or racial groups—this Agency must carefully weigh the needs of pressures for collecting and maintaining this information against the risk and impact of revelation should the operation become compromised or public knowledge. We therefore urge that all domestic collection and action programs be severely reviewed so that only those be continued which are of the highest priority and which absolutely cannot be undertaken by domestic agencies. CIA should not take on requirements of this type by default.…Our increasing concern and our intense interest in maximizing the Agency's ability to do its proper job, impel us to bring our serious apprehensions to your attention.”

Like Hoover's need to protect and hide
COINTELPRO, the FBI's massive political surveillance and dirty tricks operations conducted against Americans that eventually would be revealed, Helms's need to continue to hide the CIA's secret domestic spying program,
MHCHAOS, was overwhelming, wrote
Angus Mackenzie in his 1997 book
Secrets: The CIA's War at Home
. Helms was most concerned, even before MAG members confronted him in March 1971, about the fact that some CIA agents disapproved of the programs.

In 1972, Helms called his top aides together and said he was adamant
that MHCHAOS would not be “stopped simply because some members of the organization [the CIA] do not like this activity.” He made changes in order to protect the program more now that the MAG was so determined to have it end. To the maximum extent possible, within the agency, the program and the agent then in charge of it,
Richard Ober, would be identified with terrorism and not with American dissidents. The massive program would in fact have the same functions it always had, including the monitoring and destruction of the more than five hundred alternative newspaper staffs it had under surveillance. (At the same time, the FBI also monitored alternative and campus newspapers, sometimes suppressing them.)

Henceforth, Colby wrote in a memorandum after that meeting, the label “international terrorist” would replace “political dissident” as the target of the CIA's illegal domestic operations. As part of this image transformation, Helms did what Hoover had done many times—and would do again in April 1971 to protect
COINTELPRO when he thought it was about to be revealed—to minimize the possibility that secret operations would be exposed. Helms ended MHCHAOS in name, but continued it in reality with a new name: International Terrorism Group. It would be much easier for people, including people within the CIA, to accept the domestic operations if they thought they were aimed primarily at stopping terrorism rather than at stopping dissent.

That simple burglary in Media now stirred panic in the hearts of the top officials in the country's most powerful intelligence agencies. Hoover knew that if his most important secrets emerged, the results could be disastrous. He did not live to see them become known. Helms, on the other hand, watched many of his secret operations revealed. He testified multiple times before various investigating committees as secrets surfaced—details of aggressive CIA plans to assassinate democratically elected leaders of other countries and to install dictators, as well as details of the agency's domestic political spying operations.
After years of going to great lengths to protect the agency's secrets, in an interview for the CIA Oral History Program in 1988, Helms insisted the exposure and investigation of CIA secrets amounted to “just a congressional firestorm over nothing.”

12

L
IFE WAS FRAGILE
for some of the Media burglars in the months right after the burglary. They felt they had little control. They were alone, not even in touch with each other. Before the burglary and while working with the files, they had felt secure in one another's hands, and most of the time they were relatively confident they could avoid arrest by being very cautious and staying concealed behind the curtain they had drawn around the group when they started planning the burglary. But after the burglary—especially after the first distribution of documents intensified both the FBI search and public interest—they had far less control. From news stories and the peace movement grapevine, they knew the search for them was intense and that it was touching the lives of countless people, cruelly in some instances. One misstep and one or all of the burglars could be arrested. Some of them also worried about the man who dropped out. Since he left the group, had he told anyone else who the burglars were?

Rumors about the burglary were swirling in the peace movement. Even among people who had engaged in acts of resistance themselves, including the draft board raids, people could not imagine that anyone they knew had enough courage to break into an FBI office. People still say that today. Philadelphia antiwar activists felt concern for the Media burglars, whoever they were, for they could see that the search was fierce and likely to end with arrests and severe penalties. Many local activists were paying a price themselves for the burglary because the FBI regarded everyone who was active in the peace movement as a potential suspect. In this anxious atmosphere among activists in Philadelphia, some of the burglars continued to
think that it seemed inevitable that a mistake had been made during the burglary—or now as they hid openly—and that when that mistake became known, everything would come crashing down on them very quickly.

At such times, some of them found it hard to believe that J. Edgar Hoover's powerful FBI would not find them. It was widely believed that the FBI always got its man. How could that not apply to them, especially the women? The only Media burglars the FBI investigators thought they had actually seen were two of the three women in the group—Susan Smith and Bonnie Raines, both of whom had visited the office. The Media agents knew Susan's face and name. They knew Bonnie's face but not her name. The burglars didn't know, of course, that Hoover had taken a special interest in efforts to find Raines, but they became increasingly aware from news stories of the intensity of the investigation. One of the agents who investigated the burglary, Terry Neist, years later described the atmosphere inside the bureau at that time:

“
It was like, ‘This is the FBI. You have penetrated us.' It became almost a personal thing.…It became, for that reason, a very important case.

“Mr. Hoover was quite upset by this,” said Neist.