The Family Jewels (2 page)

In a democracy the rule of law is central. This creates special tensions with respect to intelligence activities, which by nature work to the edge of or beyond the law. That makes public confidence vital. The uneasy relationship between secret agencies and public order requires that intelligence maintains the highest standards of discipline and accountability. Anything that challenges public confidence is harmful.

Two points are axiomatic. First, the potential for abuse is perennial. Intelligence covers a global range of concerns, and it utilizes a broad spectrum of methods. Political, military, social, and even economic concerns change over time and drive demands for action. Events alter previous perceptions of the state of nature. Presidents demand countervailing efforts. Directors devise projects. Operational logic can push projects across boundaries. The combination of purpose and circumstance leaves original goals behind. Thus are Jewels created.
The Family Jewels
illustrates this by taking a range of the abuses of the 1970s as archetypes, detailing the operations, and then showing how the same kind of activity has been replicated. Authorities sought different purposes in the later operations, they were conducted for the most part by different individuals, and the regulatory regime changed and tightened, but still the projects crossed the line.

Equally important, the temptation to avoid scrutiny has remained a constant. Both presidents and agencies succumbed. Here the narrative explores the efforts of several presidents and their intelligence agencies to prevent, curtail, or outflank investigations of Family Jewels as they are revealed. As part of this exploration I devote significant attention to the CIA's use of the media, not, as usually conceived, for such purposes as disguising agents, but as tool
and object to be manipulated for the purpose of controlling knowledge—and
not
in foreign countries. A related subject, the CIA's creation and use of an apparatus to manage what its own employees can write about their experiences, is also treated in considerable detail. Manipulations of the record are made in the name of national security but in practice serve political and institutional goals.

The book makes a distinction between “The Family Jewels,” the compilation of CIA documents that bears that name, and Family Jewels, the broad range of questionable or abusive CIA activities. Through Family Jewels the narrative examines the impact of the attitudes that drive the system. Nevertheless, the original document must not be denied its importance or name. In order to distinguish the two, this narrative uses the terms “Family Jewels documents,” or “original Family Jewels,” to denote the collection of CIA papers, but the plain terms “Family Jewels,” or simply “Jewels,” to signify the category of controversial operations that, both individually and collectively, lie at the heart of our inquiry. In a few places that usage may appear awkward, but the formula is necessary to establish our distinction.

The Family Jewels
opens with chapters that introduce the Family Jewels documents and recount how 1975 became the Year of Intelligence. A prologue briefly revisits the journalistic revelation that set off controversy. Two subsequent chapters review how and why the Family Jewels documents were created, and what measures President Gerald R. Ford took in the immediate aftermath of the disclosure. This latter prefigures a much later discussion of the cross-cutting interests presidents have in drawing upon intelligence agencies for political cover, and conversely those of spy units in securing presidential protection.

Scandals and controversies during the Year of Intelligence
not only disclosed details of many operations covered here, they led to creation of the system of oversight that exists in the United States today. This latter apparatus became a hurdle to be overcome by the perpetrators of many subsequent Family Jewels. This accountability mechanism still has to be made to function properly for there to be effective intelligence operations in a democratic system.

A succession of chapters ranges over time. These take four of the most important issues investigated in 1975—political surveillance, eavesdropping, detention and interrogation, and assassination. They represent most of the subjects dealt with in the Family Jewels documents, but I have deliberately excluded one area—the CIA's mind-control experiments. The story here is too sensational and the declassified record even more expurgated than it is in many other areas, plus the available records appear to show the drug experiments ended in the early-to-mid-1960s.
¹
The way that public sensibilities have evolved, it would be surprising had these experiments been resumed later, and in any case primary sources have hardly progressed in more than a decade. As for the Year of Intelligence itself, existing accounts focus on the congressional investigations. These treat events almost entirely as a face-off between Congress and the intelligence agencies, neglecting the White House perspective.
The Family Jewels
makes an effort to illuminate this crucial area, without which the events of 1975 cannot be understood properly. However, the congressional sources and accounts of its investigations are introduced wherever they are germane to the narrative. Nevertheless, the central concern is operations and what happened to them, not the investigations per se.

The narrative shows that charges leveled against the CIA reflected real intelligence operations and outlines how the same kinds of controversial spy activities replicated themselves in later decades. Each intervening chapter takes up the thread of one kind of Family Jewel—political surveillance,
eavesdropping, harsh interrogation, or assassination—or shows the lengths to which the CIA went to cloak its daggers. A final substantive chapter brings the story full circle to the White House. The conclusion analyzes our findings and proposes a means by which Family Jewels can be more effectively monitored and—hopefully—prevented.

John Prados

Washington, DC

January 2013

PROLOGUE

It all began with an astonishing headline. December 22, 1974. Those who picked up the big Sunday edition of the
New York Times
found a blockbuster story splashed across three columns of the front page under the text “HUGE CIA OPERATION REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES, OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS.”
¹
The story ran in other papers too. In his lead paragraph investigative reporter Seymour Hersh charged that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had conducted a massive illegal domestic intelligence operation. Elsewhere he mentioned wiretaps on people's phones, break-ins, agents penetrating political groups, photographs taken at demonstrations, and a surveillance and disruption plan aimed at Americans—coordinated by the Nixon White House. All this was illegal under the CIA's charter, which prohibited activities within the United States, and many activities were also violations of existing criminal statutes. The CIA's place in the American pantheon had already become deeply controversial. The Watergate political scandal, which destroyed the presidency of Richard Nixon, added to the pot. The agency had defended itself by claiming it had been duped. These were new charges,
even more serious, and Hersh's account included more Watergate news as well—of an attempt to blackmail the CIA by former agency employee, now convicted Watergate burglar, James McCord, Jr.

Several paragraphs into his account Seymour Hersh mentioned that many of the abuses he was reporting had been uncovered by a culling of CIA files ordered under former agency director James R. Schlesinger, and deep down the story mentioned that the current director, William E. Colby, confirmed that a complete investigation had in fact been conducted. Colby referred to the issues uncovered as “family skeletons.” Hersh, together with
Times
publisher Abe Rosenthal, had confirmed that directly with Colby in an interview before the piece was written. When the Hersh revelations appeared, Colby knew, as did few outsiders, that the agency's file review had produced a real document—or more properly a collection of documents. The cognoscenti knew it as “The Family Jewels.”

Langley might have gotten off more easily had the
Times
downplayed its disclosures. And that might have happened. There was a frantic run to make press time.
Times
bureau chief Bill Kovach edited the piece, and in the bustle let the adjective “massive,” describing the CIA operations, slip by. That became a sore point for the Washington bureau chief, who worried it gave the agency an opening to discredit the story. The appearance of the
Times
revelations was like striking a match in a tinderbox.

One who saw the flicker of flame was journalist David C. Martin. A cub reporter on his first job—the night shift at the Associated Press (AP)—Martin was tasked with keeping watch on the news tickers and early editions and finding stories that could be matched or bettered by the AP. The early edition of the Sunday
Times
was obviously explosive. The Hersh story spoke to Martin, the son of a CIA officer. He began to mine the story for names and telephone people.
One name he found was that of James Angleton, chief of the agency's counterintelligence unit. Martin picked up the phone, figuring he was on a desperate mission—others would already be all over Angleton. But no, the man answered the call. Soon David Martin had his own scoops to add to the pile. Associated Press reporting gave the CIA scandal even more legs—plus wider distribution. Even more fat fell in the fire.

Senator Walter Mondale was at home when he saw the Hersh story. Mondale typically set aside Sunday afternoons to read books that struck his fancy and scan a variety of newspapers. For months, Mondale recounts, senators had been hearing rumors of outlandish activities by the intelligence agencies, but the
Times
revelations were still shocking.
²
Over several years Americans had been exposed to a new, cynical vision of government—first the Pentagon Papers had shown how the United States government had misled the public into the Vietnam war, then Watergate demonstrated presidential integrity at its nadir. Now the Family Jewels scoop unmasked the CIA's nefarious doings—with Congress completely in the dark. Mondale and other legislators were incensed. Within days, Rhode Island's John Pastore rose on the Senate floor to argue the Congress could not abdicate its responsibility to investigate these matters.

1

WHERE DID THE FAMILY JEWELS COME FROM?

The answer to that question depends on which “Family Jewels” are on the table. At the broadest level the Family Jewels are the set of intelligence activities that are most sensitive from the political, legal, and moral standpoints. These Family Jewels evolve from the warp and woof of operations. Many projects are conceived, born, and completed without ever numbering among the “jewels.” Others are noncontroversial at the outset but endure or morph in such a way that one day they become Family Jewels. Yet other intelligence activities are sensitive from the start. A project can be controversial politically where its nature challenges the public's understanding of acceptable activities. Sensitivity also arises when a project pushes the limits of legality or skirts proper approval. And operations that controvert moral standards are Family Jewels by nature. From this perspective a set of Family Jewels often exists, shrouded in secrecy, at the heart of intelligence operations. This has been true throughout the history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United States intelligence community—as will be shown. The problem is a thorny one and has long escaped the attention it deserves.

There is a specific set of Family Jewels that derives from a certain era of American intelligence history and a specific document known as “The Family Jewels,” compiled at Langley, Virginia, CIA headquarters. The time was the early 1970s and the answer to the question can be quite specific: From a director afraid of being blindsided by revelations of the agency's past domestic activities, illegal by definition under the National Security Act of 1947. The director was James R. Schlesinger, appointed by President Richard Nixon. When he perceived political pitfalls from what he did not know about their operations, Mr. Schlesinger demanded his subordinates create a record of CIA misdeeds. The Family Jewels is the result.

It happened like this:

In 1972, during the transition before his second term, Nixon stunned the serving director and most at the agency's Langley headquarters by asking Director Richard M. Helms to resign. Sending the former spy chief to Iran as ambassador, Nixon showed his displeasure with the CIA by going completely outside the espionage business to select Schlesinger, an economist and defense intellectual who then headed the president's Office of Management and Budget. His White House job had given Schlesinger a good sense of the Nixon administration's budget problems. Almost his only experience with U.S. intelligence, other than as a consumer of reports on Soviet strategic forces (during years as a RAND Corporation analyst), had been in assembling a review of intelligence community efficiency for Mr. Nixon in late 1971. Thus Schlesinger became the boss, a post then known as the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), with a mandate to reduce and streamline the community in general and the CIA specifically. The Vietnam war was entering a new phase without U.S. combat involvement, requiring fewer CIA field operations. Schlesinger had no particular liking for the CIA, and he detested its long-serving chieftain Helms, but that was not
the root of his actions. Rather, he had a specific mandate from the president. Richard Nixon, who had trimmed CIA budgets and overseas personnel from his first year in office, wanted a director who would be his ally. Thus Schlesinger arrived at Langley determined to cut deadwood from the CIA's ranks, and he proceeded to do so.

Director Schlesinger's motives are important to the Family Jewels for two reasons. First, his firings of CIA officers put him at odds with agency professionals and affected what its rank and file would eventually be willing to report in the Jewels. Second, Schlesinger already knew that investigative journalists, Seymour Hersh specifically, were nosing into CIA domestic activities.