The Family Jewels (28 page)

This was not the first time, nor the last, Langley would act to neutralize works considered inimical to its interests. During McCone's tenure similar action surrounded publication of the Haynes Johnson book on the Bay of Pigs.
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Illustrations of the CIA's war on books are powerfully reinforced
by evidence of its sensitivity to works regarding the murder of John F. Kennedy. Whether due to its assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, its other Cuban operations, its information on Lee Harvey Oswald, the Nosenko affair, or for some other reason, throughout the Helms period the agency remained extraordinarily sensitive about Kennedy assassination books. Soon after the 1964 release of the Warren Commission's report, member Gerald R. Ford came out with his own account of the investigation. A staffer analyzed this for Dick Helms. “In general,” he concluded, “my feeling is that the less we touch in this manuscript the better.” In fact, CIA was relieved that then-representative Ford had little to say about it.

Mark Lane's Kennedy assassination book
Rush to Judgment
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received a full treatment in August 1966, with a summary memorandum to Helms along with appendices dissecting Lane's claims and offering rationales to discredit them. The CIA director received another, separate analysis as well, one focused on the agency's appearances in Lane's book. Langley was so desperate to see the William Manchester account of Kennedy's murder
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that it became the subject of a November 9, 1966,
operational
cable—almost two months prior to publication—in which a spook reported on efforts to obtain a copy of the manuscript.

This material, other published works, and the Warren Commission Report became the grist for a lengthy analysis of the then-existing literature on the Kennedy assassination as part of a CIA psychological warfare study, “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report,” issued on January 4, 1967. Included were observations on the negative impact of conspiracy theories on public opinion, the assertion that no significant new evidence had emerged on the Kennedy assassination—even though the agency's own reporting on Oswald was already being questioned—an analysis of books published so far, and guidelines for countering criticism of
the CIA. This lengthy cable, the work of William V. Broe, at that time chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, went to all stations, to be given to CIA assets to use making arguments about the assassination. Though nine attachments to this guidance were never secret (in fact, rated “unclassified”), when forced to release these documents the CIA kept back most of them.

These suppressive maneuvers are ironic, given the CIA's own history as the “Mighty Wurlitzer,” the propaganda machine combining entities like Radio Free Europe with subsidies to publications created during its early years. The agency is credited with commissioning, subsidizing, or encouraging a mountain of books. Yet in the suppression campaigns we see the agency leaning over backwards to neutralize, minimize, or even neuter books it considered less favorable. But the secret warriors did not stop to consider that psywar plays both ways. When the truth emerged about CIA's maneuvers, where its raison d'être was to defend a nation that prizes free speech, there would be a cost to weigh against any gains from publication manipulations.

On Dick Helms's watch more books antagonized the agency. One was by a young graduate student, Alfred McCoy, assisted by others, called
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
, which condemned both the CIA and the U.S. war in Vietnam.
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It too contained extensive detail on drug trafficking by the agency's Laotian and South Vietnamese allies, as well as their links to Air America. McCoy's book was scheduled by Harper & Row. The CIA learned of it, but failed to obtain the details it wanted. Then Cord Meyer, who happened to be a friend of Harper board member Cass Canfield, cadged a copy of the manuscript from him. In July 1972 OGC attorney Lawrence Houston wrote Harper & Row, demanding not only a front-channel copy, but the right to review the
book's content, claiming publication could endanger the lives of agency officers. Terrified Harper lawyers induced management to permit this infringement. (While CIA officers sign contracts promising to protect secrets, American publishers have no such obligation.) The agency hit the publisher with a twenty-page list of changes it demanded. According to McCoy, the review actually improved his book—he insisted the CIA fully document every change it wanted. He used that material to extend his analysis. The agency overreached, and both McCoy and Harper lawyers rejected its overblown demands.
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The controversy also drew attention from the
New York Times
, where Sy Hersh published a big piece on the manipulation.

Central Intelligence Agency officials, led by William Colby, then tried to counter the McCoy book's charges with letters to the editor in magazines and newspapers where the author placed articles, including the one in
Atlantic
mentioned earlier. The CIA's campaign to discredit McCoy backfired. The major news coverage from Hersh drew attention to
The Politics of Heroin
. The book garnered even more interest. After that Langley reprised its ploy on
The Invisible Government
and made plans to buy out the entire print run of the book. Harper & Row merely increased the size of its printing. This CIA suppressive maneuver backfired.
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Even friends of the agency could be swept up in CIA's enthusiasm to police the public domain. At a July 1971 staff meeting, the agency's Vietnam director, George Carver, told Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Robert Cushman that air force General Edward Lansdale, who had been intimately involved in agency operations in the Philippines and Vietnam as well as Cuba, had completed a memoir he'd been writing for almost two years. It was in the hands of the publisher, again Harper & Row. Carver hoped the agency could get a look at that manuscript too. While CIA actions in regard to Lansdale's book cannot be ascertained, when
In the Midst
of Wars
appeared a year later, the work proved remarkably uninformative about the CIA.
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The memoir of a major figure in the secret wars sank without a trace.

A 1960 memorandum in which General Lansdale surveyed U.S. clandestine warfare assets in Southeast Asia surfaced as part of the Pentagon Papers, a major Department of Defense review of the Vietnam war's history that leaked in June 1971. This Lansdale paper also figured among the specific items discussed at agency staff meetings. Indeed, the Pentagon Papers as a whole were a staple of conversation among Helms's barons. As early as September 1970, months before Daniel Ellsberg actually leaked the papers, CIA considered suspending his security clearances. When the Pentagon Papers finally emerged, the agency was all over them. George Carver headed the team performing the damage assessment, identifying secrets that were compromised. Helms's minutes make clear that despite sworn affidavits the United States government filed in various courts to affirm the Papers were full of intelligence secrets, the CIA review
had not even been completed
when the Supreme Court issued its
final
ruling crushing Nixon administration efforts to quash publication. Langley later considered a lawsuit to prevent Boston's Beacon Press from issuing the Senator Gravel edition of the Papers, contemplated reprimanding officer Sam Adams, who appeared as a witness for defendants Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo at their subsequent criminal trial, and maneuvered to evade subpoenas for other agency personnel or documents.

Erroneously or deliberately, George Carver, who could tack to the wind better than almost anyone, told the CIA barons
after
his study that the Gravel edition's four volumes could be the so-called “negotiating volumes” of the Pentagon Papers. This is incomprehensible, since, presumably, Carver
had been looking at what had actually appeared in public. The diplomatic volumes tracked Johnson administration efforts to engage North Vietnam in talks that might end the war. They were materials that Dan Ellsberg had protected, refusing to leak them precisely in order to protect their secrecy. The Helms notes also disclose that the CIA knew of the creation and activities of the White House “Plumbers” unit, which formed at this time with the intended purpose of plugging leaks like that of the Pentagon Papers.

Like the Nixon White House, with its notorious “Plumbers,” the CIA ran its own ops. Journalists became targets. One of the first was
Washington Post
reporter Michael Getler, whose articles on intelligence bothered the agency, while his pieces on U.S. arms control talks with the Soviets irritated the White House, which also prodded Langley. A December 1970 Getler article describing intelligence disputes over the Soviet missile buildup annoyed defense secretary Melvin Laird, who approached national security advisor Henry Kissinger. Another on CIA patrols into China raised CIA eyebrows in August 1971. Wiretaps were placed on Getler for four days in early October under Project Celotex I, for the entire period from October 27 until December 10, and on January 3, 1972. The CIA used an observation post at the Statler Hilton Hotel, created to surveil Jack Anderson, to watch Getler's comings and goings from across the street. His name or work figured at several of Helms's meetings. Undeterred, Getler came up with a new scoop. On February 8, 1972, he published “New Spy Satellites Planned for Clearer, Instant Pictures.” The article described the general features of the next-generation U.S. reconnaissance satellite, KH-11, or “Big Bird.” At Director Helms's morning confab, the CIA barons denounced Getler. Furious, Helms ordered more investigation. The spooks never uncovered Getler's sources.
But the
Post
discovered the investigation, and the domestic intrusion came back to bite. The newspaper provided Getler a top-flight lawyer. The journalist chose to go easy, met with CIA counsel, and obtained a cease-and-desist agreement under threat of open legal action.
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The surveillance of Michael Getler suggests the CIA's sensitivity had hardly changed since John McCone's day. It still made for operational assignments—aimed at Americans.

Columnist Jack Anderson also aroused the CIA's ire—and even before the Getler affair. Anderson had published columns regarding secret U.S. intelligence knowledge of the Tonkin Gulf incident in the Vietnam war. The National Security Agency conducted an internal review and reported to Director Helms that it had been able to identify several NSA items that might have been a basis for the journalist's columns. But there were also inaccuracies in the articles,
and
statements made on the floor of the United States Senate had referred obliquely to the same information. The NSA concluded it would be too difficult to prove that the journalist had been culling from its secret documents.

Helms was pushed further by Nixon, who dreaded what would be in the book
The Anderson Papers
.
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Already alarmed by Anderson's newspaper columns detailing Nixon administration decisions on Cambodia in 1970, the India-Pakistan war of 1971, NSA interception of the radio-telephone conversations of Soviet leaders, and agency mind control experiments, Helms wrestled with what to do. He came down hard. The National Photographic Interpretation Center tried to photograph the screen during Anderson's television show to capture images of documents on his desk. Enhancing the pictures might reveal what papers were there. But television broadcast with low screen resolution in those days, while primitive enhancement made the effort futile. There was a straight leak investigation too. By Anderson's count the agency questioned no fewer than 1,566 persons in its effort
to uncover his sources. Nixon officials settled on a young sailor as culprit. The yeoman shuttled documents between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council. But
after
he was reassigned to Alaska, Anderson came up with more revelations, this time about U.S. policy on talks for a new treaty on bases in Japan. Nixon demanded action.

Some of the Japanese bases, in Okinawa, the CIA used to support its operations in Vietnam, while others in the home islands were the mainstay for National Security Agency monitoring of Soviet and Chinese radio transmissions in the Far East. The FBI dissuaded the White House from initiating an illegal telephone wiretap, fearing Anderson would stumble on its surveillance and reveal it. Langley was leery too. As early as 1967 the CIA had analyzed Anderson's reporting as opinionated and self-righteous. It assembled a fresh analysis now. The CIA's Office of Security mounted Project Celotex II, full physical surveillance of Anderson and his colleagues Britt Hume, Les Whitten, and Joseph Spears. According to Anderson, the physical surveillance was called Project Mudhen. Anderson was given the cryptonym “Brandy.” The surveillance was ordered in January 1972, shortly after the columnist's Japan articles. Beginning on February 15, Anderson and his colleagues were followed 24/7, and the Statler Hilton Hotel observation post was busier than ever. Sixteen officers were on the mobile teams, two to a vehicle, and there were four to staff the stakeout. At one point they followed and photographed as Anderson was being filmed by a crew for the CBS television series
Sixty Minutes
. On March 17 they surveilled him at lunch with Richard Helms, recording the CIA's own director as Anderson complained of the surveillance, which he then believed was an FBI initiative. Visits to art museums, sorties to take the kids to school—Celotex II generated mountains of records but no substance at all.

The watch went smoothly for a month, but late in March Anderson realized he was being followed—a friend who lived
nearby noticed cars in the parking lot of a church across the road, and men with binoculars and cameras. The lot was a perfect vantage point from which to watch Anderson's home, his friend warned. Anderson visited the place and saw for himself. Driving around, the journalist soon spotted the CIA tails. He suspected Justice Department official Robert Mardian as author of the plot, but discovered it was the CIA by tracing the license plates of the trailing vehicles. On March 27 the journalist's teenage kids pulled up in the parking lot, blocked the CIA cars where they were, and photographed the watchers. It became a game. The reporter's nine children and their friends once piled into cars and sped off in different directions to stymie the minders. Or they would flash their headlights as if giving some secret signal. Or they would drive past the CIA people and wave. The spooks decided to halt the surveillance of Anderson's home, but keep it up at his office. The reporter countered by filing a lawsuit alleging breach of privacy. Discovery forced the CIA to yield surveillance files and subjected Director Helms to deposition. Helms called off the hunt. The agency gave up Celotex II in embarrassment on April 12. The Mudhen files filled a suitcase when they came to Anderson. He quotes the order terminating the surveillance as admitting its search had been “
‘rather unproductive.'
”
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