Part 7: Wedge(CIA-FBI Pissing Match).....Wedge...The Hydra Project...The Sullivan Plot

 WEDGE FROM PEARL HARBOR TO 9/11 

HOW THE SECRET WAR 

BETWEEN THE FBI AND CIA

 HAS ENDANGERED NATIONAL SECURITY 

MARK RIEBLING

CHAPTER TWELVE 

WEDGE 

RICHARD HELMS HAD a predicament. By October 1966, it was clear that Yuri Nosenko could not remain incarcerated indefinitely. CIA’s Office of Security, which had built Nosenko’s jail and was keeping him in it, had begun to grumble. Security man Solie had been impressed by Kochnov’s claim that Nosenko was bona fide, and began protesting to Security Director Howard Osborn about “the illegality of the Agency’s position in handling a defector under these conditions for such a long period of time.” Congressmen and journalists were getting curious; as early as January 1965, Angleton had been bothered by a query from Senator Everett Dirksen, based on a letter from a constituent, concerning the “whereabouts” of Nosenko. The CI chief told Papich that, though Dirksen’s correspondent was probably just a “curious individual who followed the publicity previously given to Nosenko, ” CIA nevertheless did “not wish to discount the possibility that there may be more to this inquiry”—the black hand of the KGB, perhaps?—and so requested “an appropriate check” by the FBI’s Soviet Section to “determine the purpose” of Dirksen’s query. Nothing sinister was found behind Dirksen’s request, but journalist David Wise in 1966 discovered a reference to Nosenko in a listing of still-classified Warren Commission documents. 

CIA feared that Wise’s article would “immediately result in newspaper inquiries as to the whereabouts of … Nosenko, ” and Helms was forced to violate the usual code of “plausible deniability” by briefing President Johnson on the Nosenko situation. “Through the years, we have been working with the FBI in an effort to establish whether he is a KGB agent on assignment or a bona fide defector, ” Helms wrote the president, adding that public access to Nosenko was “not feasible” because “This question is still not resolved.” 

The thing to do was resolve it. On August 23, 1966, Helms set a limit of sixty days for Bagley, who still oversaw the Nosenko case, to “wind it up.” That resulted in a period of frenetic activity, because Bagley felt that it was impossible to prove Nosenko’s guilt and couldn’t conceive of any way of getting at the truth unless some additional measures were taken. More polygraph tests were administered; their results were interpreted as indicating deception, but no firm proof was gained. 

Bagley proposed that Nosenko be interrogated under the influence of sodium amytal, believed to lower a subject’s defenses, but Helms refused to permit any interrogations using drugs. Finally, the sixty days ran out, and Bagley was asked how CIA could “clean up traces of a situation in which CIA could be accused of illegally holding Nosenko.” Of seven options put down by Bagley, the last three were chilling: “5. Liquidate the man. 6. Render him incapable of giving coherent story (special dose of drug, etc.). Possible aim, commitment to looney bin. 7. Commitment to looney bin without making him nuts.” Helms decided that the case simply could not go on in such a fashion, so he took it to his new DDCI, Admiral Rufus Taylor, and said, “It’s all yours.” 

Taylor quickly moved not only to head off a possible scandal over conditions of Nosenko’s incarceration, but to contain the “enormous damage” which the dispute had already done to relations between CIA and FBI. He took a two-pronged approach. Bagley was to begin work on a massive report detailing the history of the case and setting down all the evidence. At the same time, the defector would be turned over to Bruce Solie at CIA’s Office of Security, who could work with the FBI in the attempt to square Nosenko’s information with Golitsyn’s. That latter task was easier ordered than performed, however, and it was also to be seen how Bagley’s and Solie’s projects would be rectified if they happened to come to different results. It would be almost two years before such matters brought FBI-CIA relations to their most desperate and dangerous phase—catalyzing disagreement over Golitsyn’s thesis, exacerbating irritation over suspected CIA support for Israeli nuclear espionage, and eventually climaxing in a major crisis over the otherwise minor case of a man who disappeared in Denver. In the meantime, new questions about the assassination, raised both publicly and in secret, would make the problem of Nosenko’s bonafides and message ever more pressing. 

THE NEW THINKING was spurred by FBI reports about the insecurity of CIA’s fall-1963 plottings with Rolando Cubela, alias AM/LASH, to assassinate Fidel Castro. As early as October 1963, it will be recalled, the Bureau had possessed indications that CIA’s Cubela contacts might have been known to Castro, but these indications had not been shared with CIA. Consequently, Cubela continued to receive caches of weapons, silencers, pistols, and explosives from CIA until June 1965, when the Bureau finally did relay data that caused the Agency to reassess security. Eladio del Valle, a Cuban exile who was an old friend of both Cubela and Trafficante, tipped the Bureau that the mobster was secretly in league with Cubela and had discussed with him the Castro plots before November 22, 1963. 

That report caused Joseph Langosch, a CIA officer who had helped Fitz-gerald run Cubela, to conclude that the Cubela plot to kill Castro “had been an insecure operation prior to the assassination [of Kennedy].” Not long afterward, del Valle’s head was split open by an ax; the murder was never solved. All contact with Cubela was terminated by a cable to Miami and European stations on June 23, 1965, which cited “Convincing proof that entire AM/LASH group insecure and that further contact with key members of group constitutes a menace to CIA operations.” That menacing group was eventually taken to include Santos Trafficante, who had been suspected by FBI informant Jose Aleman of being a Cuban agent. “Fidel reportedly knew that this group was plotting against him and once enlisted its support, ” Langosch noted. “Hence, we cannot rule out the possibility of provocation.” The question “What Could Castro Have Known?” could only be answered: He could have known everything, right from the start. The question then became: What, If Anything, Had Castro Done About It? 

Johnny Rosselli, Trafficante’s co-conspirator in CIA’s 1962 anti-Castro plots, soon came forward to say that Castro, once he learned about the plots against his life, had gone after Kennedy. In early fall 1966, Rosselli confided to his attorney, Robert Morgan, that the three man CIA assassination team of “Trafficante mob” recruits dispatched to Cuba to kill Castro in September 1962 had come under Cuban influence or control and returned to the United States to kill President Kennedy. Rosselli’s attorney called the office of columnist Drew Pearson, who was known to be tight with Chief Justice Warren, and Pearson dispatched his assistant, Jack Anderson, to extract details from Rosselli. Though it took Anderson several months to get the story—Rosselli feared that other mobsters would kill him for “talking”—by late January 1967 he had given it over. Pearson met with Warren and relayed the allegation; Warren informed President Johnson, who promptly ordered a full accounting. Scott Breckinridge, of CIA’s Office of the Inspector General, was instructed to summarize the history of CIA’s attempts to kill Castro, to assess how widely these schemes were known outside the Agency, and consider whether these plots might have been “turned around” to cause Kennedy’s death.

In the course of his inquiry, Breckinridge somberly surmised that CIA’s plots were probably known not only to Castro but also to the FBI. “As far as we know, the FBI has not been told the sensitive operational details, ” Breckinridge noted, “but it would be naive to assume that they have not by now put two and two together and come out with the right answer. They know of CIA’s involvement with Rosselli and Giancana as a result of the Las Vegas wiretapping incident. From the Chicago newspaper stories of August 1963, and from Giancana’s own statement, it appears that they know this related to Cuba. When Rosselli’s story reached them … all of the pieces should have fallen into place. They should by now have concluded that CIA plotted the assassination of Castro and used U.S. gangster elements in the operation.” Breckinridge felt his hunch confirmed in a May 3 conversation with Sam Papich, who commented that Rosselli had the FBI “over a barrel” because of “that operation.” Papich said he doubted that the FBI would be able to do anything about mobsters such as Rosselli or Trafficante because of “their previous activities with your people.” 

The liaison officer’s insight, if pushed to its logical end, contained an implication that was chilling indeed. If Trafficante and his assassins were immunized from prosecution because of participation in CIA’s anti-Castro plots, could they not have had a “free shot” against President Kennedy? And could not communist intelligence, by using anti-Castro assets tainted by “CIA fingerprints, ” force the U.S. government to cover up any and all evidence of a communist role—as, indeed, the government had done? Couldn’t the conspirators have reasoned that the U.S. government would never go after the assassins, or declare war on their suspected foreign sponsors, over evidence which, viewed from the public’s perspective, might also implicate CIA? 

If Trafficante and/or Cubela were secretly working with Castro—as Aleman had originally alleged, and as Breckinridge himself reportedly believed—there was the troubling possibility that any mischief they made in Castro’s behalf could not only be undertaken under immunity from prosecution but, as Angleton later hinted, “ghost[ed] … to the doorstep of CIA.” Because the U.S. government would be forced to obscure its own seeming links to the plot, any official investigation would be a de facto coverup which, when exposed as such, would undermine the country’s confidence in its most basic institutions. 

Finally, as KGB defector Pyotr Deriabin had hinted four days after the killing, the U.S. intelligence community would be demoralized by such a demonstration of “pure power” by its enemies, who would have effectively said: We can reach out and do this, and you can’t do a thing to punish us. 

The poetry of that possible deception struck Lyndon Johnson with all the force of legal proof. Before reading Breckinridge’s May 1967 study on the Cubela-Trafficante plots, the president thought the notion of a Castro plot no more credible than the idea that the first lady was “taking dope.” But after reading the Breckinridge Report, Johnson was persuaded, as he later told columnist Marianne Means, that his predecessor was liquidated “either under the influence or the orders of Castro.” Johnson also confided to his close adviser Joseph Califano: “I will tell you something that will rock you. Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got him first.” 

Yet CIA believed, from Golitsyn and other defectors, that Castro’s intelligence service, as that of any Soviet bloc country, would not have undertaken such a sensitive operation without KGB knowledge and guidance—and so the Nosenko problem gained urgency. As one CIA memo noted, “the belief that there was Soviet and/or Cuban (KGB and/or DGI) connection with Oswald” would “persist and grow” until there was “a full disclosure” of “all elements of Oswald’s handling and stay in the Soviet Union and his contacts in Mexico City”—or until Nosenko was broken. By summer 1967, as Helms later admitted, the Agency’s investigation of Nosenko “reflected the concern or working hypothesis among many officers working on these matters that the Soviets might have been involved in this [i.e., the Kennedy assassination] in some fashion and that Cubans might have been involved…. That was obviously a matter of prime concern, and since Nosenko was in the Agency’s hands this became one of the most difficult issues to face that the Agency had ever faced.” 

It was especially difficult because, by February 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was forcing CIA’s hand by publicly alleging that the Agency had killed Kennedy. Garrison had ties to Trafficante’s close friend, reputed New Orleans underboss Carlos Marcello, and Garrison’s self-styled “investigation, ” initiated just after Rosselli began to “sing, ” seemed to confirm precisely what the “turnaround” thesis postulated: when any hint of Cuban or Soviet involvement in JFK’s death threatened to surface publicly, it would be matched by allegations implicating the Agency. Public opinion was meanwhile increasingly restive, after several best-selling attacks on the Warren Report, and Helms worried that CIA incarceration of Nosenko, a KGB defector who alleged CIA innocence, might even be mirror-read by the public as evidence of Agency guilt. That was just one more reason the Nosenko situation had become volatile, and Helms moved to defuse it before it could explode. 

IN NOVEMBER 1967, Nosenko was blindfolded, handcuffed, and driven from his cell at Camp Peary to a luxurious townhouse near Washington. After being held prisoner for 1,277 days, he was now given considerable freedom of independent movement, was allowed to brush his teeth, and lived perhaps as well as anyone in Washington. In his plush new pad, Nosenko was questioned daily by Bruce Solie and other sympathetic Security people. They went through his career, and all KGB cases and personnel known to him. To Solie, it was “immediately apparent” that Nosenko was bona fide. 

In January 1968, however, Pete Bagley completed a nine-hundred-page report which reached exactly the opposite conclusion, as did a study conducted independently by Scotty Miler. Though perhaps only codifying what had been believed since summer 1962, two of the most powerful “black” pieces on the U.S. intelligence chessboard, CIA’s Soviet Russia Division and CI Staff, had now officially allied themselves firmly against Nosenko. But the white queen had yet to be heard from. 

When Hoover was advised of Bagley’s evaluation, he sensed that it could have grave consequences for his beloved Bureau. So Angleton, at least, seems to have later psychologized: if Nosenko was now found to be phony, this not only undermined the authority of Fedora, Hoover’s KGB source at the UN, who had backed up Nosenko’s story, but might force a new inquiry into Oswald’s foreign connections, and expose all the FBI mistakes which had caused Hoover to concede: “There is no question in my mind but that we failed in carrying through some of the most salient aspects of the Oswald investigation.” The director therefore abandoned his historical resistance to joint FBI-CIA operations by assigning Bert Turner, and several other FBI agents who accepted Nosenko’s authenticity, to work with Solie toward the defector’s total rehabilitation. 

Solie and the Bureau were an easy “fit.” He had worked closely with the FBI on many cases, including the ongoing Shadrin-Kochnov double agent game, and, because his job was to see CI as simple security, he shared the G-men’s open disdain for convoluted, theoretical constructs of the Angleton-Golitsyn school. “Solie was a security type, not an analyst, so we felt comfortable with him, ” FBI Soviet-CI man Bill Branigan said. “He was a rock.” 

The main emphasis in the Solie-FBI debriefings was in obtaining new counterespionage leads, and those “serials” were then taken as proof of Nosenko’s bona fides. “An analysis of this case clearly indicates that Mr. Nosenko has been an extremely valuable source, one who has identified many hundreds of Soviet Intelligence Officers, ” Solie wrote in a rebuttal to Bagley’s nine-hundred-page indictment. It was noted that “a considerable quantity of useful information on the organization of the KGB, its operational doctrine, and methods, ” including the identities of “nearly 2200” Soviet intelligence officers or recruitment targets, had been “forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation based on data from Mr. Nosenko.” The report went on to list some of those leads, including a loyalty investigation of ABC correspondent Sam Jaffe, and “remarks in regard to personalities in the pocket book entitled, Svetlana, the Incredible Story of Stalin’s Daughter.” 

When Scotty Miler read Solie’s report, he pronounced it “a whitewash.” The whole project, he believed, was based on a false premise—namely, that the Soviets would never have “thrown away” so much information to establish a disinformant’s bona fides. What difference did it make, really, if Nosenko named twenty-two hundred KGB officers in 1963? It was nice to have in the files, but what good did it do, particularly if twenty-one hundred of those guys were going to be in Moscow the rest of their lives? As for the “spies” Nosenko burned, none of them was actually in a position to provide secrets to the Soviets —not Sergeant Johnson, not Jaffe, not any of them. Miler concluded: “To give him merit badges on any of that stuff is bullshit.” 

Perhaps most puzzling of all, Solie had devoted almost no effort to getting Nosenko’s Oswald story straight. On January 3, 1968, Solie had asked Nosenko to write out an account of everything he did in the Oswald investigation. After reading this version, Solie concluded that there was “no conflict” between Nosenko’s new Oswald story and the one given Bagley in 1964. But it would have been difficult for Solie to have found any conflict between the two stories, because, by his own admission, he never compared them. Although he conceded that Nosenko’s Oswald information was “an important part to be considered” in establishing Nosenko’s authenticity, Solie never questioned Nosenko about what he wrote, or about Oswald generally, because he “never had any reason” to doubt Nosenko’s story in the first place. 

Years later, during the reinvestigation of President Kennedy’s death by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Solie was asked in a sworn deposition whether he thought it possible that Nosenko could be lying about Oswald and still be bona fide. “I do not consider that he was lying about Oswald, ” Solie said. His questioners were taken aback by this dogmatic attitude, and asked him to clarify it. But Solie simply repeated: “I do not consider it.” The questioners tried a different tack: if it were proved that Nosenko was lying about Oswald, would that change Solie’s opinion about Nosenko? “It sure would.” So why hadn’t he asked Nosenko about Oswald? The CIA man passed that buck to the FBI. “As far as our office was concerned, the Oswald matter was an FBI matter, ” he said. “They would be in a much better position for that judgement than I would be.” 

Miler was frustrated, but with both the CI Staff and SR Division against Nosenko, and only Security for him, Nosenko’s attackers seemed in a good position to outflank his defenders during CIA’s final disposition of the case. Before that could happen, however, the FBI officially got into the Nosenko sweepstakes with a report of its own. In a Top Secret working paper disseminated to CIA on October 1, 1968, Bert Turner cited “significant confirmatory information” obtained during the Bureau’s 1967-68 interrogations, and found “no substantial basis to conclude that Nosenko was not a bona fide defector.” 

Deputy DCI Rufus Taylor, who was managing the the case for Helms, now had four reports to consider: Bagley’s and Miler’s, indicting Nosenko, partly on Golitsynist grounds, and Solie’s and Turner’s, which supported Nosenko largely because of his utility to the FBI. Bureaucratically speaking, the score was tied, and Taylor would have the swing vote. Three days after receiving the FBI’s report, he had made up his mind. 

“The FBI summary notes that a minimum of 9 new cases have been developed as a result of this reexamination and that new information of considerable importance on old cases not previously available resulted from this effort. Thus, I conclude that Nosenko should be accepted as a bona fide defector. In addition, I recommend that we now proceed with the resettlement and rehabilitation of Nosenko with sufficient dispatch to permit his full freedom by 1 January 1969.” 

To discuss just how Nosenko should be freed, Taylor suggested that Helms convene “the relevant personalities” at a final meeting in mid-October. Present at the big table in the DCI’s seventh-floor Conference Room were Helms, Taylor, Inspector General Gordon Stewart, Solie and others from Security, the new SR chief, and a CI contingent headed by Rocca; Angleton was in the hospital with a minor illness. Everyone agreed that Nosenko should be quietly released, but Miler and the CI faction insisted that all past and future data obtained from Nosenko be tagged: “From a defector whose bona fides have not been established.” That angered Nosenko’s many defenders, especially Taylor. 

All eyes were on Helms. He was preoccupied with getting Nosenko resettled, but he had never resolved the case in his own mind, and he hesitated to sign off on any document or make any final decision about Nosenko’s bona fides. He therefore determined to cut the pie in half. The CI caveat about Nosenko’s bona fides would stand; in that sense, the Angletonian skeptics had won. But as Taylor recommended, CIA’s prisoner would be relocated, employed as a consultant to the Agency, compensated for the time of his incarceration, and made freely available to the FBI for the development of leads. The Agency would also take the official position that Nosenko had been “truthful and honest” in his Solie-FBI debriefings. In that sense the skeptics had lost, Solie and the FBI had won, and a de-facto acceptance of Nosenko had been achieved. 

Even so, CIA officials worried whether tensions with the FBI had been fully resolved. Taylor warned Helms that, despite acceptance of the Solie report, “the FBI just might level official criticism at this Agency for its previous handling of this case.” Because Solie had conducted Nosenko’s re-examination with “finesse and candor, ” Taylor was “inclined to doubt that the FBI [would] wish to make an issue of our previous actions, ” but there was no telling what Hoover might do. The Bureau’s Washington Field Office interviewed Nosenko regularly after December 8, 1968, but CIA and FBI were unable to agree on the “proper characterization to be used in reporting information from the subject”—i.e., on whether Nosenko was telling the truth. No more than a tacit approval of Nosenko’s future information could be given without the consent of Angleton’s shop. The FBI was free to interview Nosenko, but his information couldn’ t be disseminated to the Justice Department, or to the White House, as “solid” or “reliable” intelligence. 

That epistemological roadblock greatly annoyed Hoover, and the seventy-three-year-old director was becoming increasingly testy over constant clashes with CIA. Even if the Nosenko dispute did not provoke him to punitive actions, any number of other episodes might. Indeed, even as Solie and Taylor had been smoothing out FBI resentment over Nosenko, Hoover was riled by an Angletonian scheme that harked back to the days of Wisner’s OPC mischief, and canceled out whatever goodwill Taylor and Solie had won.

SINCE THE EARLY 1950s, Angleton had been in charge of KK/MOUNTAIN, CIA’s “Israeli account, ” and the forging of a special relationship with Israel’s Mossad was to be one of his great legacies. The Mossad would become by consensus the most efficient spy service in the world, and it could be said that this had something to with Angleton’s role as mentor to its various chiefs. Millions of U.S. dollars also must have helped, in exchange for which the Mossad agreed to act as U.S. intermediaries or surrogates in certain situations throughout the world. But the intimacy of U.S.-Israeli intelligence relations was not unproblematic from the law-enforcement perspective, especially when it was suspected that Israeli agents might be spying on their patrons. 

In September 1968, Angleton arranged for Israeli intelligence officer Rafi Eitan to visit the United States. Eitan was a seasoned Mossad officer known as “Rafi the Smelly, ” because he had had to wade through sewage on a 1947 sabotage mission; he had scored his greatest coup in organizing the commando team that kidnapped Adolf Eichmann in 1960. Eitan had been recently put in charge of Lakam, the Mossad’s Science Liaison Bureau, which aimed to keep Israel’s defenses technologically superior to those of any likely aggressor. During his 1968 trip, Eitan and three other Israelis visited a Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) uranium processing plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, which enriched uranium for Westinghouse, the U.S. Navy, and other contractees. After Eitan’s visit, an audit by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) determined that two hundred pounds of enriched uranium, enough to make six atomic bombs, could not be accounted for. 

The AEC suspected that NUMEC’s founder and president, Zalman Shapiro, might have helped Eitan smuggle the uranium to Israel, and since the case seemed to have both foreign and domestic angles, both the FBI and CIA were informed. Neither agency could agree, however, on whose problem Israeli espionage really was. Perhaps because spying by a U.S. ally was such a sensitive issue, no one wanted official responsibility for the problem. A former congressional investigator who reviewed the Senate and House intelligence committees’ files on Shapiro later told journalist Seymour Hersh about a yearlong war of memoranda: “The CIA was saying to Hoover, ‘You’re responsible for counterintelligence in America. Investigate Shapiro, and if he’s a spy, catch him.’ Hoover’s answer was, “Go to Israel and get inside Dimona [the Israeli nuclear program], and if you find it [evidence of the Shapiro uranium], let us know.’ It was kind of a game. The memos were hysterical—they went back and forth.” 

But Hoover, at least, was playing a double game. Though he refused, on the one hand, CIA’s formal requests to investigate Shapiro, the FBI was already investigating Shapiro under a massive counterintelligence program whose existence was hidden from the Agency. After Israel’s Six-Day War against the Arab nations in 1967, which impressed upon Tel Aviv the importance of technological advantage, the FBI had noted that an increasing number of Israeli experts and business executives were visiting the United States. Reports started filtering back from U.S. executives who had been approached by Lakam agents. In 1968, under a super secret project code-named “Scope, ” the FBI began tracking Israeli scientific delegations in the U.S., as well as the movements of Israeli Embassy personnel. Knowing that Angleton’s CI shop was eager to maintain cooperation with Israeli intelligence and would likely not have thought too highly of the program, the FBI did not disclose it to CIA. 

Shapiro was put under active FBI surveillance, and it was determined that he was under Mossad influence, though there was no firm evidence that he had smuggled the uranium. A Scope assessment of Eitan’s visit did conclude that it was part of a Lakam effort to divert uranium from the NUMEC plant to Israel, but no formal charges were ever brought against Shapiro or Eitan. Nevertheless, the Bureau was concerned enough about Eitan’s mischief to expand Scope in 1968—69 to include wiretapping and bugging of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Consequently, some Israelis were asked to leave the country. 

The Agency’s resistance to those expulsions caused Hoover to suspect that Helms, too, might be playing a double game, and that CIA might be a partner in the very espionage it had asked the Bureau to investigate. Among the targets tracked by Scope in 1969 was Israeli professor Yuval Ne’eman, a former colonel in Israeli Military Intelligence, who made frequent and lengthy stays in the United States. The FBI watched him as he visited Lawrence Livermore Laboratory near the University of California at Berkeley, and Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada, near Pasadena. As a result of that surveillance, FBI officials believed they had conclusive evidence that Ne’eman was working for Lakam, and finally they confronted him. Ne’eman was ordered to register formally as a foreign agent of the Israeli government or risk deportation. Knowing that registering as an agent would automatically deny him access to most research facilities, Ne’eman stubbornly pretended innocence. The G-men then revealed all they had learned about his activities in country. Horrified, Ne’eman contacted Mossad’s station chief in Washington, D.C., and asked for help. The station chief decided to circumvent the FBI by appealing to CIA. 

A few days later, Angleton suggested to William Sullivan that it would be in the U.S. national interest if the Bureau left Ne’eman alone. Angleton was negotiating an expanded U.S.-Israeli intelligence-cooperation deal, he said, and he didn’t want the Bureau’s hounding of Ne’eman to put that arrangement at risk. Papich relayed the message and the FBI backed off, but Hoover was furious. Not since the days of Wisner’s OPC, when foreign nationals had been running wild all over the country, had the Agency asked the Bureau to countenance such mischief. At the very least, the Agency’s foreign liaison interests were in direct conflict with the FBI’s domestic imperatives. “As was typical, ” recalled an FBI deputy director, “intelligence cooperation superseded effective counterintelligence here to protect our secrets. The Israelis knew that was our tendency, and they took advantage of it.” 

Also typical was that the whole matter of U.S.-Israeli technological cooperation, like so much conflict between CIA and FBI in the late 1960s, may have been ultimately rooted in Angleton’s reliance on Anatoliy Golisyn. If Angleton was, in fact, helping Rafi Eitan build Israel’s atomic capabilities, he was almost certainly doing so in the attempt to maintain a pro-Western nuclear counterweight to the Ba’ath socialist government of Iraq, whose role as a Soviet client was a subject of much Golitsynist suspicion. The defector believed that the Soviets would cultivate Third World client states as part of the KGB’s long-range plan, and when Saddam Hussein’s own writings proclaimed that the Soviet-Iraqi alliance was based on a unity of long-term “strategic interests, ” Golitsyn began to see Saddam as a key rook or knight in the Soviet endgame. Chilling, then, was Leonid Brezhnev’s 1968 gift to Saddam of a nuclear “research reactor, ” at Tuwaitha, on the east bank of the Tigris River. It was only a week after this that Angleton arranged for Eitan to visit the NUMEC in Pennsylvania, and only a few months later asked for Ne’eman to be allowed continued access to rocket-propulsion secrets; the sequence of events may not have been coincidental. It may well have been Golitsyn’s concerns that caused CIA to condone one of the great ironies of the Cold War: the smuggling of technology gleaned from ex-Nazi rocket scientists, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and elsewhere, for the delivery of nuclear devices in defense of a Jewish state. 

THAT EVEN THE MOST otiose of FBI-CIA conflicts in the late 1960s could be traced back to Anatoliy Golitsyn was testimony to just how divisive the defector’s message was proving to be. As the decade neared a close, the longstanding war over which axis would guide U.S. counterintelligence, CIA-Golitsyn or FBI-Nosenko, reached a point of crisis. Papich would maintain that Hoover’s own opinion on Golitsyn was not unilaterally formed—that the boss “pretty much relied on the analysis and the view-points of his men, no question about it”— but Hoover clearly had a close acquaintance with the impact of the Golitsyn thesis on FBI reporting from Soviet sources, and in one case it deeply embarrassed him. 

In 1970, British intelligence had “turned” Oleg Lyalin, a KGB man under diplomatic cover in London. They sent over intelligence digests containing his material to the FBI for circulation through to the CIA, and on up to the president. Hoover was so proud of the fact that Lyalin’s information had been obtained from the British by his agency that during a vacation in Florida, when he called on President Nixon at his holiday home on Key Biscayne, the FBI director went out of his way to ask, “How do you like the British reports from their source Lyalin, Mr. President?” 

“What reports?” replied Nixon. He had never received them. 

Hoover turned red with rage. Calls to CIA determined that all intelligence from Lyalin had been dead-ended in Angleton’s safe. The CI chief suspected that Lyalin was yet another disinformation agent, as predicted by Golitsyn, and had refused to circulate the documents to Nixon. 

If Lyalin had been the first such source to be knocked down by Golitsyn, Hoover might have been able to tolerate Angleton’s skepticism. But, coming at the end of a decade which had seen CIA disparage a whole series of FBI sources, the Lyalin affair turned Hoover irrevocably against Angleton and Golitsyn—and against Sam Papich, who was still trying to merge the incommensurate mindsets. 

“There’s no question about it, I did present the views of Jim Angleton and his people on defectors, ” Papich reflected. “And I mean I made it clear that they should be considered. I needled the hell out of Hoover and a lot of people. I definitely knew there were people in the Bureau that completely disagreed with me. You can run into FBI agents and they’ll tell you, ‘Sam’s a great friend of mine, but, boy, did he get sucked in by CIA.’ But I honestly felt Jim’s criticism could help correct us where we were weak, on disinformation. So I questioned the Bureau’s position on Nosenko and Fedora. I gave my reasons for it. And I presented CIA’s views. Of course, at CIA I presented the FBI’s position. To me, it wasn’t a matter of rooting for one or the other team, depending on your loyalties. Goddamn it, it was just a matter of analyzing what you had there.” 

That attitude was killing his FBI career. “Sam routinely took on Hoover, ” Larry McWilliams would say, still in awe more than twenty years later. “When Hoover demanded that certain things be written up in certain ways for his own purposes, Sam refused him. He said, There’s two sides to this argument—ours, and CIA’s.’ Well, that was his end.” 

In 1969, Papich started getting the message that he wasn’t “fitting into the picture.” There were little hints— not being invited to “closed meetings, ” and getting little blue ink digs on interoffice memoranda: Does this fellow Papich have all his marbles today? Papich had been around long enough to know Hoover’s tactics, and by early 1970 had come to the conclusion “that I was no longer useful as a liaison man.” 

He probably could have hung on at some post out in the field, but Papich was fifty-seven years old, and he felt physically and mentally beaten. There was no sense staying with an organization that did not really want him anymore, and at such a cost to his family life. He was lucky to have a wife who was considerate about the long days and lost weekends, but it wasn’t doing her any good, and it was getting to him, too. He hoped to spend more time with his son, Bill, who was coming home disillusioned from an army tour in Vietnam, cursing Nixon and all the policymakers for fighting a political war, not going in to win, and Sam didn’t argue with him. He’d seen in Washington the way decisions were based on all manner of considerations but merit, and it sickened him, too. He didn’t like Washington, never did want to work at headquarters, and, looking back, he thought it amazing that he had lasted almost twenty years in that atmosphere—getting into disagreements with Dulles, with Bedell Smith, John McCone, Dick Helms, “bouncing among all those wheels in both agencies like a goddamned tennis ball.” 

But he had a lot of good friends at both agencies, and no misgivings. Relations between the two outfits had developed and grown. In the beginning, back in 1952, it was just Papich and CIA, but gradually he had got people to see each other, and now, despite all the differences over defectors, which would with luck clear up, G-men and spooks were working together on cases in New York and Washington and all over the country, whether Hoover wanted them to or not. That wasn’t all the liaison man’s doing, but he had incited it and inspired it to some extent. At the very least, he had left the secret world a better place for his having been there, which was something few men could safely say. He would do it all again, if he could relive the past. But he had no future in the FBI. 

On February 15, 1970, Papich submitted a letter to Hoover, giving five weeks’ notice of retirement. This letter was an unusual document. Interlarded among traditional kudos to the legendary director were a number of polite but implicitly critical pleas for the FBI to move more aggressively, and work more closely with CIA, against foreign spies. The United States had “never faced the kind of sophisticated and dangerous Soviet-bloc espionage” that it did now, and the Bureau needed to make some changes if it were to meet the new level of threat. The FBI had no real CI training program, and “nothing in the way of computerized counterintelligence, ” and, given the Soviets’ excellent capability of monitoring telephonic communications from Lourdes, Cuba, steps needed to be taken to secure the lines of FBI communication between Washington and New York. The Bureau should also try to see CIA’s side on certain issues, like requests for technical coverage, and Papich later admitted “taking off on the whole subject of defector bona fides.” Urging a reconciliation between warring CI philosophies, Papich ended by expressing the hope that Hoover would appoint a new liaison officer who “might more easily smooth over the difficulties between the two agencies.” 

But this criticism boomeranged, reinforcing Hoover’s desire to continue in his old ways. Papich later acknowledged that his letter “really shook up J. Edgar, ” as he had hoped it would, but he hadn’t anticipated Hoover’s furious accusation that the letter had been “drafted by the CIA.” Nor had he any idea that his criticism would boil up all the resentment which had been building in Hoover’s soul—stirred by the penetration and defection controversies of the 1960s, but really brewing ever since Donovan’s men had started invading his turf back in the summer of 1941. 

“I want to abolish the Liaison Section, ” Hoover barked at one of his deputies, Mark Felt, after reading Papich’s letter. “It’s costing us a quarter of a million dollars a year, and other agencies obviously benefit from it more than we do. Let the supervisors handle their own contacts with other agencies.” Felt said he would look into it—“I think we can work out something which will be effective”—but privately he was horrified. “Papich had an extremely effective working relationship with the CIA, ” Felt later wrote, “from the lowest supervisor to Richard Helms.” His reputation, even among those who thought him too Angletonian for a G-man, was that of “an honest and sincere man with high professional competence and an insatiable appetite for work. More importantly, in an area potentially fraught with jealousy, intrigue and deceit, he had the trust of the CIA and the respect of the FBI, if not its Director.” But it was Hoover who counted, not his men, and clearly he had made up his mind. 

Of course, a pretext was needed for such a drastic move as the breaking off of liaison with CIA. Hoover and Felt found it in a bizarre case twenty-five hundred miles to the west, which had begun the spring before. 

JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on Sunday, March 9, 1969, at a ranch-style home on a snowy hill in Boulder, Colorado, a pretty young woman had locked herself in her first-floor bedroom, opened the window, and screamed for help. When a neighbor ran over and helped her to the ground, he noticed about her a strong odor of what smelled like chloroform. Boulder police, summoned to the scene of this domestic disturbance, were met at the door by another woman, later described by officers as “the fullback type.” She had graying hair, a ruddy complexion, and horn rimmed glasses; she gave her name as Galya Storm Tannenbaum. She said she was “doing a little work for Immigration now and then, ” and had been attempting to have the screaming woman, Mrs. Thomas Riha, sign some type of immigration papers which had to do with “divorce proceedings.” 

Lurking submissively behind the imposing Tannenbaum was a man who looked like Gary Cooper. This was University of Colorado history professor Thomas Riha, a thirty-nine-year-old Czech émigŕ, and the screaming woman’s husband. Police sensed immediately that he and Tannenbaum were lovers, a classic case of “opposites attract.” 

But why had Riha’s wife been screaming? 

When interviewed at the neighbor’s house where she had taken refuge, Mrs. Riha said she had been in bed when she heard whispered voices in the study and awoke to sense a strange odor. Feeling dizzy, she opened her window and called for assistance. Under her bed covers, police found a small bottle containing what was subsequently determined to be ether. 

Nevertheless, police concluded that “no foul play” was involved. They were not particularly concerned that, when asked for proof of her employment with Immigration, Tannenbaum stated it was in her car, but failed to produce it. It would be some months before police learned that the name of Julia Galya Storm Tannenbaum had appeared in the wills of two persons whose deaths had been described by authorities as suicidal and accidental, respectively. 

That pattern would loom in significance after March 16, when Professor Riha failed to show up for a faculty meeting. Colleagues came by his house, looked through the kitchen window, and saw a table set for a breakfast never eaten. They never saw their friend again. Police soon discovered that Riha had recently transferred the title to his car, house, and furniture to Tannenbaum. In January 1970, she was arrested for forging the will of another Colorado man, who had recently died with cyanide in his blood. The local police chief told Scott Werner, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Denver Field Office, that Riha had probably been murdered by Tannenbaum. But before any direct evidence could be developed, a District Court declared her legally insane, and she was carted off to a Boulder mental hospital. There she became known to fellow inmates as “a kind of witch of the ward, ” and it was not long before she was found dead by cyanide poisoning, with a suicide note in the pocket of her dress. 

Newspapers were meanwhile speculating that Riha was a victim of international intrigue—“either kidnapped by the Russians, or picked up by the CIA or the FBI.” His colleagues told reporters of generalized suspicions that Riha had intelligence links, but could produce no proof. In fact, Riha had been of some interest to both CIA and FBI since emigrating from Czechoslovakia in 1947. Fluent in five foreign languages, he had taken a leave of absence from doctoral work in the Harvard history department to study at Moscow University, from June 1958 to September 1959, leaving Russia just as Lee Harvey Oswald arrived. The Bureau debriefed him on his return, and cross-referenced its Riha file: “Soviet Intelligence Services—Recruitment of Students.” The FBI report noted, “It is not believed at this time that Riha possesses any double agent potential, ” but a later Bureau document disclosed “that at one time subject was of some interest to CIA.” 

After Riha’s disappearance, Angleton and his staffers were left to wonder, as Miler would put it, “whether there was an STB [Czech intelligence] or KGB connection.” Angleton naturally tried to connect the Riha affair with the larger events of the day: Was it significant that Riha, a Czech, disappeared just after the Prague Spring? Was it possible that Riha was a deep-cover, long-term illegal after the manner of Rudolf Abel? If so, had he bolted after being tipped by an “emergency contact” that he might be exposed by one of several recent Czech defectors? “We never could find out, ” Miler later said. “There was information that he was in Czechoslovakia, but we never got anything more; we never could confirm it.” Indeed, Papich advised his superiors in April 1969 of CIA’s belief that the Czechoslovakia story was “without foundation, ” although the University of Colorado had been publicizing that angle to quiet rumors. The Agency had also stipulated that, despite its previous interest in Riha, it was “not utilizing subject in any capacity, ” and did not know where he had gone. 

CIA repeated that disclaimer publicly, but by late 1969 it had failed to neutralize speculation about an Agency role in Riha’s decampment. As a result, CIA’s man in Boulder, a non-operational “domestic contact, ” worried that the Agency might be “kicked off campus.” He therefore told University President Joseph Smiley, who was very concerned about Riha, that the professor’s absence was “merely a marital matter” and that Riha was all right. The CIA officer attributed that information to an FBI agent, and pledged Smiley to secrecy.

But Smiley fumbled the ball. By January 1970, he had inadvertently told reporters that government officials had assured him that Riha was safe, and Denver SAC Werner suspected that CIA might have leaked this information. Werner’s inquiries produced “some equivocation” from CIA officials, and by January 28 he was lamenting “unfavorable relations” with CIA in Denver. Finally, just as the sun sank behind the Rockies on February 10, CIA’s domestic-contact agent in Denver, Mike Todorovich, called Werner and came clean. He admitted that a “CIA representative in Boulder” had told Smiley that Riha was all right. Todorovich alleged that both he and the Boulder officer had “got this information from an FBI agent in Boulder.” 

Werner demanded to know the name of the FBI agent. Todorovich demurred. Werner began shouting. Until he had the name, he would assume CIA was lying. 

Four days later, FBI headquarters was told that Smiley was trying to float a retraction. His information about Riha was based on someone else’s “honest mistake.” Smiley thought this “cleared the air.” But Hoover wrote: “I don’t. I still want name of our agent which [CIA representative] gave to Dr. Smiley.” 

Sam Papich was still on duty for a few weeks, closing out his files and cleaning out his office, and his main project before retiring was now to get the name of the offending agent from CIA. On February 17, according to FBI records, “Liaison Agent Papich vigorously protested … to CIA, charging the Agency with impeding our inquiry.” Papich pointed out that CIA’s “stubborn refusal to divulge the identity of the Bureau agent involved was unacceptable because we had no information to support the information attributed to our agent.” As a result of Papich’s protest, a CIA official telephoned the Agency’s Boulder officer and insisted that he divulge the identity of the G-man. The officer refused as “a matter of personal honor, ” and offered to resign before squealing. 

Papich went higher. On February 20, he visited Helms in his seventh-floor office at Langley, went through the background of the case, and asked Helms to help him. The DCI maintained that he did not have the identity of the FBI agent, but said that CIA’s Boulder officer had been recalled to HQ and would be “interviewed in detail” by Helms personally. In the meantime, Helms was requesting his subordinates to prepare a report covering all CIA knew on the matter. Helms advised that he considered this “a most serious development” and fully recognized “the gravity of the situation, ” since it had a “bearing on relations between the two agencies and the highly important work of both organizations.” 

The CIA officer arrived in Washington on February 24, and Helms heard him out. Two days later, Papich carried a Personal and Confidential letter from Helms to Hoover. 

The FBI director read it at his desk, with blue pen poised. 

“Dear Mr. Hoover, ” Helms began. “Mr. Papich has informed me that you wish to have the identity of the FBI agent who was the source of certain information communicated to an employee of this Agency. I have reviewed this complicated case and have requested [my employee] to reveal the identity of his source.” 

“As a point of honor and personal integrity, ” Helms wrote, his man “was adamant that he could not disclose the identity of his source, and had maintained this position under further pressure from me stating that in defense of it he was prepared to submit his resignation immediately.” The officer had given out his Riha story merely to counter media speculation that U.S. intelligence had killed or kidnapped the professor. He had tried to coordinate this white-propaganda process with SAC Werner, but the FBI man had instead “engaged in an oral exchange during which he remarked that our representative in Boulder was ‘lying.’” 

Hoover scribbled, “Werner acted properly.” 

Helms went on: “I feel that poor judgement was employed in passing the information in question. This should only have been done with specific FBI approval.” At the same time, Helms had “no reason to doubt” that his man had “acted honestly” and “reported to me in good faith, ” being “sincerely interested in preserving a sound working relationship between the CIA and the FBI.” 

Hoover wrote: “I do not agree.” 

“I hope sincerely, ” Helms continued, “that this recent incident will not impair our mutual efforts in making certain that we have not overlooked factors possibly having a significant bearing on U.S. intelligence and internal security interests. I shall pursue this matter through our respective liaison offices. 

“In closing, Mr. Hoover, I wish to state that this Agency can only fully perform its duties in the furtherance of the national security when it has the closest coordination and teamwork with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Furthermore, it is necessary that we continue to conduct our business in an atmosphere of mutual respect. I trust that we can coordinate closely any future developments or actions in these cases, in order to prevent the airing in public of conflicts or differences between the two agencies.” 

Hoover’s comment: “Helms forgets that it is a two way street.” 

“I strongly feel that there are representatives of the news media who are eager to exploit alleged differences on a national scale. Disturbing as this experience has been, I wish to thank you in the interests of our common cause for having communicated with me in such a forthright and candid manner. Sincerely, Richard Helms.” 

Underneath the DCI’s signature, Hoover wrote: “This is not satisfactory. I want our Denver office to have absolutely no contacts with CIA. I want direct liaison here with CIA to be terminated & any contact with CIA in the future to be by letter only. H.” 

When Sam Papich read those words, his blood ran cold. He rushed into Hoover’s office and beseeched him in the strongest terms to reconsider, pleading that a close relationship between the two agencies was vital to an effective national counterintelligence effort. The intricacy of CI cases, combined with the speed of travel and communication, required direct personal contact between the FBI agents and more than a dozen CIA officers daily. Communicating by mail would be an unworkable situation, Papich warned. By cutting off liaison, Hoover would only “drive a wedge” between FBI and CIA, accomplishing in one capricious instant what the KGB had been patiently trying to do for years. This wedge would create a dangerous gap, which communist intelligence would naturally exploit. 

“I was very strongly denouncing the cutoff of liaison, ” Papich allowed. “You know, I’d been working my butt off for years to build bridges, and the boss severs relations with the Agency, just kind of overnight—yeah, I blew my stack.” 

Hoover listened quietly. Then he said, “My decision stands, ” and went back to work on the pile of papers before him. 

That afternoon, Papich informed Helms that no “new Papich” would be coming around after his retirement, because Hoover had “terminated” the liaison-officer position. Papich was despondent, and Helms was grim. 

The outgoing liaison agent tried one last time to reason with Hoover, in a memo on March 2. “I hope that you will share my alarm, ” Papich wrote, being “absolutely convinced that the intelligence services of Great Britain, France, West Germany and others, ” including the FBI and CIA, were “well penetrated by the Soviets.” It was important for the agencies to work together in rooting out these penetrations; the KGB must not profit from interagency differences. “The break in relations between the FBI and CIA will provide a basis for promoting further rifts, ” he warned Hoover. “I appeal to you to leave the door open.” 

Hoover did not respond to Papich’s letter. Instead, that same day he sent a Secret Coded Urgent teletype to all FBI field offices in cities where CIA also had a presence. “immediately discontinue all contact with the local cia office,” the message read. 

No one pretended that Hoover had decided to break liaison simply in a “fit of pique” over the unsolved disappearance of a Czech professor. After all, he had endured far worse transgressions by men like Bill Donovan, Donald Downes, William Harvey, and Frank Wisner, but had never cut off relations because of them. And if it was often true, as CIA’s Lyman Kirkpatrick observed, that “superficial and insignificant mistakes resulted in greater adverse reaction than the important ones, ” it was no less true that the impact of seemingly trivial errors could be magnified, so to speak, at the end of a bad day, when one was looking for an excuse to blow up. For Hoover it had been a bad decade, coming after two others which, from the perspective of interagency relations, were less than wholly good. Scotty Miler and others at CIA later told Senate investigators that the deeper causes of the liaison rupture included the Bureau’s lack of CI savvy and research resources, differences of opinion on possible moles, and, most especially, disputes over the bona fides of Nosenko and Golitsyn. The Riha episode, as Angleton later said, was simply “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” 

“I LEFT UNDER A CLOUD,” Sam Papich recalled. “It was standard for any retiree to get a letter from J. Edgar, and a picture taken with him. But I got nothing. Quite honestly, I’m not bitter about it, but that’s the way it was.” 

Papich insisted that his retirement ceremony be kept “quite brief, ” but it went on for a couple of hours, because so many people wanted to talk to him. He was loaded down with gifts of one kind or another, mostly fishing equipment, and he had to get help carrying it all out to his car. It was almost like what Hoover himself would get from his men for Christmas, and what he had once got from the public, back during the Dillinger days. The comparison was not lost on G-men like McWilliams. “To me, and to everyone else I knew, Sam was a jewel. What happened to him, with Hoover, was a travesty. Sam should have been running the god-damned place, after Hoover.” CIA officers like Raymond Rocca would revere Papich as a martyr to the true CI cause—“an outstanding person, who really understood, and because of that, suffered much.” 

The Papich legend only grew when, in coming years, he stood virtually alone among disillusioned ex-FBI men in refraining from blasting Hoover, supporting him even in private conversation with his closest friends. How, people asked him, can you look at Hoover with any sympathy or support or kindness, after what he did? Papich would just say, “Well, I disagreed with the man, but on the other hand I had some great assignments under him.” And then he would change the subject.

BOOK FOUR 

CHAOS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN 

THE HYDRA PROJECT 

WHEN J. EDGAR HOOVER broke liaison with CIA on February 26, 1970, America was quite a different country than it had been when Sam Papich joined the secret world some thirty years before. As Papich drove home to North Arlington that night, after the worst day of his life, the news on the radio did nothing to cheer him. In Saigon, the U.S. Marine Corps command announced that five American soldiers had been charged with murdering eleven South Vietnamese women and five children while on patrol south of Danang. At the University of California in Santa Barbara, hundreds of peace demonstrators smashed store windows, burned a Bank of America, and hurled firebombs at police, who dropped tear-gas grenades from helicopters and begged Governor Ronald Reagan to declare a state of emergency. In San Francisco, a District Court judge heard a civil suit by David Hilliard, a leader of the Black Panther Party, challenging the constitutionality of the law banning threats against the president’s life. 

When, in coming days, Papich tried to escape this troubled world by going to see a movie with his wife, now that he had time, he discovered just how far the changes had reached. There were ads for X-rated films in the movie pages of the Post, unthinkable only a few years earlier, and—as if to symptomize the malaise of confusion that had struck the secret world, as well as society—Alfred Hitchcock had made his first boring thriller, Topaz, from the Leon Uris novel about an irascible Soviet defector modeled on Anatoliy Golitsyn. Uris’ story ended happily, with the defector’s daughter giving a piano recital of an original composition called The American Dream, whereas Golitsyn’s daughter, a talented artist, had fallen in with a bad crowd, and died of a drug overdose. 

The cultural revolution had made itself felt even among Golitsyn’s keepers at CIA. The first sign had been beards. It was nothing new for CIA officers to come home full-whiskered from postings in Asia and Africa—the kind of places where one thought: Well, if I’m ever going to grow a beard, this is the place to grow one—but by the late 1960s a lot of people were not shaving them, and Agency headquarters had begun filling with sideburns and goatees and muttonchops, which lent something of the atmosphere of a steamboat pilots’ convention. The next transformation was women wearing slacks, which traumatized the old guard, particularly West Pointers and other military types. Then came the addition of young computer programmers and systems analysts, at a time when, nationwide, there weren’t really very many, so CIA was competing against RCA and IBM, and therefore not only had to pay considerable salaries to these new people but had to take them in sandals, with hair down to their shoulders, and all that sort of thing. Director Helms would deflect complaints by saying, “You know, we just don’t need to have the same kind of mold applied to all our personnel, we need to have some young people who are part of that culture.” On the other hand, when he first saw an employee in the Executive Dining Room wearing a high black turtleneck shirt, no coat or tie, and a medallion around his neck, his eyebrows did go up. 

But there was one institution where the traditional American way of life seemed purely preserved, her old customs and mores protected intact. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI remained in a cultural time warp. One could walk down its spit-polished corridors, past crew-cut crusaders in suits and hats, and get the impression that it was 1959. The only hints of change were at Hoover’s 30th Street hermitage, where his living room displayed a large stereo, the kind that flashed colored lights as different notes were hit. The director’s beloved backyard grass had also been torn up for easy-care AstroTurf after James E. Crawford, his chauffeur and gardener, had been disabled by a brain tumor; Hoover never wanted anyone around the house he didn’t know, a prudent prejudice for someone who’d received over a thousand threatening letters from left wing revolutionaries in 1969. FBI sedans were parked under the elms at either end of his street, agents sitting there all night or whenever he was home, and motorcading with him in the mornings. “It was great, ” one of Hoover’s neighbors would remember. “You could cancel your insurance when they were out there.” 

In fracturing daily interface with the Agency, however, Hoover had crippled the Bureau’s efforts to cover and comprehend the same domestic disturbances which now endangered his life. Of course, though Papich no longer came over each day, that didn’t stop communication by courier pouch, and superficially the rupture might have seemed a mere inconvenience, surmounted by telephone calls over newly installed secure lines, and through meetings on the sly. Helms, for one, refused to appear disturbed by the development, precisely because he knew that Hoover expected some kind of reaction. General consensus, though, was that the country was in trouble. Scotty Miler believed that Hoover’s move had injured U.S. counterintelligence, and FBI CI man Charles Brennan “very definitely” believed, as he later said, “that this adversely affected the operations of the FBI.” Many G-men, such as William Sullivan, saw the breach as a principal impediment to FBI’s domestic collection efforts, especially regarding the possibility of foreign sponsorship to terrorism and dissent. 

The disruption of FBI efforts was particularly troubling to Sullivan and others because, coincidentally enough, on the very afternoon Hoover terminated direct contacts with CIA, the U.S. Army announced it would no longer monitor antiwar dissent. The FBI had now to carry sole responsibility for investigating political disorder and violence. That was an impossible duty, and the Bureau’s inability to perform it would drive two U.S. presidents to desperate measures in the attempt to conjoin the rival halves of U.S. counterintelligence. 

THE BUREAU HAD BEEN monitoring ideological “subversives” since FDR’s antifascist edict in 1936, and on up through the McCarthyist period, but 1960 marked a new era of drastic social change, posing new problems which should have brought about better-defined legislation. Failing that, the Bureau fell back on guidance from presidents. In the early 1960s, the FBI had begun unlawfully burglarizing Ku Klux Klan headquarters in Louisiana, obtaining its membership list and financial records, then subjecting suspected troublemakers to surveillance, and sometimes arresting them before murders were committed. The tail-side of that coin was investigation of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., whose most trusted adviser, Stanley Levison, was believed by the Bureau to be a key financial backer and organizer for the American Communist Party. The Justice Department also sanctioned COINTELPRO (“counterintelligence program”) operations against the communists and other radical groups. If, for instance, Professor Jones was a member of the Socialist Workers Party and was running for the school board, a friendly neighborhood FBI agent might send a letter to the local newspaper saying, “You may not know it, but this bird is a Marxist fanatic.” 

Although Papich and some others at the Bureau had been quiet critics of COINTELPRO projects—not because such operations were judged immoral, but because “we were not trained to do that kind of psychological-warfare work”—there was no going back after the mid-1960s, when political protest turned increasingly violent. The hope of civil-rights progress within a democratic framework imposed by Northern white liberals seemed symbolically to die with Jack Kennedy, and despite Lyndon Johnson’s strong support for voting rights and welfare bills, sit-ins soon gave way to riots. Early in 1965, leading New Left theoretician Franz Fanon pronounced that “violence invests character with positive and creative qualities”; the next year H. Rap Brown, who had once directed nonviolent protest as head of the Student National Coordinating Committee (SNCC), declared that “Violence is as American as apple pie.” From SNCC was born the Black Panther Party, an urban guerrilla group that was armed and, by its own declarations, very dangerous. 

By spring 1967 the goals, tactics, and rhetoric of the Black Power movement were taken up by the largely white “free speech, ” countercultural, and antiwar movements which had been building at college campuses since 1964, and the result was an amorphous phenomenon that came to be called the New Left. This was really a disjointed collection of individuals, ranging from those who simply grew long hair and experimented in the drug scene, to several millions of middle-class students concerned with the Vietnam situation, but including a relatively small core of radical revolutionaries, probably no more than a few thousand, who formed the active membership of groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Youth International Party (Yippies). These groups denounced the old American Communist Party and Soviet Union as moribund and defunct, aligned themselves with Third World revolutionary movements (China, Cuba, the Vietcong), and openly advocated the violent overthrow of America’s “bourgeois” constitutional democracy. Until that happened, they hoped that the Constitution would protect their right to organize massive anti-establishment demonstrations such as those during 1967’s “Summer of Love, ” which became the worst period of racial riots and the largest political protests America had ever known. 

Pressure on the FBI to stoke up its investigations increased when President Johnson concluded that the protest movement must be the product of a foreign conspiracy. That theory had been presented to him by Republican Senator John Tower of Texas, who had tried to give a conciliatory speech from the steps of Sproul Hall at Berkeley, only to be drowned out by “all the rhetoric of the Communist anti-American propaganda mill.” Tower considered himself lucky to get away with his life, and was sure that, however “indigenous” the sentiment, the scale and seeming coordination of radical action must be due to “external influence.” That set Johnson to thinking. Was it any accident, he wondered, that a number of Black Panthers had reportedly traveled to Algeria, North Korea, and Cuba, then come back denouncing his Great Society welfare programs as a “capitalist trick”? For that matter, what were Jane Fonda and other dissidents doing in North Vietnam? When polls showed that a majority of the American people still supported military intervention in Southeast Asia, a cause that was “so clearly right for the country, ” as Johnson muttered to his advisers, how could it be “so widely attacked if there were not some foreign force behind it”? 

But the FBI’s ability to verify Johnson’s hunch, or disprove it as paranoia, was crimped by Hoover’s new hesitance to undertake warrantless surveillance. Johnson’s push for coverage on subversives had come just four months after Hoover rejected, for the last time, requests for black-bag jobs and other illegal methods, and when the FBI prepared a study for the White House in July 1967, the lack of intelligence resulted in a weak thesis. “Certainly there was evidence of Communist direction, ” recalled the FBI’s Charles Brennan, but that “direction” seemed to be primarily in the form of “ideological guidance.” There was “no evidence” that dissidence was being “funded from abroad.” As far as the FBI could tell, they were dealing with middle and upper income people, whom Brennan considered “credit card revolutionaries.” 

The president would not be persuaded on that point. The American conservative mind had always regarded left-wing dissidence as something external, an alien import, rather than as, say, a consequence of the political right’s own failure to articulate a consistent moral basis for capitalism. Unfathomed was the fact that communist revolutionaries took much of their moral inspiration from ideals like altruism or collectivism, whose roots could be traced to the brother’s-keeper ethics of Christianity. Nor were pacifist movements, or their tendency to turn violent, novel phenomena in American history. New England’s Transcendentalists had been devoutly anti-war until slavery became an issue, whereupon they purchased rifles and ammunition for the abolitionist guerrilla leader John Brown. Once the Civil War broke out, bloody “peace” riots had nearly cost Abraham Lincoln his reelection. But Lyndon Johnson certainly did not see the problem in that kind of historical or intellectual context, and by August 1967, unhappy with Hoover’s “product, ” he was already turning to Central Intelligence. 

PRESIDENTIAL PRESSURE ON antiwar matters created an immediate problem for Richard Helms. Surveillance of domestic dissidence was really the FBI’s duty, even if uncovering their suspected foreign links could be a legitimate CIA job. How, then, could Helms comply with LBJ’s request without encroaching on J. Edgar’s AstroTurf? Very carefully, and probably not even then. Setting aside the whole molehunt fiasco, post McCarthyist cooperation between CIA and FBI on the foreign connections of certain American citizens had been shaky since February 1963, when McCone formally established a Domestic Operations Division (DOD). The stated purpose of the unit was “to exercise centralized responsibility for the direction, support, and coordination of clandestine operational activities of the Clandestine Services conducted within the United States.” Naturally, CIA was careful to stipulate some feared foreign connection to legitimize each domestic operation. The DOD must coordinate action “against foreign targets in response to established operational requirements … Nothing in this instruction shall be construed to vest in DOD responsibility for the conduct of clandestine internal security or counterintelligence operations in the United States.” Though distrustful as ever of CIA’s designs, Hoover had agreed to compromises and “working arrangements, ” such as the February 1966 deal which gave CIA some operational leeway. 

Yet the Agency’s aim seems to have been somewhat imperialistic from the start. According to McCone’s 1963 directive, “The essential relationship of DOD to divisions and staffs parallels that of a foreign field station. The future establishment of subordinate bases is envisioned.” CIA officer Victor Marchetti would recall that, after creation of the DOD, many clandestine officers under Helms continued “to press for additional operational duties in the United States, claiming that the FBI was not sophisticated enough to cope with the KGB.” 

Even before Hoover’s mid-1960s “conversion” to civil libertarianism, there had been a feeling that the FBI was not providing enough support domestically, let alone the right kind. Since the FBI’s statistical reporting procedure measured effectiveness in numbers of prosecutions, Hoover was reluctant to approve certain kinds of investigations, such as the “leaks” of government secrets to the press, which tended to be undertaken less on legal than on political grounds. CIA found that situation unsettling, given its statutory responsibility for protecting intelligence sources and methods, and therefore sometimes put together its own “plumber” units to stop the leaks. In 1959, for instance, a foreign newspaper correspondent and two U.S. writers were the object of CIA telephone taps, which Allen Dulles authorized without consulting the FBI, and two American newspaper reporters were the target of an Agency tap again in 1963. Discovery of such projects inevitably led to FBI criticism of CIA for violating its charter, and to what Marks termed “constant bureaucratic bickering.” But Hoover’s final January 1967 refusal to do bag jobs only increased pressure on CIA to conduct its leak investigations. 

Within a month of that decision, in fact, the Agency had initiated its largest plumbing operation to date, one which would eventually become a “desk” to handle domestic subversive matters for LBJ. When Ramparts magazine, a New Left organ, exposed CIA sponsorship of the liberal but anticommunist National Student Association—yet another domestic incursion which Hoover could not have heartily welcomed—the question arose: Who had blabbed? Were there any links between the Ramparts crowd and hostile intelligence? CIA’s Richard Ober was ordered to find out, and began building computerized files on all individuals and groups, American or otherwise, with Ramparts “connections.” 

Ober was working on that project out of the CI shop, and when Helms’ clandestine-operations chief, Tom Karamessines, asked Angleton on August 15 to find someone to run a new Agency unit for Overseas Coverage of Subversive Student and Related Matters, Angleton chose Ober, who had already keyed in information on several hundred Americans for the Ramparts database. Much as Angleton had once created a Special Investigations Group (SIG) to hunt for Soviet moles, he now created a Special Operations Group (SOG), to search for communist connections to domestic disorder. The SOG would be under Angleton’s CI Staff for rations and quarters, but Ober would run the SOG as Miler ran the SIG—“tightly controlled, and tightly compartmented.” Because CIA was now keeping files on the political activities of certain Americans, there was, as in the case of its continuing mail-openings, a special need for discretion. Angleton himself would not have access to many of Ober’s documents, not even the carbons, and the new unit quickly became known as “the deep snow section.” 

No attempt was made to hide Ober’s function totally from the FBI; the most that could be done was to mask it. “Because of the pressure placed upon Helms, a new desk has been created at the Agency for the explicit purpose of collecting information coming into the Agency and having any significant bearing on possible racial disturbances in the U.S, ” an FBI memo tersely recorded. Technically, coverage of racial disorder was an internal security function, but the president had directly ordered it, and Hoover had to sit still. To reassure the FBI director, Helms had stressed that CIA was only to collect information concerning U.S. racial agitators who might travel abroad, and Karamessines had mandated that Ober feed his findings to “appropriate departments and agencies which have the responsibility domestically, ” which meant mostly the FBI. Not mentioned was Ober’s burgeoning database, or the collection of information on New Left activists—or the fact that, rather than restricting itself to servicing the Bureau’s requests for coverage of American dissidents, CIA had launched its own program, which would operate and report to the president independently of the FBI’s, and compete with it. As Karamessines confided to Angleton, the SOG had “definite domestic counterintelligence aspects.” 

Merging Ober’s preliminary take with tidbits from the HT/LINGUAL mail-openings, Angleton and Miler thought they discerned some patterns suggesting foreign involvement. Some American leftists went to Cuba as part of the so-called Venceremos Brigade and came back as well-trained guerrillas and saboteurs, presumably after being trained by Soviet-bloc intelligence. Other activists flew from New York to Stockholm to Berlin, then disappeared for three weeks, only to come out in Prague. Mail intercepts showed that certain individuals who traveled to Moscow and North Korea were at least keeping Soviet institutions informed of their plans and actions—nothing illegal in that, but it was suggestive. And how could these students or occupational radicals afford to travel so much? Unlike Brennan and other FBI men, who created the concept of “credit card revolutionaries” to cover that contingency, Miler thought there was more to it than bourgeois parental largesse. After all, the FBI thesis could not cover racial radicals, like Julius Lester or Rap Brown or the Black Panthers, and even for the New Left it was demographically and sociologically suspect. How many parents of that generation approved of their children’s activities? How many of them said, “Son, here’s $2,000—grow your hair long, visit Hanoi, and blow up the Pentagon”? Some activists were “red-diaper babies, ” whose parents had gone to New York’s City College and organized garment workers and talked social justice at the breakfast table, but being a professional socialist was not like running Standard Oil. People like Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin or Mark Rudd were not preppy WASPs or trust-fund brats, but working-class Jewish kids from places like Queens, New York. Yet, when they went to Prague for two weeks and stopped over in Paris, they weren’t doing it on bicycles, and they weren’t staying in hostels at $2.00 a night. Whence came the cash?

From Soviet “peace fronts, ” perhaps? Nothing could be demonstrated, of course, without bag jobs on the U.S. offices of such groups, but Angleton’s CI Staff knew from Golitsyn and other defectors that in 1949 the Soviet Politburo had determined to sponsor what it called “the peace movement” in the West, by funding “front” organizations and recruiting agents of influence. Party ideologist Mikhail Suslov had ordered that “Particular attention should be devoted to drawing into the peace movement” both “youth” and “political and public leaders.” And after 1963, it seemed, a large number of young and radical political leaders had been associated with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a Washington based think tank heavily endowed by de-facto Soviet influence agent Samuel Rubin. After emigrating from the USSR in the 1920s, Rubin became a member of the Communist Party of the U.S.A., and despite being a communist, he made a fortune in Faberge, Inc., which he founded in 1936. Rubin sold the lucrative family business in 1963, the same year that IPS was established with his money, and by the mid-1960s the institute had brought together such militants as Stokely Carmichael, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, H. Rap Brown, and many other representatives from SNCC and SDS. When seven black militant groups, including the Panthers, met in December 1966 to form a black-power alliance, they did so at IPS headquarters. Rubin’s daughter, Cora Weiss, led Women Strike for Peace, and had mobilized thousands of women from thirty-five states in a march on the Pentagon on February 15, 1967. When American radicals met with foreign counter-parts in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in September 1967, to coordinate a massive international “day of action” on October 1, IPS fellow Christopher Jencks was there to meet with North Vietnamese and Vietcong representatives. There was no evidence that IPS was serving as a “paymaster” for the Panthers or Yippies, and there would have been nothing illegal about it if it had been. But given the Rubin connection, the pattern of IPS involvement in radical action did seem significant from the CI perspective.

From other viewpoints at CIA, however, it seemed Ober and Angleton had come up with only patterns of suspicion, not conclusive facts. There were no photographs of KGB or Czech intelligence officers handing SDS leaders suitcases of cash, no taped conversations showing radicals to be acting on orders of a foreign power, no “hard evidence” that IPS people who went to Cuba had done anything but cut sugarcane. “Within the Agency itself, there were those who took a very staunch stand that there was no foreign involvement, ” Angleton recalled. “And these were fairly senior individuals, mainly on the overt side of the business. This attitude was very definitely that there was nothing to it; namely, foreign contact.” 

As he had a habit of doing, Helms carefully split the difference. There was no conclusive proof of foreign sponsorship, direction, or control, he reported to President Johnson on November 15, but demonstrations had been “coordinated” by meetings in communist Prague. There might be more to the situation than met the eye, but CIA simply had not been able to cover important angles. In particular, the Agency lacked data on “finances, foreign embassy contacts in the U.S., and campus radicals”— which, as Helms reminded the president, “could only be met by levying requirements on the FBI.” 

Johnson probably did not grasp exactly what Helms was asking. The FBI, which had always had the leading role in monitoring domestic dissent, was used to “levying requirements” on CIA for coverage of radicals—not the other way around. In 1960, Papich had made it standard operating procedure to inform CIA about the overseas travel of American “subversives, ” as a Bureau manual explained, “to place stops [requests for coverage] with appropriate security services abroad to be advised of the activities of these subjects.” Although CIA provided the same kind of information to the FBI for domestic “stops” on suspected foreign agents, such as communist diplomats, there was no precedent for CIA’s asking Hoover: Give us all your files on American student radicals, bug the Black Panthers for us, and, while you’re at it, burglarize IPS. 

But the White House wanted results, not a lesson in bureaucratic delicacies. Badgered by Johnson to work “with” CIA, Hoover finally consented, in July 1968, to service Agency “requirements” in a field which had for thirty-two years been the monopoly of the FBI. Henceforth the Agency was to get all FBI reports on dissidents and their known contacts, and Ober would cross-index them in a special CIA computer system, Hydra. To safeguard the ultra-sensitive fact that CIA was keeping files on the activities of American political activists, Karamessines limited headquarters distribution of such intelligence by creating a special reporting cryptonym, MH/CHAOS. 

It is unclear whether and to what extent the FBI knew about CIA’s work under Chaos, which on a few occasions shaded into outright domestic spying. Tom Charles Huston, who kept an eye on domestic intelligence for the White House, later mused that “Hoover would have had an absolute stroke if he had known that CIA had an Operation Chaos going on.” FBI agent Jay Aldhizer, who worked Black Power cases, later complained: “I never knew that the Agency was involved in domestic programs. Stokely Carmichael—the Bureau was always trying to get information on him, and since he lived in Africa, we expected CIA to give us all kinds of good scoop. But it was probably one of the lowest priorities CIA had, you know? Maybe people above me, at higher levels, knew, and the Agency would keep them posted, but I’ve always held that against the Agency. I always felt like they had a lot of information that they probably never disseminated to the Bureau, that could have helped us with what we were trying to do.” 

Miler and others would insist however, that Ober’s work was known to the Bureau, at least in a general way, and that the problems came not so much over turf as over “how information was handled” at the working levels. “It was like in the Tairova case—that kind of thing, ” Miler said. “Could we rely on X field office? Did they have the manpower to follow up our leads, or would they use too much, and blow the source? So we were careful about what we passed them, and I’m not sure they knew how much data we were collecting.” 

Though the full scope and nature of Chaos was apparently kept hidden from the Bureau, consensus at the Agency was that Ober’s work was a proper counterintelligence function. If there was any “gray area” or unavoidable overlap with FBI work, it was only because one had to consider both the foreign and domestic sides. Miler felt that the problem “pretty fairly graphically illustrated the impossibility of this demarcation between the domestic and the foreign responsibilities. Where do you divide the line? Unless there is real centralization, and very good coordination, between the Bureau and the CIA, you aren’t going to get the kinds of leads and basic information that permit you to follow up. We were supposed to know what Eldridge Cleaver was doing in Algeria. In a logical sense, it seems easy, but it’s complicated, also, by the fact that, in order to go that way, you have to know what’s going on here. How did a Black Panther leader know that he would get sanctuary in Algiers if he fled there, unless he had somebody telling him that here? How did he make those connections, and who was involved? Those ordinarily might have been questions for the FBI. But the idea was that the FBI didn’t know enough.” After all, their work stopped at the border. As Ober put it: “Obviously, if you’re talking about links between the foreign individuals or groups of people in the United States, to understand any link you need some information on either end.” 

Operation Chaos thus led to some unlikely interagency teamings in places like Mexico City, where old CIA hands like Joseph Burkholder Smith were serving out their final days. When Smith arrived in 1969, he found that Chaos work with the Bureau was the first and most frustrating priority of Sam Archer, Mexico Station’s resident CI officer. Precisely because Archer’s information had been collected “jointly with the FBI, ” Smith noted, “more station space was taken up by files than by people … J. Edgar Hoover insisted that all FBI memoranda be written on especially heavy bond paper, thicker than the paper used by any other agency of the U.S. government. Any file containing FBI memos quickly became fuller than any file which didn’t.” And much of what was in the FBI memos, according to Smith, was merely the product of poorly targeted paranoia. The first thing Smith learned was that the initials “ACGM” stood for “American Communist Group in Mexico”; the one thing that seemed to make the ACGM a “group” in the FBI’s view was that all had fled the United States during the McCarthy era. The file of every person identified as ACGM was filled with telephone-tap transcripts, surveillance reports, and informant accounts—but no firm evidence of contacts with communist intelligence. 

Ober believed that better results might be obtained by opening the mail of dissidents in the U.S., rather than tapping the phones of those abroad, and had suggested as much to Papich on January 16, 1969. The Bureau should not overlook Hunter Project, the FBI-CIA mail-opening venture, for “development of leads in the New Left and Black Nationalist fields, ” and the Bureau might wish to consider “placing stops on certain key personalities.” But when Papich dutifully reported Ober’s idea to Hoover, it was killed by cold blue ink: “stops on black extremists not warranted at this time.”

HOOVER’S HESITANCE TO HELP CIA increase dissident coverage coincided with Richard Nixon’s arrival in the White House, and marked a gambit by the FBI director, not only to reclaim his lost role as leading political policeman, but to usurp CIA’s authority abroad by playing the “Nixon card.” Hoover and the president went back a long way, had seen each other socially at least a hundred times—“Shit, Hoover was my crony, ” White House tapes caught Nixon saying—and they still considered themselves old friends, partly because both had been active against suspected communists in the McCarthyist era. Nixon had no such ties with Helms, who was asked to stay on as DCI, but who quickly found himself reporting to the president through National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger or Attorney General John Mitchell. Hoover, however, retained his personal access to Nixon, and used it to convince him that an expansion of FBI jurisdiction was the best way to uncover foreign sponsorship of domestic unrest. 

Like LBJ before him, Nixon suspected that leftist troublemakers “were being aided and abetted, if not actually inspired, by Communist countries, ” as his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, recalled. After only a few days in office, he called in both Helms and Hoover— separately, of course—to push for better coverage. Each blamed his problems largely on the other agency, but Hoover’s case was apparently enhanced because Nixon liked him, and owed him a favor: according to William Sullivan, Nixon had asked Hoover not to investigate Mitchell before his confirmation hearings, as was done with all other attorneys general. 

“By merely making the request of Hoover, ” Sullivan recalled, “Nixon put himself right in the director’s pocket. Never a man to let any advantage go to waste, Hoover used his leverage with Nixon when the president called him over to the White House … to complain about the quality of domestic intelligence being supplied by the FBI. Hoover smoothly changed the subject from domestic to foreign intelligence and sold Nixon on the idea that he should be permitted to expand our international intelligence network. Hoover proposed that Nixon allow the FBI to re-open the overseas offices that had, with some exceptions, been closed or only minimally functional for so many years.” Hoover reportedly told Nixon: “When these offices are fully operational, Mr. President, I will give you better information than the CIA.” Nixon gave the go-ahead, prompting an outburst from presidential counsel John Ehrlichman, who had hoped the president would hire a new FBI director. “That goddamned Hoover! He swung Nixon around!” 

Sullivan likewise thought Hoover had “sold Nixon a bill of goods, ” but Papich and others supported putting Gmen in more embassies—with the understanding that there would be coordination with CIA. He and Angleton agreed that there were a lot of things on certain operations overseas that the FBI could do with locals that were just not right for CIA to be doing. For example, FBI, being law enforcement, could deal with its overseas counterparts, such as Scotland Yard, in getting certain information, or instituting a certain type of an operation, though still coordinating with CI. They could conduct interviews—as FBI agents. As Papich contended, “There was a very important role for FBI overseas.” 

Richard Helms was not so sure. The president assured him that Hoover’s legats would stick strictly to the investigation of crimes, but Helms was not going to abet any further overseas encroachment—even if his own men requested it. When William Colby asked to borrow some G-men for Operation Phoenix, a counterinsurgency program aimed at neutralizing double agents in rural South Vietnam, he was turned down. 

For the better part of a year, the Bureau’s overseas expansion went smoothly, especially in Northern Europe, where experienced CI men like Larry McWilliams were sent to help effect it. As assistant legal attaché in London during the mid-1960s, on leave from the Nosenko furor, McWilliams had worked well with Scotland Yard, and, despite differences of philosophy, had managed to get along well with CIA since his 1950s adventures in Pigeon’s Paradise. In 1970, as Mac moved the FBI into Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, his first step was always to drop in on the local CIA station to broker a “special arrangement.” If he wanted to meet the security chief in Finland, he couldn’t just go up there “cold, ” but would use CIA to set things up. That was the PapichAngleton conception of how things should work, and it was shared by Mac and most everyone else but Hoover. “I don’t think the boss ever knew the system was operating like that, ” McWilliams said. “In fact, I’m positive he never knew, because before I even got over there, I was told, by some higher-ups, ’If you’re working closely with the Agency, make sure that CIA never sends a communication back with a copy for the Bureau. We’re supposed to be striking out on our own.’ So I know that Hoover didn’t know about that dependence on CIA, because he probably would have canceled it.” 

But when obeyed by less imaginative agents in places like the Middle East, Hoover’s demand for FBI “independence” soon caused trouble. “We were making a lot of people angry, ” Sullivan later wrote. “Our men overseas were under instructions from Hoover to send everything straight to him, without clearing it first with the ambassador, the CIA, or the State Department. Two of our men in Israel sent in some incorrect information, and when Hoover unwittingly sent it on to Kissinger and Nixon, the people at the State Department hit the ceiling. A real flap developed, and Nixon finally had to tell Hoover—it couldn’t have been easy—that our agents had to clear their reports through the ambassador and the CIA before sending them on to the United States. That really cramped Hoover’s style. He liked to go around ambassadors, the CIA, military intelligence, and everyone else who stood between the director and the president.” 

By fall 1969, in fact, President Nixon, like Johnson before him, was already beginning to “go around” Hoover to CIA. This time it happened through the graces of Attorney General Mitchell, who was “keeping an eye on intelligence matters and on covert action matters, ” as Helms perceived. Mitchell felt that Hoover was “too timid” about using wiretaps and other “black” techniques against American radicals, and admired Helms’ more aggressive approach. Helms ended up consulting with Mitchell, as the DCI later conceded, “on a variety of problems affecting CIA that an Attorney General would not normally have been privy to.” Mitchell was intensely interested in CIA’s mail-openings, and also liked the work CIA’s Office of Security had been doing in Operation Merrimac, a sister project to Ober’s initial Ramparts inquiry, which used construction workers to gather intelligence on IPS-linked groups who might potentially attack CIA installations. Impressed by Helms’ fighting spirit, Mitchell urged him to expand CIA’s domestic coverage. 

What Mitchell was asking, as asked, was very likely against the law, and Helms told him so. Merrimac could be justified by a need to protect “sources and methods, ” and Chaos by “foreign collection, ” but outright domestic coverage would violate CIA’s charter. Still, the matter kept coming up in the context of feelers—as Helms recounted, “How can we do a better job, isn’t there somebody else that can take on some of these things if the FBI isn’t doing them as well as they should?” Despite Helms’ hinting that flat-out CIA monitoring of U.S. dissent was illegal, and despite the continuing failure of Chaos and Merrimac to prove anything, the White House did not stop pressing. 

Helms was also getting pressure from the working level, as Ober and the CI Staff felt increasingly that they needed more room to work in Hoover’s yard. So by September 1969, Helms approved the development of “new sources” to feed Hydra and Chaos. One was MK/SOURDOUGH, a project to cover mail coming into the San Francisco Bay area from communist China and Vietnam. Technical Services experts flew out from Langley for three-week shifts, and, according to blind notes assembled by one participant in early 1970, the setup yielded “leads for domestic operations (Asian operations) and the FBI.” Sourdough was soon augmented by a dramatic expansion of Chaos collection; the net was cast so wide that virtually all opponents of U.S. policy could be monitored. In October 1969, Ober for the first time “fully tasked” CIA’s Domestic Contact Service (DCS, successor to DOD) to collect intelligence on “black militants; radical youth groups; radical underground press; antiwar groups; and deserter/draft resister movements.” This new thrust produced such silliness as a CIA memo to the FBI listing all contributors to The New York Review of Books, and such seriousness as the burrowing of CIA moles into radical groups inside the United States. 

Where possible, those penetrations were to be attempted with the assistance of the FBI, and one of Sam Papich’s last meaningful actions as liaison officer was to accomplish that smoothly. Of forty potential recruits evaluated by Ober at CIA, roughly half were current or former FBI informants, lured by the romance of a foreign intelligence assignment or in some cases already planning to travel overseas. Eighteen of those FBI referrals were hired, and then, to avoid being “caught out” as secret squares, underwent a “reddening” process. They held “rap” sessions to hone their facility in leftist theory and jargon. Arrangements were made for novice narcotics users to experiment sufficiently with marijuana and LSD. The agents were ordered not to shampoo, shave, or shower for a full week before their infiltration attempts. The Bureau provided questions for the agents’ debriefings, and one of the CIA handlers consistently amazed the Bureau with the amount of data he could pull from the recruits; he was “like a vacuum cleaner.” G-men who liaised with CIA on the project were so impressed that they soon levied requests for the agents to cover domestic targets when they returned from overseas missions. 

Some of CIA’s assets, however, refused to work with the Bureau. Principal among them was one who was described in a CIA memo as having “particularly good entree into the highest levels of the domestic radical community, ” and who thus reported some “extremely personal data.” In the fall of 1969, it was determined that this prize source could not be sent overseas for many months and, in the meantime, would be debriefed for purely domestic information about his associates, “in part because he did not wish to deal with the FBI.” There is some evidence to suggest that this Chaos agent might have been LSD guru Timothy Leary, who was “liberated” in September 1970 from a minimum-security prison in Lompoc, California, by members of the Weather Underground, a new and extremely militant group, and had then found his way to the Algerian headquarters of Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. Later Leary turned state’s evidence against the Weathermen who rescued him, giving a complete account of the escape and naming the “commandos” who took part. In 1966, Leary had had a “bad trip” at the hands of the FBI when then special agent G. Gordon Liddy led a raid on Leary’s “acid estate” in Millbrook, New York, an event which could explain Leary’s reluctance, if he was working with CIA, to cooperate also with the Bureau. 

If Leary was indeed a Chaos agent, his infiltration-by-staged-rescue into the Weather Underground would certainly have made sense, for the Weathermen had become a top-priority counterintelligence target. After October 1968, when IPS wired bail to Weathermen arrested for overturning cars and smashing windows, Angleton staffers saw the group as yet another tentacle of the Samuel Rubin octopus. The September 1969 return of the group’s “queen bee, ” Bernadine Dohrn, from her summer in Cuba had marked the beginning of a violent new phase of protest, which the Weathermen christened “Days of Rage.” In October, they instigated a melee in Chicago; they raked police headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with sniper fire on November 8; they bombed Chicago police cars three weeks before Christmas. At December’s end, a three-day “Wargasm Conference” of four hundred Weathermen was convened in Flint, Michigan, to plan their transformation into a PLO-style terrorist group, complete with guerrilla cells, safehouses, weapons caches, and bomb factories. Dohrn took the stage in a Flint ballroom in brown hot-pants, admonishing her “honky” colleagues to emulate the actions of Charles Manson’s followers, arrested the month before for brutally murdering pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six other purported symbols of establishment life. Dohrn held up three fingers in a Manson “fork salute, ” mimicking the ivory-handled carving fork which had been found by police protruding from the stomach of one Manson victim; this replaced the two-fingered “peace sign” as the revolutionary greeting favored by the group. After three evenings of drug-fueled orgies in the nave of a Flint Catholic church, a select cadre of the most trusted Weathermen set up their first underground action cell —“The Fork”—in a townhouse on 1st Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. But on March 6, 1970, one stoned Weatherman accidentally crossed wires while constructing a bomb he planned to detonate at Fort Dix, New Jersey, during an Army dance. The townhouse was totally destroyed, and three Weathermen were killed, but two others, Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson, escaped.

The townhouse explosion not only dramatized the full menace of the Weather Underground’s intentions, but also demonstrated the inability of the nation’s estranged CI agencies to anticipate the new level of threat, or to track the living suspects. The Bureau had not had any Weathermen under surveillance, and had no penetrations in the group. CIA’s own Chaos agents were still in training at the time, so all that could be done was to hope for a break from FBI. But Bureau clumsiness soon negated an instance of bald luck that could have made the case. When the entire top leadership of the Weathermen, including Dohrn, went to see a movie at a theater just around the corner from the FBI’s New York Field Office, they were spotted by a special agent, who waited till the lights dimmed, then approached one of them and said, “Excuse me, would you please step out into the lobby?” The fugitives, though high on LSD, scattered simultaneously toward different exits, and they all escaped. 

Most galling of all, though, was the Secret Urgent teletype that had gone out from FBI Headquarters just four days before the nth Street blast, breaking Bureau contacts with domestic CIA offices. That did not make it very easy for G-men who “held the tickets” on Boudin, Wilkerson, and other fugitives to swap leads with their opposite numbers at the Agency, who might supply the “Moscow connections” and other foreign-based clues. It was in that desperate, frustrating, violent atmosphere that one of Hoover’s closest deputies now betrayed him, hatching a secret plan to restore FBI-CIA liaison.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN 

THE SULLIVAN PLOT 

HOOVER’S JUDAS WAS William C. Sullivan, the FBI’s assistant director for domestic intelligence. A short man approaching sixty, Sullivan was regarded in the Bureau as something of a character, much as William Harvey once had been. He was one of the Bureau’s few liberal Democrats, and an intellectual in the “nutty professor mode.” His home and office were stacked with books, and Bureau efficiency reports consistently noted that “This agent does not always present a neat appearance.” But his eccentricities were tolerated by Hoover because of his thirst for eighteen-hour days, his gift for brilliant, logical conversation, and his unquestionable loyalty. Hoover called him “the son I never had” until 1971, when Sullivan stood accused of being “more on the side of CIA … than the FBI.” 

Sullivan’s good relations with CIA dated to 1961, when he began representing the FBI on the United States Intelligence Board (USIB), chaired by CIA’s director. Sullivan was impressed by the exchange of ideas, especially compared to what he felt was groupthink in FBI meetings. “Everyone was uninhibited; every man spoke his mind. There was very little back-scratching going on; these were able, intelligent men who had done their homework.” After 1966, Sullivan was much taken with Helms, who had “a great knowledge of intelligence operations but [who] in running the board … always avoided any parochial approach.” By decade’s end Sullivan was smitten also with Angleton, and became CIA’s main point of contact with the Bureau when Papich retired. “After I left, I understand that Sullivan saw Jim a lot more, ” Papich said. “These contacts were not known to Hoover. I don’t know how solidly Bill bought into all of Jim’s doubts, but he saw our vulnerabilities to penetration.” 

Indeed, Sullivan became convinced that the Soviets had placed several moles in the FBI’s New York Field Office. But he had reached that conclusion “more from being persuaded by Angleton than from the FBI, ” according to McWilliams, and Hoover had consequently been of little help in finding the alleged FBI moles. When Sullivan had recommended gradually transferring people out of the espionage section in New York and replacing them with all new men—a shotgun approach that had been used by Helms and Angleton on the supposedly porous CIA Soviet Division—Hoover declined. “Some smart newspaperman is bound to find out that we are transferring people out of the New York Office, ” he told Sullivan. That was an eerily intuitive prediction, for reporters would eventually find out about CIA’s mole transfers, and the Agency’s reputation would be hurt by cries of “Witch-hunt!” Hoover spared the FBI that public relations trauma, but in Sullivan’s view he also ensured that the Bureau would remain insecure. 

Even before the liaison break, Sullivan had outlined the “Hoover problem” in a secret letter to Helms, but Helms felt that there was nothing either of them could do about it as long as Hoover was in control. “Bill, I’m with you, you know that, ” Sullivan would recall Helms as saying. “But as long as Hoover remains in the bureau there’s not a damn thing that I can do, and I don’t think anyone else will back you, either.” 

“Well, I’ll try to do something on my own, ” Sullivan said. 

“You haven’t a chance, ” Helms warned. “But if there’s anything I can do to help without coming out into the open as an opponent to Hoover, I’ll back you.” 

Sullivan had lain low for a while after that, but the explosion of the Weather Underground’s townhouse, just after the liaison break, gave him a pretext for proposing reform. Within hours of the news from New York, he composed a memo to Hoover. 

Noting “CIA criticism which could generate from Agency belief that the Bureau has failed to cooperate and offer necessary assistance in collection of positive intelligence in the United States, ” Sullivan undertook to “briefly comment on policy of cooperation we have adopted with CIA.” Careful not to let his own sympathies show, he cited “CIA belief that more aggressive action should have been taken in field of collecting positive intelligence in the United States, ” which “would mean increased technical surveillance, coverage, development of informants.” Sullivan noted especially a refusal of CIA technical-coverage requests in October 1969; perhaps those requests had concerned the Weathermen, who had been achieving real notoriety then, in the Days of Rage, and who were the prime subject of CI concern on March 6, when Sullivan wrote. Noting that “our policy of cooperation with CIA … calls for guarding our jurisdiction but shows our willingness to cooperate with CIA, ” Sullivan concluded by recommending “that we … forthrightly ask CIA if it is satisfied with the status quo, and if not what do they have to suggest as changes.” 

In essence, Sullivan was trying to broker an interagency meeting of the minds, but by cloaking his proposal as a pre-emptive brief against “CIA criticism, ” he obtained Hoover’s backing. On March 11, Hoover wrote Helms and asked for his views on FBI-CIA relations. 

Helms’ reply was crafty. “Dear Mr. Hoover, ” he wrote, “We endorse your proposal for a reexamination and bespeak your desires as to how this might be conducted [emphasis added].” Helms was smart enough to give credit where it wasn’t due. Since Hoover had asked, however, Helms would raise a few subjects “deserving of your personal consideration, ” such as the question of bugs on domestic targets. 

“For several years your Bureau has been receptive to requirements and leads which resulted in valuable coverage, ” Helms diplomatically lied, softening Hoover for what came next: “On 2 October 1969, two related requests for audio coverage were submitted by this Agency pertaining to positive intelligence targets … Your Bureau replied that henceforth the Agency should refer all such cases directly to the Attorney General for approval. It is suggested that the question of audio coverage be repeated between representatives of your Bureau and this Agency.” The DCI then extended the olive branch of technical assistance (“our most sophisticated equipment … offered you at cost or gratis”) before gingerly raising the subject of the FBI’s ability to collect information on such domestic threats as the Weathermen. 

“I realize that your personnel are now somewhat at a disadvantage in carrying out the evaluating and reporting procedures necessary for the conduct of positive intelligence, ” Helms wrote. In the past, CIA had offered to institute positive-intelligence-training courses, including report writing and analysis, for FBI personnel, and Helms wished “to reiterate our willingness to provide such instruction.” In the same mode, Helms suggested that FBI agents attend CIA seminars on “opposition Services” such as the KGB, “in order to keep abreast of new developments.” The DCI ended by tendering the understatement that “there may be room for improving the quality of liaison.” 

Hoover’s reply fell considerably short of what CIA or Sullivan wanted. The Bureau was eager to continue receiving “certain technical equipment developed by the Agency, ” but “inclusion of positive intelligence courses in our training curricula” would not be “feasible.” As for “New Left and racial extremist matters, ” there was “already a considerable exchange of information between our agencies, ” and the only problem with it, according to Hoover, was that “we are definitely in need of additional information from your Agency as to the foreign aspects of the extremist movement in the United States, including foreign funding in support of local extremist organizations.” Nor was Hoover about to go back to his old ways when it came to “black” techniques, let alone approve any restoration of formal liaison. 

The only concession to Helms—or to Sullivan—was Hoover’s approval of “seminars between specialists of our two agencies in selective areas of interest when justified by specific circumstances.” That was only a tossed bone, but Sullivan retrieved it, and dropped it directly into the lap of a secret ally in the White House. 

SULLIVAN’S COVERT PARTNER IN his plot against Hoover was a slight young man, just twenty-nine, with two-inch sideburns and a penchant for quoting the Federalist Papers. Tom Charles Huston had been a leader of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, a U.S. Army captain assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency, then a part-time volunteer for Nixon’s 1968 campaign before joining the president’s speechwriting-and-research staff under Pat Buchanan. On June 5, 1969, presidential counsel John Ehrlichman had asked Huston to report on foreign financing of revolutionary protest activity, choosing him for essentially the same reason that one might choose a black to examine racial problems. Huston was interested in the subject and, being under thirty and slightly “hip, ” presumably knew more about “the radical scene” than anyone else in the administration. 

It was in that context that Huston had first come into contact with Sullivan, on June 19, in the Executive Office Building. “President Nixon has designated me to look into the entire intelligence operation in this country, to see whether we can improve it, ” Huston said. As Sullivan later told it, Huston ran down a list of student riots that had “caught the FBI completely by surprise, ” and chastised the Bureau for “lack of cooperation with other intelligence agencies, which was jeopardizing national security.” Since Sullivan was as dissatisfied with Hoover’s performance as Huston was, he assured the younger man that he would have his cooperation in pressuring Hoover to improve. 

Sullivan assumed the role of mentor in what followed. One day after meeting Sullivan, Huston sent all U.S. intelligence agencies a memo on White House letterhead which clearly echoed the “Sullivan line, ” asking what gaps might exist “because of either inadequate resources or a low priority of attention.” Sullivan later said that “Hoover hit the roof” when he read Huston’s memo, and this set back the Sullivan-Huston initiative by about a year, but the two men kept in contact by phone, and often lunched together. Huston came increasingly under Sullivan’s spell—“I do not think there was anyone in the government who I respected more than Mr. Sullivan”— and the young White House intellectual soon developed a theory on domestic dissent that reflected Sullivan’s interest in the history of communism. Sullivan pointed out that Russia’s revolt against the czars had really begun with a general university strike in 1899, which was soon co-opted by radicals. Student bodies and faculties became politicized, and Bolsheviks shrewdly incited acts which would bring repression, knowing that this, in turn would radicalize moderate dissidents. After two hundred demonstrators were killed in the “Bloody Sunday” of January 1905, Russian campuses were closed, and the country turned forever against its established form of rule. Sullivan thought communist dialecticians and campus radicals were now similarly hoping for “a [U.S.] police state that could be brought on by law-and-order overcorrection, ” which would turn the American public against its leaders.

Such a complex and subtle scenario could only be “preemptively resisted, ” Sullivan led Huston to believe, if the White House were to put liberal intelligence professionals, as opposed to conservative law enforcement types, in charge of a secret counteroffensive. CIA should assume the leading role; the FBI “had neither the manpower nor the minds to do it.” At the very least, failing such radical surgery, “the quality of data on domestic radicals could be vastly improved by increased FBI-CIA cooperation.” The younger man listened ruefully as Sullivan recounted how, on “hundreds of occasions, ” Hoover arbitrarily denied CIA coverage requests in such language as “Screw the CIA—let them do their own work!” It was with Huston’s backing, then, that Sullivan wrote Hoover about FBI-CIA relations on March 6, 1970, and then intrigued to parlay the FBI director’s single concession—approval of “meetings between CIA and Bureau representatives”—into a restoration of liaison. 

Sullivan began by lining up support for his plan at CIA, asking Angleton for what amounted to a shopping list of items for Huston to take to the president. Not wanting to diffuse presidential attention, Angleton cited only two areas for improvement. The first was electronic surveillance, which CIA needed for coverage on subversives and suspected moles. The second was a resumption of regular personal liaison, even if only in the form of “periodic seminars to coordinate our information.” Those were just the issues that Huston hand-carried to Nixon on April 22, in what was to be Huston’s only meeting alone with the president. After White House photographers lurched in for the obligatory handshake-shot, Huston had exactly ten minutes to make his pitch. The only way to restore CIA-FBI liaison and to get Hoover to resume warrantless coverages, Huston said, was for the president himself to give a “hot foot” to the FBI director. That could by done by forcing a series of sitdowns between CIA and FBI officials, such as Hoover himself had reluctantly authorized in his letter to Helms— with the difference that the president himself would chair the first meeting, and a White House representative would oversee subsequent sessions, until agreement was reached. 

Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, would recall that “this recommendation fell on predictably fertile soil when it reached the President, ” for “Huston was saying exactly what Nixon was thinking.” It was agreed that Nixon should meet as soon as possible with intelligence community leaders regarding “gaps” in coverage, and that Huston himself would convene regular interagency meetings for “liaison with FBI and CIA on domestic violence, if they wouldn’t liaison with each other.” For symbolism, other agencies would be brought into the process, and Nixon would name Hoover “chairman” of the overall effort. For substance, William Sullivan would be in charge of any working-level groups, and would supply a two-page “talking paper” for the president to use in briefing the IC chiefs. 

The plan was to have been put into effect in May, but Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia on April 29 disrupted the entire White House schedule, delaying the Huston/Sullivan initiative another month. In the meantime, four student protesters were shot to death at Kent State, echoing Russia’s Bloody Sunday, and the shutdown of campuses that spring also followed the Russian pattern. A series of meetings to coordinate and revivify domestic intelligence therefore “became even more important, ” as Huston later said. Haldeman reflected that “Kent State … marked a turning point for Nixon, ” a junction on the way toward Watergate, and the president’s meeting with his intelligence chiefs on June 5 was among the earliest in a series of interlinked episodes—almost all of them involving FBI-CIA relations—which would eventually drive Nixon from office. 

“THE PRESIDENT CHEWED OUR BUTTS,” one participant remembered. The June 5 session lasted less than an hour, but Nixon presented a stern, angry front to Hoover, Helms, and Directors Noel Gayler and Donald Bennett of the National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency. Huston was seated near the president, while Haldeman and Ehrichman lurked on the sidelines. Nixon announced that he was forming a “special committee to study intelligence gaps, how to close them, and to enhance interagency coordination.” He paused and looked deliberately at Hoover, then at Helms. 

“Are you people getting along, working well together?” 

Hoover frowned. “Well yes, we’re doing very well.” 

Helms, caught off balance, was unprepared to challenge or contradict. He murmured his agreement. 

Huston felt a sinking in his chest. Looking back years later, he saw such deception and bureaucratic timidity as emblematic of the difficulties he faced. For the moment, though, he took solace in the president’s flat declaration that Hoover would chair a new Interagency Committee on Intelligence (ICI), and tried not to blush as the president announced to the much older men around the table that “this very capable young man, ” Tom Charles Huston, would monitor all meetings, to ensure “the scope of the review which I have in mind.” 

But Huston was merely a screen for his mentor, and the ICI would fold or flourish as Sullivan’s show. The assistant FBI director was put in charge of the ICI staff, and his first move was to schedule a “planning session” in Hoover’s office the following Monday. Hoover went through the motions of compliance, convening his fellow intelligence directors at the Bureau to plan the writing of a special report to the President, which Nixon wanted on his desk by June 25. The FBI director stressed that the president was unhappy with intelligence on domestic dissent, and admitted that he, Hoover, was himself worried about possible dissident links to Cuba, China, and Iron Curtain countries. No wonder the president wanted “a historical study made of intelligence operations in the United States and the present security problems of the country.” Hoover hoped that the ICI would be able to satisfy the White House in this, and he asked the other directors if they had anything to add. 

None did. Huston, seated on Hoover’s left, cleared his throat. 

“I didn’t hear the president say that we should prepare a historical document, ” Huston said. “I understood President Nixon to say that he was dissatisfied with present-day operations and what the president really wants to know is what the present-day problems are in the security and intelligence fields. Further, the president wants to know to what extent they are being solved and what we can do to elevate the quality of our intelligence operations.” 

There was a long, long stretch of quiet. Then Gayler said, “Yes, Mr. Hoover, that was also my understanding.” Bennett and Helms backed Huston as well. 

Hoover “became crimson, ” according to Sullivan, to whom the director now turned. “Well, you’re the one in charge of the working committee. Go ahead—do a study and prepare a report.” He then asked the other directors to assign staffers to the project, and abruptly adjourned the meeting. As the intelligence chiefs filed out, Hoover muttered that Huston was a “hippie intellectual.” Sullivan recalled that “From that moment on, Hoover hated Huston. He never called him by his right name, and in our conversations he never referred to him by any other name except that ‘hippie.’” 

For the moment it did not matter what Hoover thought of Huston, because Sullivan would be running the meetings from now on. The very next day, he chaired the first of four ICI “drafting discussions” at Langley. Huston carpooled out there with the FBI contingent—Sullivan, Don Moore, and William Cregar, who had been Sam Papich’s assistant during the final days of liaison, and who was favored to succeed Papich if the position were ever restored. Sullivan understood the importance of a continuing White House imprimatur, so he let his mouthpiece, Huston, lead the discussion. With Sullivan’s nodded approval, Huston tasked the FBI to prepare a report on the possible “domestic” improvements, CIA on the “foreign.” 

Angleton, wreathed as usual in a blue haze of cigarette smoke, monitored the proceedings with considerable interest. For someone so inexperienced, Huston was extremely aware of the gaps in CI coverage. Angleton realized that Sullivan and Huston had become close over the past year, and he knew what Sullivan’s concerns were in terms of gaps. Huston certainly reflected those concerns. Angleton also knew that Sullivan didn’t usually waste his time, and wouldn’t be putting them through all this unless there was an excellent chance something could come of it. The key was the White House role. Huston’s letter from the president seemed a clear-cut edict, declaring him the ultimate authority for domestic security in the Executive Branch. But could this young man ride herd over Hoover? 

Angleton was at least prepared to let him try. The CI chief had “enormous respect” for Hoover, as he later said, and “understood the problems he had in sustaining the reputation of the FBI, ” but recentralizing the CI community must take precedence over parochial concerns. Angleton was ready to “practically drop everything” he was doing, as he later said, to resolve “conflicts [that] had grown specifically between the CIA and the FBI.” 

Helms, however, was wary of the unlit way before them. “I thought, since the president was so forcefully behind it, since he called the meeting to start it off, the improvements would probably come into being. But I didn’t want to mix in domestic politics or law enforcement; that was somebody else’s job.” Helms made only a brief appearance as “host” for the first planning meeting, since it was being held in his headquarters, and then, as Angleton noted, “took off.” He would not attend any more working meetings, but Angleton would keep him current as the ICI prepared its report to the president. 

A preliminary report, authored by Sullivan on June 17, proposed a Permanent Interagency Committee to force FBI and CIA to work together. Huston thought that was “the most important recommendation” that could be made to the White House, but the draft also recommended the development of more “campus sources” (not specifying whether by FBI or CIA), and the resumption of warrantless surveillance. For tactical purposes, Sullivan would first submit the draft to Gayler, Bennett, and Helms, and only then to Hoover, saying, “This report has already been approved by the other three Directors.” Consensus was that Sullivan had a good strategy, and the other agencies would play along. No one suspected that, the very next day, Sullivan would betray them all, disavowing his own report and realigning with Hoover. 

ON THE EVENING OF JUNE 18, Sullivan learned that he would be promoted to number-three man at the Bureau, to replace the retiring Deke DeLoach. That put Sullivan in “pole position” for the directorship after Hoover—and offered an alternate route for realization of the Sullivan-Huston plan. Sullivan apparently calculated that he had more to gain by advancing his career, at the temporary expense of his plan, than by advancing the plan at possible long-term expense to his career. He had been playing a double game with Hoover, but now he tripled back. 

“It is clear that there could be problems involved for the Bureau, ” Sullivan wrote Hoover the next day, passing along a copy of the “Huston” plan he had previously promised to hide from his boss. Hoover’s new number three opposed “the relaxation of investigative restraints which affect the Bureau, ” and even attacked the existence of the ICI and its mandate to improve coordination: “I do not agree with the scope of this proposed committee nor do I feel an effort should be made at this time to engage in any combined preparations of intelligence estimates.” Within hours, Hoover called in Sullivan, thanked him for the heads-up, and scowled: “That hippie is behind this. Well, they’re not going to put the responsibility for these programs on me.” The FBI director was not merely opposed to a resumption of “black” coverage. According to Sullivan, “The provisions for better interagency coordination were anathema to him; he believed that he and the FBI operated best independently and unilaterally.” As Hoover put it, “We’ve got enough damned coordination in government now, too much in fact!” 

This sudden opposition to the ICI’s work, even if secretly engineered by Sullivan, did pose something of a problem for him. His working sub-committee was supposed to produce a “final report” for signing just five days hence, and if one was not ready by then, Sullivan would have to take the blame. So he asked Hoover: why not just add footnotes to the ICI report, stating the Bureau’s objections? Such a policy was allowed by the USIB, on which Sullivan sat. Hoover consented, and Sullivan had a secretary completely redo the draft before the fourth and final working meeting at Langley. 

When the “final draft” of the report was distributed at the ICI’s meeting, the other intelligence directors got all stirred up. If Hoover could add footnotes, why couldn’t they? Huston pleaded that with only one day left before the official signing of the report, there was no time for additional changes. Helms acquiesced, knowing that there was no fighting both Hoover and the White House deadline, but Gayler and Bennett remained “mad as the dickens.” Huston asked them to “live with” the situation until he could cover their concerns in a memo to the president. 

Admiral Gayler expressed his contempt by arriving five minutes late for the three o’clock signing ceremony on June 25. The other directors and their aides were already seated at the long rectangular conference table in the FBI director’s ceremonial outer office. Hoover greeted him by saying, “We hope this is not characteristic of the Navy.” Gayler merely glowered at him. 

After praising the participants for their “cooperative spirit, ” Hoover began reading page one of the report aloud. 

“We couldn’t believe what we were hearing, ” remembered Sullivan, who had promised everyone that the meeting would take only ten to fifteen minutes: these were busy men with full schedules, and how long could it take to sign a piece of paper? But, whether from senility or spite, Hoover was reading the entire report, all forty three pages of it, as if it were a speech. At the end of every page, he would look up and query each of his chiefs, ostensibly giving them a chance to add any footnotes they wished. “Mr. Helms, do you have anything to add on page one?” he’d ask, and when Helms did not, he went on to Admiral Gayler, General Bennett, the others, and finally to “Mr. Hutchinson, ” or one of the half-dozen other names he used for Huston. Helms, sitting to Hoover’s right, casually leaned back in his chair and winked behind the director’s back at Huston, who was praying they’d get through the whole thing without anyone speaking out about Hoover’s footnotes. But Admiral Gayler was practically biting through his lip, and he looked as if he was about to snap. Finally, he did. So did General Bennett. Hoover’s dissenting footnotes, they protested, had essentially torpedoed the whole ICI process, which was supposed to bring agreement on various points of contention. 

Hoover appeared to have trouble swallowing. He was obviously stunned that these men had dared raise critical objections during what was supposed to be a pro-forma reading. Huston looked toward Helms, who tried to smooth the waters by referring to the “special burdens of the FBI.” Hoover remained visibly upset, however, and quickly skimmed through the rest of the pages. Despite objections to the FBI footnotes, everyone signed the report, and Nixon’s deadline was met. Hoover reminded the rival chiefs to have all working papers destroyed, and ended the meeting. In all, it had taken an hour and a half. 

Huston put the signed copy of the report into his briefcase, carried it back up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, and prepared a covering memo for Haldeman, who managed the presidential paper-flow. Trying to capture “the real result and attitude of the committee, ” Huston characterized Helms as “most cooperative and helpful, ” Hoover as a “stumbling block.” Should the president adopt the ICI’s recommendations, Huston recommended a face-to-face “stroking session” with Hoover, in which Nixon would explain that he was “counting on Edgar’s cooperation.” That was the only way of winning cooperation from a man who was “getting old and worried about his legend, ” and who was, quite simply, “bullheaded as hell.”

Three weeks later, on July 14, Haldeman told Huston the president had “approved” all the recommendations, including an Intelligence Evaluation Committee to recoordinate foreign and domestic intelligence, and the lifting of FBI coverage restrictions which had been impeding molehunt and antiwar projects. Huston got nothing in writing, however. Ascribing that lack to a need to preserve presidential “deniability” concerning such matters as warrantless coverage, he prepared his own memo, noting Nixon’s approval, and sent it to the intelligence chiefs. But the bureaucratically seasoned chiefs equated Nixon’s failure to offer written authorization as a lack of support, and joked about Huston’s signature on the plan. “They passed that one down about as low as it could go, ” remarked Bennett’s assistant, James Stilwell. Nixon and Haldeman “didn’t have the guts” to sign it themselves, and the use of Huston as a possible scapegoat indicated “what a hot potato it was.” Indeed, even without Nixon’s signature, presidential approval of certain terms in Sullivan’s attempted CIA-FBI truce would later constitute article II of the House Judiciary Committee’s 1974 Articles of Impeachment. 

But if Nixon erred by orally approving the Sullivan Plan, he compounded his mistake by not agreeing to Huston’s proposed “stroking session” with Hoover. According to Sullivan, Hoover “had yet another eruption” after reading Huston’s approval memo; no hippie intellectual was going to order him around in the name of the president. He stormed straight into the office of Attorney General Mitchell, restating his objections to both warrantless coverage and permanent interagency coordination. At first Mitchell didn’t know what Hoover was talking about, because, on Sullivan’s urging, Huston had left him out of the ICI process. After Hoover filled him in, he was angry about being bypassed. Two days later, Mitchell met with Nixon and suggested that the ICI recommendations, “in toto, ” were not the kind of thing the president should put his name to—especially when the FBI director was so staunchly against it. If the White House tried to “buck Edgar, ” the FBI could always have the Huston recommendations leaked, which at the least would bring the enterprise to a sudden halt, and at most could land the White House in serious legal trouble. 

Nixon agreed. That afternoon, Huston got a call from Haldeman, saying that the president had decided to “revoke” the approval memo and “reconsider” its recommendations. “In terms of lack of any coordination among the intelligence agencies, ” a dejected Huston told Sullivan, they were “back to ground zero.” Within a few weeks, Huston was officially demoted to a “floater” position. He kept in contact with Sullivan and other CI friends via a special scrambler phone concealed in his office safe, and tried to remain their White House advocate on issues of “interagency” concern; on September 10, he wrote Haldeman on the need for “improved intelligence community coordination” against air hijacking—referring to Hoover, predictably enough, as “the chief obstacle.” But Huston was disenchanted with his own diminished role at the White House, and with Sullivan’s continuing inability to fix FBI-CIA liaison; he soon quit government for a private law practice. Like so many idealistic young intellectuals who had come to Washington, Huston had found that there was nothing so powerless as an idea whose time the bureaucrats would not let come. 

• 😠• 😠•😠 

THE FAILURE OF Sullivan’s plot caused a groundswell of sentiment, even within the FBI itself, for Hoover’s removal. His own men increasingly complained to one another, after hours, that Hoover was simply too old and out of touch. “The boss was just surrounded with a number of sycophants, and a lot of them were as old as he was, ” McWilliams remembered. “His secretary, Helen Gandy, must have been about seventy-four; Tolson, well into his seventies, was three-quarters dead. We were run by a geriatric society. Hoover was a damned recluse, the average guy never really saw him, and for all we knew the man was taking a nap in the afternoon.” 

Hoover’s old friend President Nixon was losing patience. Helms heard that Nixon “really wanted to get rid of Mr. Hoover, and was wondering how to get rid of him.” White House sources confidentially told Helms that Nixon “did not feel that Mr. Hoover was doing a very good job of getting a hold on dissent in the country— principally, dissent on the Vietnamese War, and how much of it was foreign-inspired.” Haldeman later corroborated the rumors that reached Helms. “As far as [President Nixon] was concerned, the FBI was a failure; it hadn’t found Communist backing for the antiwar organizations which he was sure was there. And Hoover had cut off FBI liaison with the CIA … The jealousies among various intelligence agencies were working at a white-hot pitch.” An exasperated Nixon complained to his chief of staff: “Those guys spend all their time fighting each other.” 

Shortly after the collapse of the Sullivan Plan, Mitchell had approached Deke DeLoach, then working for PepsiCo, to see “what would be the best way to get rid of Mr. Hoover.” DeLoach was astonished that such an act would even be contemplated, but thought to himself: If they’re going to do it anyhow, let’s try to work something out so the boss can leave in grace. He suggested that Nixon make Hoover director emeritus, let him keep a small office and his secretary, because he didn’t know how to order groceries or handle correspondence, and also his bulletproof Cadillac and driver, because the boss didn’t know how to drive. “Let the President do it, not you, ” DeLoach recommended, “and call upon him for consultation every once in a while on matters of espionage or organized crime.” Mitchell said, “Good idea, I’ll do it.” 

Two weeks later, DeLoach heard that Nixon had invited the director for breakfast and told him exactly what DeLoach suggested, but that Hoover “kept right on talking, ” as if he hadn’t heard what the president said. Mitchell confided that Nixon didn’t have “guts enough” to tell Hoover he wanted a new director. The story went around that Nixon had said, “I wanted to see you to discuss with you the issue of retirement, ” prompting a shocked Hoover to reply, “Why, that’s ridiculous. You’re still a young man.” 

CLEARLY THERE WAS NO getting rid of Hoover, but the White House was still determined to find a path around him. Huston himself had hinted as much when the Sullivan Plan was withdrawn. “He seemed to exude the attitude, ‘What the White House wanted, the White House would get, ’” a Navy observer at the Huston proceedings recalled. “If Hoover didn’t want to play, it would be played some other way.” 

Reanimating the Sullivan Plan became a running project among the president’s men, and the onus fell on presidential counsel John Dean. A sharp young California lawyer who had worked under Mitchell at Justice, Dean had the political savvy Huston lacked. He did not possess the counterintelligence knowledge Huston had garnered through tutorials with Sullivan, but in late August 1970 CIA gave him a security clearance so he could see a copy of the Sullivan proposal. Two Office of Security men made him promise to keep the document locked in a combination safe, to move it only in the company of a CIA guard, and to avoid talking into lamps, flowerpots, or paintings in any foreign hotel. Dean agreed, and was handed a sheaf of papers labeled “Top Secret/Handle Via COMINT Channels Only.” 

“You’ve got to be kidding, ” Dean laughed to Haldeman after he read the plan. “This sounds like something the people on ‘Mission Impossible’ would dream up.” When Haldeman solemnly asked Dean to see what he could do to implement the plan, Dean suddenly realized that “These were the hottest papers I had ever touched.” They called for removal of legal restraints on wiretaps, mail intercepts, and burglaries, as well as a legally dubious expansion of CIA coverage. Dean hesitated to mix in such matters, so he stalled for a few weeks until Mitchell assured him that “the President loves all this stuff.” The hint was obvious: Dean had to take some action on the plan. But what could anyone do, Dean asked, if Hoover was so set against it? 

Mitchell had an idea, though probably it was not his own. He had just ate that day with Helms at Langley, to discuss the “possibility of improved interagency coordination.” If an Intelligence Evaluation Committee (IEC) could be brought into being, as the Sullivan Plan proposed, it might become a forum for the continued pursuit of other objectives. Mitchell therefore approved putting the IEC under the Justice Department, so the Bureau could be forced to join. Similarly, to gain Hoover’s confidence, the IEC would operate “within the FBI, ” being staffed by G-men and chaired by the Bureau’s director, though he could easily be outvoted. 

Hoover could smell a setup. He declined to chair the group, and did his best, or his worst, to delay the IEC’s debut until December 3, 1970. Under the direction of Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian, the IEC would aim, as Mardian later stated, “to increase formal liaison among the intelligence agencies, since Hoover had broken it off the previous summer.” Most of the participants were old “Huston Plan” hands. As experienced CI men, they were soon disillusioned with the new group. Neither its creator, Dean, nor its leader, Mardian, had the foggiest conception of counterintelligence, and the IEC itself had no operational powers or resources, no leverage to implement the additional Huston recommendations, and therefore could put no “bite” into the eighty-five staff reports and “intelligence calendars” it sent to Dean at the White House. 

Dean’s failure to improve interagency cooperation, or to loosen legal restraints, caused counterintelligence professionals to cast about for alternative solutions, including the possibility that Sam Papich might once again work his magic. After “doing nothing” for a few months, Papich had become a consultant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, helping assemble a “bible” on strategic deception, and then moved to the consulting staff of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), a part-time civilian body intended as an independent White House watchdog. “That was great, because I had access to everything the board was getting from all the agencies, ” Papich said. “So I had some role in continuing developments in the whole area of counterintelligence, both FBI and CIA.” Speaking with the authority of a two-decade liaison officer, Papich effectively represented the Agency’s need for closer cooperation with the Bureau, especially in the area of electronic coverage. The board was persuaded to the point where it met with Mitchell and challenged him to do what other attorneys general had done—namely, authorize warrantless work. Mitchell promised to prepare a memo authorizing a return to previous policies, but eventually just sent the board a sheet of paper indicating, as Papich recalled, “that in no way did he agree to do anything that involved sticking his neck out. So the problem was still there.” 

BY SUMMER 1971, impatient for better coverage on antiwar matters, the White House was quietly encouraging CIA and FBI to encroach on each other’s turf. Helms complied by continuing with Chaos, which was still kept hidden from Hoover. Hoover complied by resuming his overseas expansion, which was to be concealed from Helms. When asked by Secretary of State William P. Rogers if Helms knew about the planned expansion, Hoover told him, according to his own memo of the conversation, “that he did not, and I did not believe the President was desirous for him to know … I assume he [the president] did not notify the CIA and certainly we have not.” 

But William Sullivan knew about the FBI’s proposed enlargement, and he took up CIA’s role in objecting to it. On June 8, Sullivan commented on a Bureau planning memo that “more is not better” when it came to FBI overseas work, although, “by juggling statistics, you can prove almost anything.” A Hoover loyalist duly reported to the FBI director, “Mr. Sullivan apparently does not realize that this is being considered at the specific request of the White House … Accordingly, I recommend that Sullivan’s observations be disregarded at this time.” 

Sullivan’s remarks were indeed ignored, but his insubordination was not, and the matter came to confrontation in fall 1971, when news of the expansion somehow reached columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, who attacked Hoover for trespassing into CIA’s domain. “The arguments advanced and the language used were exactly the same as Sullivan had used within the Bureau, ” FBI Assistant Director Felt recalled, and Sullivan later admitted leaking the story. Some at the Bureau speculated that Sullivan was opposing Hoover perhaps because he knew that his friends in CIA, who resented what they considered FBI incursions into their jurisdiction, would be pleased by his position. In a “Strictly Confidential Memo for the Director’s Personal Files, ” Hoover assistant R. R. Beaver warned: “It appears more definite to me that he [Sullivan] is more on the side of CIA … than the FBI.” 

Some thought that Sullivan’s stand on the overseas expansion merely served as a pretext for Hoover to attack his deputy for other supposed transgressions, especially his involvement in the Huston process. James Nolan believed Hoover might have recognized the Huston Plan “as a Bill Sullivan thing, ” and Felt, too, thought it “more than possible that Hoover, because of the intrigue of the efforts on imposing the Huston Plan, had been informed by Tolson of what Sullivan was up to—and he may have decided to use this [overseas-expansion] incident to clamp down hard on a rampaging subordinate.” Then again, maybe it was sin enough simply to be identified as “more on the side of CIA”; according to Sullivan, Hoover had “falsely accused me of writing the two fine letters which Sam J. Papich … had written trying to prevent [Hoover] from further damaging the Bureau.” Perhaps, too, Hoover had heard rumors, as had Felt, that Sullivan “would be the new Director within a few months, placed on the throne by friends in the White House.” In any case, Sullivan arrived at his office on the morning of October 1 to find that he had been locked out. 

Sullivan’s parting shot, as Sam Papich’s had been, was an appeal for closer work with CIA. “I never wrote [Papich’s protest] letters but I would have been proud to have done so, ” Sullivan told Hoover in his official letter of resignation, dated October 6. “Had you listened to Mr. Papich, one of the finest and most able men this Bureau ever had, we would not be in the horrible condition we are in today and there would have been no need of my writing this letter to you. Like myself, Mr. Papich was most fond of the Bureau but he saw it was deteriorating and tried to prevent it. After the reception his two fine letters received he knew the cause was hopeless and retired. Perhaps I should have done the same thing at the time but I still clung to the hope that changes could be brought about orderly and quietly….” Now, however, Sullivan saw things as they really were: “You want the FBI to have as little to do jointly as possible with other members of the community. It is suggested that this be changed. We should pool our assets in behalf of national security. You have always been hostile toward CIA despite the usual polite exchange of letters. We should work very closely together in every respect, pool assets, work cases jointly where facts warrant, etc. Breaking liaison with CIA was not rational.” 

But Hoover was unaffected by such arguments, and was unruffled when they were echoed four days later by reporter Robert M. Smith, in a lead story on the front page of The New York Times.: 

FBI IS SAID TO HAVE CUT DIRECT LIAISON WITH CIA Hoover Move in Quarrel 1½ Years Ago Causes Concern Among Intelligence Officials About Coping With Spies. The information was attributed to “authoritative sources, ” but Sullivan’s hand was transparent to those who had worked with him. “To offset some of the danger” posed by the breakdown of liaison, Smith wrote, “officials of the FBI and CIA have held private meetings, unknown to Mr. Hoover, at which they exchanged information…. The suspension of direct contact is one of the factors prompting leading members of the intelligence community to feel that Mr. Hoover must be deposed as Director of the FBI…. They fear the 76-year-old Director will do nothing to repair the breakdown in liaison between the two agencies and will try to remain as long as he can at the post he has held for 46 years.”

Asked if it was true that the Bureau had broken direct liaison with CIA, an FBI spokesman told Smith, “It is not true.” He added, “The FBI has always maintained liaison with CIA, and it is very close and effective liaison.” 

When asked the same question, CIA had no comment. 

THREE MONTHS BEFORE Sullivan’s final dramatic exit, his “failure to bring Hoover into line” had already, as Sullivan later realized, “forced the White House to forget about the FBI and look elsewhere for men to do the kind of investigative work Nixon, Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean, and the others felt was necessary.” As the Sullivan plot was catalyzed by the Weatherman townhouse explosion, so the new approach was triggered by an event with which the CI community seemed unequipped to deal—viz., the June 1971 report from Hoover’s pet KGB source at the United Nations, Aleksei Isidorovich Kulak (Fedora), that a sheaf of Defense Department documents had been delivered to the Soviet Embassy in Washington. The White House had not been too concerned when those same “Pentagon Papers, ” which chronicled America’s Vietnam buildup, had been leaked to The New York Times on June 13 by former Rand Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg. But the notion that a “complete set” had been passed to the KGB rattled Nixon and Henry Kissinger. 

Though CIA officers such as Angleton, accepting the Golitsyn thesis, believed that Fedora was a disinformant, Hoover had passed his tip to the White House as intelligence “from a source who has proved reliable in the past.” That caused Kissinger to wonder whether Ellsberg, who had lectured at Kissinger’s Defense Policy Seminars at Harvard in the mid-1960s, might be a Soviet agent. “Henry had a problem because Ellsberg had been one of his ‘boys, ’” Haldeman recalled. “Ellsberg, according to Henry, had weird sexual habits, used drugs, and enjoyed helicopter flights in which he would take potshots at the Vietnamese below.” Ellsberg had also undergone a mysterious transformation from hawk to dove and, by leaking the Pentagon Papers to the press, and possibly by carrying them to the Soviets, had undermined Kissinger’s secret efforts to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War on terms favorable to the U.S.—or so Kissinger told the USIB. 

Sullivan, who was then still three months from his final confrontation with Hoover, would recall that “the USIB unanimously requested the FBI to investigate the case.” Unanimously, that is, except for the FBI. Sullivan realized sadly “that not one among this prestigious board comprised of brilliant men, including Helms, could take a stand against Hoover and say, ‘Look here, you’re responsible for intelligence investigations within the United States. You are responsible. Now get off your ass and do it.’” Helms had tried to get Hoover “off his ass” by personally meeting with him in spring 1971, and Dean had attempted to do it through the IEC, as had Sullivan himself, but all had been beaten. Even the White House had backed off him, after the Huston process. Indeed, it was the “failure to implement the Huston Plan, ” as Haldeman recalled, that “set the stage for the drama surrounding the release of the Pentagon Papers. By this time, Nixon had given up on the FBI and CIA for any real help…. But he was still determined something had to be done.” 

What the White House did was to set up under Ehrlichman a “Special Investigations Unit, ” which came to be known as the Plumbers, because its first assignment was to fix the Pentagon Papers leak. Appropriately enough, for a unit which was to investigate the foreign connections of domestic dissidents, such as Ellsberg, its key operatives were former CIA and FBI men. George Gordon Liddy had been named for Lord Byron, and had a relationship to reality that was grimly adventurous; he would hold his hand over an open flame to intimidate colleagues, and in the FBI had sometimes acted erratically, deflating the car tires of citizens who did not cooperate in Bureau probes. Edward Howard Hunt was regarded as “a bit of a romantic” by Helms, who had allowed him to write an “American James Bond” series, but Hunt had been case officer to many Miami Cubans during the Bay of Pigs period, and his ongoing contacts with the Cubans would be vital to the Plumbers’ work. James McCord, an electronic-surveillance specialist, had incurred Hoover’s wrath by leaving the FBI for CIA’s Office of Security in 1951; he had been assigned to protect Yuri Nosenko before retiring from CIA in August 1970, just after the collapse of the Huston-Sullivan Plan. By the time McCord joined Hunt and Liddy, the Plumbers were doing some of the black-bag operations that Hoover had refused to do, while relying on CIA for certain kinds of “assistance.” In July 1971, Liddy received from CIA a 9mm parabellum pistol and false documentation; Hunt obtained from the Agency a miniature camera and tape recorder, which could be concealed in his tobacco pouch, as well as a red wig and a speech-altering device. On August 26, Hunt delivered some film to Langley, where it was developed; one picture showed Liddy standing in front of the decimated files of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. 

The next day, a shocked Helms ordered CIA to cut all contacts with Hunt, who seemed to be crossing over a line. Although Ehrlichman promised to restrain him, Helms staunchly refused to provide any further “rations and quarters” for the freelance White House spies, and a few months later, after failing to prove that Ellsberg was a Soviet agent, the Special Investigations Unit was officially “disbanded.” Yet both Liddy and Hunt remained as White House “security consultants” and continued to receive CIA help into early 1972, when they added McCord to their group. Liddy and McCord went on the payroll of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), while Hunt worked across the street, at a private security firm. That reorganization was simply a shell game; the Plumbers continued as a White House “operational arm.” 

But if the original mandate of the Plumbers had been to do what CIA and FBI between them could not do—find foreign links to domestic dissidence—the Plumbers’ operations now began to focus on the upcoming presidential election. Under exotic code names such as “Crystal, ” “Quartz, ” and “Odessa, ” the Plumbers would at various times perform such pranks as “inviting” all Washington’s black diplomats to a Democratic Party function, even hiring limousines to drop them off there, only to have the blacks discover they hadn’t really been invited. Other plans called for such domestic-espionage operations as “photographing key documents” and sexually compromising Democrats. Many of the operations were openly proposed to Mitchell, who now headed CREEP, and to Dean, who was still trying to be the Kissinger of domestic security. “The most incredible thing I have ever laid my eyes on, ” Dean later said of the Liddy proposals. “All in codes, and involving black bag operations, kidnapping, providing prostitutes, uh, to weaken the opposition, bugging, uh, mugging teams. It was just an incredible thing. Mitchell virtually sat there puffing and laughing.” 

Yet by spring 1972, the Plumbers themselves were quite serious about one climactic political-warfare assignment, one which would both fulfill the spirit of the Huston-Sullivan Plan and show what an evil precedent that plan had set. At the time, Huston hadn’t thought anyone in the ICI process was motivated by a desire to protect the president politically, to secure his re-election, to embarrass the Democrats, or to engage in any partisan purpose. But the danger, as Huston discovered only too late, was that some people would be motivated by political rather than national-security considerations, or perhaps conflate the two rationales. The danger was that they would move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with a picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate, and just keep going down the line. The danger was that if the national-security rationale could be used by sincere, honest, responsible people, it could also be used by duplicitous, dishonest, irresponsible men. The danger, as Huston, Sullivan, and all the world were about to learn, was that laws would be broken not by people like Dick Helms and Jim Angleton, who were targeting Weatherman terrorists or suspected Soviet moles, but by people like G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, who were targeting the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at Watergate.

next

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/05/part-8-wedgesmoking-gunblowback.html

SMOKING GUN

FAIR USE NOTICE

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. As a journalist, I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of artistic, cultural, historic, religious and political issues. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Copyrighted material can be removed on the request of the owner.