CIA DIRECTOR HELMS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP84-00161R000400210135-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 21, 2014
• Sequence Number: 135
• Publication Date: February 24, 1967
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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CIA DIRECTOR
HELMS
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VOL 89?NO. 8
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TIME
THE WEEKLY NEWSMAGAZINE
February 24, 1967 Vol. 89, No. 8
THE NATION
THE ADMINISTRATION
The Silent Service
(See Cover)
What enables the wise sovereign and
the good general to strike and conquer,
and achieve things beyond the reach of
ordinary men, is foreknowledge.
?Sun Tzu, 6th Century B.C.
Chinese military theorist
Inside a U.S. ferret satellite flashing
around the earth at 17,000 m.p.h., su-
persensitive instruments intercept and
flick back to Virginia a radio message
between Moscow and a Soviet subma-
rine in the Pacific. In Laos, an American
listens attentively to the words of a
cocktail waiter, then slips him a bar of
silver. In an office of the U.S. embassy
in Bonn, a rotund Sovietologist digests
a stack _ of reports that may originate
from any one of a thousand sources?
a barber in East Berlin, a whorehouse
madam in Vienna, a U.S. electronics
salesman in Darmstadt, an Eastern Eu-
ropean propaganda broadside. At an
airfield on Taiwan, a black U-2 recon-
naissance plane with a Nationalist Chi-
nese pilot at the controls soars off the
runway, bound for skies 15 miles above
Red China on a photographic mission.
Such is the spider-web scope and
space-age sophistication of the U.S. Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency, the nation's
deep-secret seeker of foreknowledge in
the dim, cold demi-world of interna-
tional intelligence. CIA is America's chief
combatant in what Secretary of State
Dean Rusk calls "a tough struggle go-
ing on in the back alleys all over the
world, a never-ending war, and there's
no quarter asked and none given."
Cacophony of Protest. So cloaked
and gagged is CIA's operation that a
majority of Americans cannot recite even
its most dramatic feats: its pinpoint re-
porting about day-by-day developments
leading to the explosion of Red China's
first nuclear device, its brilliant success
in wiretapping Soviet army headquar-
ters in East Berlin,* its nick-of-time
revelation in 1962 that Russian missile
bases were abuilding in Cuba. Even
more mysterious to most Americans
than CIA itself is its director, Richard
McGarrah Helms, 53, an intense, con-
* Accomplished by digging and wiring a tun-
nel from West to East Berlin, which caved in
only because East German street laborers in-
advertently hit a weak spot while working on
a routine job in 1956.
trolled, self-effacing professional who
holds one of the most delicate and cru-
cial posts in official Washington?and
whose name has yet to appear in Who's
Who in America. Dick Helms has been,
in Washington parlance, a "spook" for
nearly 25 years. He is a veteran of some
of the agency's most labyrinthine op-
erations?from masterminding double
the emotionalism of young Americans
who worship honesty. It aroused the
outrage of many in the academic com-
munity who?mistakenly?regard CIA
as an evil manipulator of foreign policy.
And the furor showed again how readily
Americans, who, while seldom acknowl-
edging the quiet and generally successful
performance of their intelligence corn-
STUDENTS ARRIVING FOR WORLD YOUTH FESTIVAL IN MOSCOW (1957)
Once again, a spotlight on the tightrope of paradoxes.
agents working at the very heart of
Kremlin intelligence to supervising cov-
ert U.S. operations that kept the Congo
out of Communist control.
Yet no amount of expertise in back-
alley battling or electronic espionage
could have prepared Helms or CIA for
the cacophony of protest that arose last
week over yet another facet of U.S. in-
telligence?the agency's undercover
funding of American and international
students' associations.
The controversy once again spotlight-
ed the shadowy tightrope of paradoxes
that the Helmsmen must walk in the
interests of a nation that cherishes
openness and fair play. The debate pit-
ted the Puritan ethic against the prag-
matism of cold-war survival. It matched
the conspiratorial methods necessarily
practiced by intelligence agencies against
munity, will howl their indignation at
the first hint of misjudgment.
"Sinister Specter." The story?and
the storm?broke early in the week
when Ramparts, the sensation-seeking
New Left-leaning monthly, took full-
page newspaper ads to trumpet an ar-
ticle scheduled for its March issue that
would "document" how CIA "infiltrated
and subverted the world of American
student leaders." The story, according
to Ramparts, was a "case study in the
corruption of youthly idealism," and
would prove that "CIA owes the youth
of this country an apology." CIA's in-
volvement with the academic commu-
nity has been a target of Ramparts be-
fore: an article last April lambasted
Michigan State University for providing
cover for five CIA agents during a fed-
erally financed project to train South
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10,000-word article on the U.S. Na-
tional .Student Association was larded
with pejorative cliches about "the sinis-
ter specter" of CIA mixing with a stu-
dent group.
Factually at least, the piece was es-
sentially accurate. N.S.A., the nation's
largest student organization, represents
the campus governments of some-300 -
colleges. It arranges hundreds of for-
eign trips and wide-ranging student ex-
change programs,. and holds an annual
National Student Congress to debate a
few domestic issues and countless inter-
national questions ranging from "Whith-
er Africa?" to "How Now, Chairman
Mao?" The association was founded in
1947 by 24 American campus leaders,
including White House Aide Douglass
attend a series of international student
rallies. Invariably, they found them-
selves outmaneuvered, outshouted and
outfinanced by Communist student or-
ganizations that went out of their way
to impress delegates from the under-
developed, uncommitted nations of Af-
rica, Asia and Latin America.
PPPM. The U.S., as leader of the
free world, could not comfortably sit
by while Moscow made its grandstand
play for the imaginations and loyalties
of the world's youth. National student
organizations were proliferating every-
where, and in 1950, N.S.A. and 20 other
groups formed the International Student
Conference as the West's counterweight
to the aggressive International Union of
Students, a Communist-subsidized youth
CRAWFORD?NEA
CARTOONIST'S VIEW OF HOW THINGS DO CHANGE
Nothing in the desk drawer but cash.
Cater, then a recent Harvard graduate,
after a trip to the 1946 World Student
Congress in Prague, where lavishly fi-
nanced Communist groups stole the
show; one of their organizers was Kom-
somol Leader Aleksandr Shelepin, who
was later to head the Soviet internal
security agency.
From its inception, N.S.A. had finan-
cial problems; membership dues were
minimal (they still add no more than
$18,000 to an annual budget of some
$800,000). Private foundations were
not enthusiastic about contributing,
partly because in those Red-scare days
N.S.A. was thought to be too left-wing;
the House Un-American Activities
Committee even planted two agents
among student association delegates to
the 1962 Helsinki World Youth Festival.
Nevertheless, N.S.A. managed to limp
14
front. The logical instrument of U.S.
policy was CIA. The agency institution-
alized its direct financial support of
N.S.A. under its PPPM (Psychological,
Political and Paramilitary) program, in
1952. William Dentzer, now a U.S. AID
director in Peru, was the N.S.A. presi-
dent that year, and he made the deal
whereby CIA would secretly funnel cash
into the N.S.A. treasury through con-
geries of private pipelines.
The use of front foundations to han-
dle CIA money is an old technique.
More than a score of obscure philan-
thropies have turned out to be contrib-
utors of millions to free-world student
groups, notably the World Assembly of
Youth in Brussels, the International Stu-
dent Conference, which is headquartered
in The Netherlands, the Independent
Research Service in Washington, and the
the past 15 years, funds were donated
to one organization or another in the
name of the Independence Foundation,
the J. Frederick Brown Foundation,
and the Sidney and Esther Rabb Chari-
table Foundation, all of Boston, the San
Jacinto Fund of Houston, the Founda-
tion for Youth and Student Affairs of
New York. In several cases, the forms
that tax-exempt foundations are re-
quired to submit as public records with
the Internal Revenue Service were
strangely missing from the files of dis-
trict offices.
The San Jacinto Fund has neither a
listed phone nor an office address, op-
erates out of the office of an account-
ant. Others, too, proved to be desk-
drawer operations?without staff, office
space or listed telephone numbers.
Dummy fronts or not, these foundations
over the past 15 years had contributed
as much as 80% of N.S.A.'s budget.
Ignored Success. From the first, the
operation was supposed to be accom-
plished with characteristic CIA attention
to secrecy. Only N.S.A. presidents (who
serve one-year terms) and a couple of
other top officers were told about the
arrangement. They were required to
sign a national-security pledge that they
would never reveal that information?
at the risk of a maximum 20-year prison
sentence for violating its terms. Over
the years, N.S.A. actually did have drib-
bles of cash coming from the Ford and
Rockefeller foundations, as well as
from the State Department, but CIA
was by far the most generous banker.
The CIA money was earmarked for
the international program only, but the
agency made no attempt to influence
the students' policies. In the years since
the CIA fund began, N.S.A. has taken
many vigorous anti-Administration
stands: it castigated the U.S. interven-
tion in the Dominican Republic and has
consistently condemned Viet Nam poli-
cy. Some critics argue that the State
Department should have supplied the
heavy financing, but N.S.A. as a result
might have been much more restricted
in its independence of expression. The
CIA-N.S.A. arrangement seemed to be
mutually profitable.
The students finally, had the money
to carry out their growing foreign ex-
change programs. CIA was able to guar-
antee first-class student representation
at international affairs. The fulmina-
tions against CIA last week were based
largely on the assumption that students
had been "manipulated" for espionage
purposes, but most critics chose to ig-
nore the success of N.S.A. delegates in
representing the U.S. abroad with vigor,
eloquence and sophistication.
The Firm. Even in 1965, there were
growing rumors among many students
that most of N.S.A.'s money was coming
from the Federal Government. CIA had
not yet been publicly fingered as the
association's moneybags, but the State
Department was a subject of dark sus-
picion. That year, N.S.A. President-to-be-
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versity of Ofegon, was invited to _a
room at Arlington's Marriott Motor -
Hotel. Two CIA men met him for what
had become an annual routine for top
N.S.A. officials: they told him that he
would have access to important facts
about the organization if he would sign
the security pledge. He agreed. First,
he learned that he had been judged
"witty" (CIA jargon for the one who
passes security clearance) and second,
that nearly all of N.S.A.'s funds came
from "the firm" (code slang for CIA).
That struck the idealistic young Sher-
burne as all wrong and "destructive of a
democratic organization." He decided
to try to dig up money for N.S.A. else-
where. He hired eight young staffers,
told them he had just enough money to
pay their salaries for two months, and
sent them out to solicit funds so they
could keep their jobs. Eventually, they
managed to raise $400,000, including
some $180,000 from the Office of
Economic Opportunity, to coordinate a
program for tutoring deprived children.
As Sherburne's term of office came
to an end in mid-1966, he felt he had
accomplished everything necessary to
clean up the CIA situation once and for
all. He had even negotiated a cagey
deal whereby the CIA-linked Independ-
ence Foundation agreed to turn over
its lease on a converted stone house to
N.S.A. for 15 years?without men-
tioning to the agency that he was about
to sever their connection.
Big Brotherism. Sherburne made one
little slip. He broke his secrecy pledge
to confess the CIA connection to one of
his staff men?red-bearded, New Leftist
Michael Wood, 24, from California's
Pomona College. Wood insisted that
Sherburne make a dramatic public re-
nunciation of the CIA ties. Sherburne
refused, arguing reasonably enough that
the relationship was about to end and
that nothing would be gained by stirring
up a storm. Wood compiled a 50-page
letter to Ramparts, which then em-
barked on a two-month investigation of
the CIA-N.S.A. liaison.
Sherburne and the current N.S.A.
president, Rhodes Scholar Eugene
Groves, 23, tried to dissuade Ramparts
from printing the article. The CIA was
not very happy either, and put heavy
pressure on N.S.A. men to deny what-
ever the magazine published. Gene
Groves refused, called a press confer-
ence and admitted all?adding that
N.S.A.'s connection with CIA had been
terminated. The State Department also
issued a stiff little corroboration that
N.S.A. had been subsidized since the
early 1950s.
Almost instantly, there arose a chorus
of indignation against "Big Brother-
ism." "It is a poisonous business," said
Harvard College Dean John Monro.
"Something very important in our na-
tional life, the real independence and
freedom of our institutions, has been
brought into question." Cried Minne-
sota's Democratic Senator Eugene Mc-
Carthy, a longtime CIA critic: "Where
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though legally well within its mandate,
was not the agency's unilateral decision.
New York Senator Robert Kennedy,
who was fully aware of all intelligence
operations while he was Attorney Gen-
eral, said last week that the CIA money
funnel was an act "of the Government
itself acting through a representative of
the President." True enough. Three
Presidents?Eisenhower, Kennedy and
Johnson?knew all along about the
CIA-N.S.A. contract.
No Abracadabra. A good deal of the
protest over spies and scholars seemed
less than realistic?and somewhat sur-
prising, considering that the majority of
the younger critics have practically been
raised on the glamour fiction of James
Bond, Alec Leamas and The Man from
U.N.C.L.E. At any rate, the CIA-N.S.A.
alliance never was based on any kind of
abracadabra espionage.
Says Dennis Shaul, 28, an Akron
attorney who was N.S.A. president in
1962-63: "If I were president now, I
would continue to accept CIA funds.
CIA. had nothing to do with how the
money was spent; there were no strings
on us." Writer Gloria Steinem, an offi-
cial of the Independent Research Serv-
ice in the late '50s when it was CIA-
funded, actually considered the agency's
support beneficial: "The CIA's most im-
portant impact was that it made us un-
afraid to go ahead and do what we
thought was right. It increased, not di-
minished, our freedom of action."
Allen Dulles, who was CIA director
from 1953 to 1961 and drew up a blue-
print for operating the agency after it
was created in 1947, said last week
that the N.S.A. money was well spent
as counter-Communist propaganda at
youth conferences. "The Soviets had to
retreat in this area," he said. "The con-
ferences weren't paying off any more."
Innocuous as its N.S.A. contributions
may have been, CIA might well have
foreseen the possibility of trouble
ahead; it could have canceled its sub-
sidy program in the early '60s when
East-West student confrontations had
subsided.
In the wake of the N.S.A. flap, it was
also disclosed last week that CIA has
been pumping money into international
labor organizations, which have set
themselves the laudable task of bring-
ing fair labor standards and union de-
mocracy to underdeveloped nations.
Among the labor groups identified as
agency dependents was the internation-
al division of the American Newspaper
Guild. Oddly enough, press pundits
could not seem to raise the same kind
of uproar over CIA involvement in their
own union as they did over its supposed
subversion of youth.
At any rate, the academic commu-
nity's hand-wringing over the suspicious
color of CIA money spent for national
security did not seem wholly justified.
There is hardly a university in the na-
tion that does not accept?indeed de-
pend on?hefty grants from the De-
fense Department. CIA itself uses doz-
FORMER N.S.A. PRESIDENT SHERBURNE
A witty deal.
do you draw the line? Is it all right for
the CIA to tell us that 'everything goes'?
This is what Hitler said. Where do we
put a stop to all this?"
Up to Pittsburgh? President Johnson
resorted to the hoary political expedient
of naming a committee. CIA Director
Helms, Under Secretary of State Nich-
olas Katzenbach, and Health, Educa-
tion and Welfare Secretary John Gard-
ner were appointed to review the oper-
ations of the CIA and other Government
agencies to see if they "endanger the
integrity and independence of the edu-
cational community." The President's
action was not calculated to defend the
agency. Griped one of the agency's old-
timers: "The CIA has become a dirty
household word; it's become fashion-
able to knock it. Maybe we ought to just
give headquarters to the Defense De-
partment for an annex and go up to
Pittsburgh, rent an apartment and start
all over again."
N.S.A. PRESIDENT GROVES
A firm admission.
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ono nf cAlrilnre and rin;vPreitv enerial- - "C:riek;41,-"ni? " ('TA t.__ a
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?directly and without masquerade?
$300,900 -to finance M.I.T.'s topflight
Center for International Studies. Until
last spring, M.I.T. continued to accept
agency funds, then terminated the con-
tract "for practical, not moral reasons."
Why? Indeed, Max Millikan, the sage
director of M.I.T.'s International Center,
frowned on the surge of CIA-phobia.
"The number of my friends around here
who have swallowed this 'invisible gov-
ernment' line is disturbing," he said.
"They think there is an entirely sepa-
rate foreign policy being concocted by
people in dark corners. When they say
that this kind of work is immoral, what
they're saying is that it's immoral to
have anything to do with telling the
President what the world is really like."
Nevertheless, almost every time CIA
calls attention to itself, there is a spate
of demands that it be reviewed, re-
formed or removed. As a CIA man
pointed out wryly last week, such criti-
cism can only lead to great jubilation
in the halls of Moscow's KGB, Depart-
ment D?for Disinformation?the arm
of Soviet counterespionage whose main
function is to discredit CIA. Senate Mi-
nority Leader Everett Dirksen, when
asked about increasing demands for
heavier congressional surveillance over
CIA, replied: "I don't believe in explod-
ing our intelligence agency. The British
don't do it."
? One reason is that any full-time civil-
ian department devoted to the dark arts
of espionage is remarkably new to the
U.S. Until Pearl Harbor, American es-
pionage was essentially the property of
the military services. The Japanese
sneak attack was one of history's most
flagrant failures of applied foreknowl-
edge, Sun Tzu-style. To fill the vacuum,
the Office of Strategic Services was
hastily constituted during World War II,
and it was from this agency that CIA
evolved into a permanent peacetime
department under the 1947 National
Security. Act.
intelligence community, but it is primus
inter pares and the right arm of the
National Security Council. Master Spy
Allen Dulles not only sketched its func-
tions but also the kind of men the na-
tion needed to attract to such duty.
"The agency," he suggested to Con-
gress, "should be directed by a relative-
ly small but elite corps of men with a
passion for anonymity and a willing-
ness to stick at that particular job."
- No one better personifies that de-
scription than Richard Helms, the man
who now heads CIA. Although he has
been with the agency since its start, no
CIA chief ever came into office with
such a passion for anonymity and down-
right disdain for public acclaim. His
predecessors assumed the directorship
after long public exposure in Govern-
ment (Allen Dulles), industry (John
McCone), or the military (General
Walter Bedell Smith and Admiral Wil-
liam Raborn), with tangible accom-
plishments and medals to show for it.
Richard Helms? He had a 1965 award
from the National Civil Service League,
the sort given annually to groups of
career bureaucrats, for "significant con-
tributions to excellence in Government."
But who could say just what these con-
tributions were?
His relative anonymity is ironic in
view of his prewar background, which
promised prominence as well as ac-
complishment. Helms's father was an
aluminum sales executive who upon re-
tirement took his family to live in Eu-
rope. The move stretched Richard's
prep schooling from Orange, N.J., to
Switzerland and Germany and gave
him lifelong fluency in French and Ger-
man. He returned to the U.S. to attend
Williams College, class of 1935. Few
* National Security Agency, Defense Intelli-
gence Agency, Atomic Energy Commission,
State Department Intelligence and Research,
Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence,
Naval Intelligence and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
FRED WARD--BLACK STAR
CIA'S LANGLEY COMPLEX
Where IBM's 360 outranks Fleming's 007.
16
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his class and Of the senior honor soci-
ety, the editorship of the student news-
paper and the senior yearbook. He was
also voted most likely to succeed. Jour-
nalism would be his career, his goal a
newspaper of his own.
Henie to Hitler. For a fast start, he
became a United Press European cor-
respondent?after agreeing to pay his
own way to London in 1935. Two
months later he went on to Germany,
covering the 1936 Olympics and the
Nazi Party rally with correspondents
twice his age and many times his ex-
perience. His interview subjects ranged
from Sonja Henie to Adolf Hitler. He
returned to the U.S. after two years,
settled for a job as office boy in the ad-
vertising department of the now de-
funct Indianapolis Times. By 1939, he
was the paper's national advertising
director. That year he married Divorcee
Julia Bretzman Shields, a sculptor. They
have one son, Dennis, 24, a student at
the University of Virginia Law School.
What was to be his real career started
in 1943, when Navy Lieut. Helms was
transferred to the Office of Strategic
Services, a switch that took him from
desk duty in New York to Washington,
Britain and finally Germany, where he
worked under Allen Dulles. After his
discharge in 1946, he went into the
War Department's intelligence unit,
then joined CIA when it was founded.
"Dirty Tricks." Helms's public record
for the next five years is a total blank.
When he surfaced in 1952, it was as
deputy to the chief of the plans divi-
sion, the so-called "dirty tricks" depart-
ment, which handles espionage and oth-
er undercover operations. Thirteen
years later, he was to make a rare auto-
biographical effusion: "I would suppose
that you would describe it as working
my way up through the ranks during
the years."
Helms became head of the plans di-
vision in 1962, when CIA's top echelon
was reorganized as a result of the Bay
of Pigs fiasco. At this stage, the agency
was smarting under severe external criti-
cism and riven by intramural factional-
ism. Helms, even-tempered and affable,
managed to avoid office politics and
grudges.
By the time John McCone resigned in
1965, Helms was one of his recommen-
dations as a successor?a natural choice
on the basis of experience and ability.
He had recruited, trained, assigned and
directed many of CIA's most trusted
operations agents, and unlike many of
his colleagues, he got along well with
the State Department and the Pentagon.
Nonetheless, President Johnson picked
Admiral Raborn as director and made
Helms the first deputy. There was a
tacit understanding that Raborn's tour
would be short and that Helms would
use this period to establish himself with
the Congressmen who oversee the agen-
cy's operations. Senate confirmation
was unanimous, and Helms took over
last June.
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Minus Anecdotes. At the apex of the
Western' intelligence world, Helms re-
mains withdrawn from public view. He
has dramatic good looks?tall, lean,
dark, with features reminiscent of Ru-
dolph Valentino. Yet, says one close
associate, "he is peculiarly minus anec-
dotes. There is no flamboyance." He
lives sedately with his wife in northwest
Washington in a modest home from
which they rarely join in Washington's
social whirl. In a city where most of-
ficials ritualistically tote bulging brief-
cases home, Helms usually goes home
empty-handed?and by 7 p.m.
During the Senate committee hear-
ing on his confirmation, Helms per-
formed in a similarly low key, shunning
any suggestion that he or CIA sought to
be an invisible government. "The CIA
takes no action without the appropriate
approval of the appropriate officials,"
he said, "and they are not in the CIA."
- The agency Helms runs goes by a
number of nicknames?the Third Force,
the Silent Service, the Other Agency
(among DOS men overseas) and La
Campania (in Latin America). The
budget is $500 million a year, an
amount that is largely hidden in De-
fense appropriations and is not subject
to item-by-item scrutiny by the Congress.
Nevertheless, CIA must account for ev-
ery penny it spends to a specially trained
top-secret team of the Budget Bureau.
It is also under the supervision of a top-
level Administration group whose mem-
bership includes Dick Helms; State De-
partment's Katzenbach; Cyrus R.
Vance, Deputy Secretary of Defense;
and White House Aide Walt W. Rostow.
The group meets at least once a week,
examines in great detail every single
"black" (covert) operation proposed.
Even for "white" (overt) functions, it
must approve expenditures as small as
$10,000 if they involve particularly sen-
sitive schemes. There are also CIA
watchdog committees in both houses of
Congress.
CIA headquarters is an eight-story
white concrete building in a wooded,
isolated section of Langley, Va., eight
miles from Washington. Though once
heralded by a profusion of highway
signs, state policemen appeared one
night in 1961?on specific orders from
then Attorney General Robert Kennedy
?and tore every one of them down;
now the only marker says BPR (for
Bureau of Public Roads).
The agency's workaday labors, the
tedious accumulation and evaluation of
infinite quantities of minutiae, have
more in common with IBM's 360 than
with Ian Fleming's 007. The task de-
mands high intelligence as well as pa-
tience. A State Department veteran
once said: "You'll find more liberal in-
tellectuals per square inch at CIA than
anywhere else in the Government." In-
deed, the agency is staffed from top to
bottom with some of the nation's best-
qualified experts; 30% have Ph.Ds.
They are linguists, economists, cartogra-
phers, psychiatrists, agronomists, chem-
DULLES, HELMS & RABORN
From the heart of the Kremlin to the coverts of the Congo.
ists, even anthropologists and foresters.
CIA experts, it is said, could completely
staff a middle-sized college.
The "Get." A scant fraction of the
agency's 15,000-odd employees actually
go out into the cold. At Langley's elab-
orate seventh-floor operations center, a
bank of high-speed (100 words per min-
ute) printers receive top-secret traffic
from the National Security Agency, dip-
lomatic reports from embassies overseas,
information from the Pentagon's De-
fense Intelligence Agency, as well as
data from CIA men around the world.
In Helms's office, there are "secure" red,
grey, blue or white direct-line phones
with scramblers attached?on which the
President often calls.
The operations room is hooked into
the White House Situation Room, the
Pentagon's military command post, and
the State Department through a near-
miraculous phalanx of teletype ma-
chines. One data page per minute can be
fed in, encoded, flashed to one of the
centers, then decoded the instant it ar-
rives. Down the hall from the operations
center is a room papered with huge
maps. On one set, the war in Viet Nam
is plotted with up-to-the-hour reports of
combat action and other trouble spots.
Another chart may track the course of
a Soviet ship bound from Odessa to
Cuba?along with U.S. surveillance
forces in the area.
One major purpose of all the influx
and indexing is the daily compilation of
a slim white 8-in. by 101-in, document
that is delivered to the White House in
a black CIA car every evening between
6 and 7 o'clock. It bears CIA's emblem
stamped in blue, is entitled "The Presi-
dent's Daily Brief," usually runs between
three and six pages of single-spaced type,
and covers the key intelligence "get" of
the day. At times, it may have included
such fascinating data as the results of a
urinalysis pinched from a Vienna hos-
pital while a major world leader was a
patient, or the latest bedroom exploits
of Indonesia's Sukarno or U-2 photo-
graphs taken over China.
Big Boot. The agency's overseas op-
erations are diversified almost beyond
belief. CIA men may control an entire
airline (such as Air America, which runs
cargo and operatives in Laos, Thailand
and Viet Nam), a full-scale broadcast-
ing operation (such as Radio Free Eu-
rope). They may pose as missionaries,
businessmen, travel agents, brokers or
bartenders. They may be seeking infi-
nitely minute pieces of information by
paying a paltry $50 to a Hungarian go-
ing home for a visit so that he will take
a short drive out of his way to check on
the number of Russian troops in Szekes-
fehervar. Or they may be arranging a
revolution?as they did when Premier
Mossadegh was deposed in 1953, or
when Colonel Jacobo Arbenz was over-
thrown in Guatemala in 1954.
CIA can boot its errors almost as far
as its successes. There was the Bay of
Pigs. CIA failed to interpret properly
the consistent East German warnings
that preceded the Berlin Wall. The agen-
cy made a foolish attempt to bribe se-
curity police in Singapore.
Naturally enough, CIA's gaffes inspire
derisive headlines throughout the world.
Just as properly, its successes are little
known and seldom disclosed. In an open
society like the U.S., there will always
be a degree of conflict between the pub-
lic nature of policymaking and the se-
cret, empirical processes by which deci-
sions must be made and implemented.
What is usually overlooked, when CIA
is the subject of controversy, is that it
is only an arm?and a well-regulated
one?of the U.S. Government. It does
not, and cannot, manipulate American
policies. It can only serve them.
TIME, FEBRUARY 24, 1967
Declassified and Approved For Release @50-Yr 2014/02/21 : CIA-RDP84-00161R000400210135-8
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