SERPENT ON THE HILL/RHODES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000201300002-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 11
• Document Creation Date: December 21, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 19, 2008
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: July 7, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
PROGRAM The Rudy Maxa Show
DATE July 7, 1984 9:05 A.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
Serpent on the Hill/Rhodes
RUDY MAXA: This hour we're going to talk with a
gentleman named Richard Rhodes (?). He's a former CIA agent who,
after he retired, decided to write a novel about a CIA agent. His
novel is called Serpent on the Hill.
Well, the CIA didn't think that was such a great idea.
And it took a little bit of jumping through hoops on the part of
Richard Rose to exercise his imagination.
We're going to talk with him this hour about not only
his novel, but also the right he had -- or the route he had to
take to have the right to publish it.
MAXA: We have to get one thing resolved right here at
the top. We're talking with Richard Rhodes, but the pen name for
his novel -- his book is called Serpent on the Hill -- is Philip
Elliott.
How would you like to be referred to this hour, Mr.
Elliott-Rhodes.
PHILIP RHODES: It's probably easier to stick with
Philip, otherwise it confuses people with the identity of the
book.
MAXA: All right. To sell books, we'll call you Philip
Philip Elliott has written a new book. It's called
Serpent on the Hill. It's a hardback. And it's published by,
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Dallas Publishing Company, or Dallas Publishing, Incorporated.
And it's a novel. And the hero -- well, there are several main
characters, but a couple of them -- one of them is a lady CIA
agent who tracks a U.S. Senator who's suspected of being a Soviet
spy. Spy novels are written every day, but they're not written
every day by an ex-CIA agent.
Maybe you better tell us a little about your background
first, Mr. Elliott.
RHODES: Well, I was -- I'll go back to the very
beginning of my career, because I think it's important to flesh
it out. And I won't take an hour.
I was a Marine after I graduated from high school, and I
got involved in electronics in the Marine Corps for three years.
I left there. I went to college, where I went to law school.
Then I went into the Treasury Department as a criminal investi-
gator. And strangely enough, I graduated into electronics again,
where I was doing wiretapping and bugging and that sort of thing
at the Treasury Department. Then I was recruited into the CIA,
or I recruited myself into the CIA, and continued to work in the
clandestine technical operations field until I left there in
1970.
MAXA: Were you stationed abroad?
RHODES: Yes, sir, almost all the time, except for when
you're at headquarters. But I certainly had no domestic assign-
ment, as such.
MAXA: What parts of the world were you in?
RHODES: I was in the Middle East. I was in Europe. I
was in South America some.
long?
MAXA: Okay. And you were with the agency, then, how
RHODES: Eight years.
RHODES: 1970.
MAXA: Okay.
Now, when did you being to write -- well, when did you
this is your first novel, I presume.
RHODES: That's right. I had been writing -- once I got
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out of the agency, I was somewhat adrift, and one of the things I
decided to do was write on physical security matters, because I
knew a great deal about that over the years. And I got associ-
ated with lock and burglar alarm companies in an executive
capacity and began to write those kinds of things and became
fairly well-known for that. And then one day I decided that I
had an urge to write a novel, and I went back to school and took
some courses. And that's how it all started.
MAXA: Now, at some point you knew you had to clear your
writings with the CIA. Is that right?
RHODES: That's right. I had forgotten anything about
it because it had been so long ago. It had been over -- well, it
had been 20-some years, almost, since I had entered, and I didn't
remember exactly what the caveats were. So I wrote a letter to
the CIA and said, "I'm writing a novel. What do I do now,
folks?"
MAXA: And they told you?
RHODES: They said, very simply, "Send it to us, under
your contract obligation not to write anything unless it's
subjected to the prepublication review committee."
MAXA: When we think of people who have trouble with the
CIA in clearning novels or books, we think of Victor Marchetti
and John Marks and Philip Agee, and basically people whose
writings have taken a critical stance against the agency. Was
hat on your mind at all when you started writing your novel?
RHODES: No. As a matter of fact, I figured that it
would go through in very short order because, number one, the
plot was entirely concocted. It was not a diguised CIA opera-
tion. It didn't even attempt to identify anyone cleverly in
Washington. My senator in the book, who is alleged to be a
Russian spy, was never described in the book, for apparent
reasons. I wanted everyone to use their imagination. I had no
intention of naming any places where I had worked on operations
or naming any specific equipment. And so I thought, "This is
going to be a piece of cake."
MAXA: Okay. What happened?
RHODES: Well, I submitted the manuscript and I got a
letter and a couple of follow-up phone calls which said there
were several problems, and they couldn't talk about them over the
phone, and would I please come to Washington.
So I asked them if -- and I'm living in Dallas, Texas,
and was at the time I wrote the book. I asked them if that was
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 something that they could pick up the tab for, because they had a
lot of money and I had very little. And of course they declined.
So I flew to Washington at my own expense and went out
to Langley and had a meeting with two people who represented
themselves as being representatives of the prepublication review
board.
meeting?
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MAXA: Now, from the beginning, was it a hostile kind of
RHODES: No, it was quite friendly. As a matter of
fact, I'll be very honest with you, one of the people who showed
up at the meeting is a man that was probably one of my five or
ten or 15 best friends in the agency when I was there.
MAXA: All right. And did they have some real serious
concrete problems that you hadn't considered in your writing?
RHODES: And I don't think -- and this is too touch back
on it again. I don't think they sent him to the meeting so that
it would be a cordial meeting. They sent him because they
thought he was knowledgeable in the areas in which I was writing.
And of course there was an attorney there who represented the
prepublication review board from the legal standpoint.
We discussed a number of points early in the meeting.
There were some single words. They said, "Well, let's dispense
with these," and they had their manuscript which had been marked
up. And they said, "Let's talk about things like" -- and now the
famous word which I'm a little tired of talking about, but it's
so ludicrous and it's caught the attention of many, many people
-- the word chip, c-h-i-p, which is, of course, an integrated
circuit, in the dictionary and in anybody's language.
MAXA: The CIA objected to your use of the word chip?
RHODES: Yes. And that was early in the discussion. And
I began to get a sinking feeling because I said, "What in the
world could you possibly object to that word about?" And they
told me. And I'm not going to get on here and tell you that
whole discussion, other than my answer to them was, "I don't care
in what context you think it's sensitive, it's a generic word.
And anyone reading this book could not possibly make any intel-
ligence connection. There's just no way in the world."
And I thought, "Ahh, I've won that point."
They just looked at me and said, "Well, we want you to
take it out."
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And I said, "Well, if this is the way it's going to go,
it looks like we're going to have a long morning."
I believe that's a pretty close paraphrase of my first
few minutes in there.
MAXA: And was it a long morning?
RHODES: It was only about three hours, because I
basically argued a few of my points and gave in, because I didn't
have a very strong bargaining position. I didn't realize how
serious they were about all these points. I thought that I might
be able to talk them out of them, so I had not come with an
attorney. Of course, he would have had to have been cleared for
top secret and I would have had to pay him, which I had no money
for at that time. So I was in there winging it by myself,
thinking that I was going to deal with it, straighten all this
out, and get on back and get the book to press.
MAXA: Reasonable people sitting down and having a
reasonable conversation.
RHODES: Sure. Because I went through my background for
a reason, Rudy. I'd been a Marine. I'd been a Treasury agent.
I'd been an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency who had
served honorably and well and had always exercised good judgment.
I could tell you some of the things that have happened where they
had sent me places and said, "We're sending you because you're
the only guy in this division who'll be able to survive, because
you'll use good judgment."
Here I am in this room and I'm being told that I'm
exercising extremely poor judgment and that I don't understand
the situation, and that the whole world is going to assume that
everything I say is true. And even though it might be totally
fabricated, I need to take certain things out.
So I was pretty stunned.
MAXA: We'll be back with Philip Elliott in just a
moment. We're talking about the prepublication review the CIA
conducted of his novel Serpent on the Hill, conducted because he
had been an agent with the CIA and had signed a piece of paper
saying that he couldn't write anything without previous clear-
ance. We'll go a little deeper into that subject in just a
moment.
MAXA: On the WRC Live Line, it's Philip Elliott, author
of a new book called Serpent on the Hill, former CIA agent.
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6
The novel's -- is it proper to say the novel's heroine is a lady
CIA agent?
RHODES: Oh, yes. And that's part of the charm of it.
And that's gotten a very good response. There's never been, as
far as I know, a lady CIA agent in fiction that's this kind of a
gal. She's pretty resourceful. And the ladies love her, and the
men lover her too.
RHODES: There were a number of people, a number of
ladies working in the field that I admired. And I was asked this
question earlier in the week, and I had to reflect upon it. And
really, with all the technical marvels that the Defense Intel-
ligence and the CIA and everybody have at their command, it's
still a people-to-people business. And women are very, very
sensitive to nuances in personal relationships, and I think they
make outstanding intelligence agents.
MAXA: All right. And so we have Philip Elliott sitting
in suburban Virginia with the CIA, and they've already objected
to the use of the word chip, and you know it's going to be a long
meeting.
Did they object to twists in the plot, to modus operandi
that might have been used by agents? Or was it just words and
sentences? I mean blocks of words.
RHODES: Well, there were basically two thrust, Rudy.
One of them was single words. And, of course, the other one
that's been published, and I think James Kilpatrick and other
people who have commented on this in newspaper articles and other
places have mentioned "The Farm." They asked me to take that
out. And I was incredulous because even in 1982, or whenever it
was I was up there for the review, "The Farm" was a household
word.
RHODES: ...there's a book recently came out which I
wrote a little review on for some people in Congress just to
point out the hypocrisy in this business, and the author says
there, "The Farm at Camp Peary, Virgina." Well, I don't know
whether it's at Camp Peary. I'm not going to comment on that.
But this is the kind of ludicrousness that began to dawn on me.
The other thing was that because I had an extremely long
background in electronics -- from the time I was 12 years old, I
had been involved in electronics. I'd been an amateur radio
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operator since 1949, Rudy, among other things. I had in my
briefcase, when I was there at the agency, one of my handy
talkers that I used on two meters. And I had patterned a device
after that and I had patterned some other devices after common,
commercially-available pieces of equipment. And therein were
some more problems, the idea that I might be giving away some
technologies that existed in the agency.
MAXA: Now, you were not a severe
case, were you?
RHODES: No, I didn't think so. And I had spent a great
deal of time in self-censorship because I knew that there would
be these kinds of questions arise. And so I had gone to ex-
tremes, I thought, to try to disguise anything that I did know,
so that this thing would be totally made-up.
One of the things that dawned on me about a third of the
way through the meeting was I had been gone about 13 years when
I'd finished this novel. I'd been working on it for seven years.
And I have never been in touch with anybody from the agency, and
particularly the technical division or the R&D division. So I
knew nothing about what was going on. But I do read a lot and I
subscribe to a lot of technical magazines.
So I looked at them, and they told me I had to change a
system that I had invented. I won't get into the details. And I
said, "Do you mean that if I make something up and you think that
it's not something I should be writing about, then I can't write
about it? Whether I have any personal knowledge, whether I have
ever been privy to this information?"
They said, "That's sort of the way it is."
MAXA: You mean you just made up...
RHODES: "Is it you're censoring may imagination?" And
I just stared at them.
And I really never intended to make a big case out of
all this. I just sort of intended to go on about my business and
see if I couldn't get any book going and see what happened.
And then the President came out with his National
Security Directive 84. And I wrote a letter to Publishers
Weekly, and just a snowballing series of events happened after
that.
MAXA: Now, what's the President's National Security
Directive?
RHODES: Well, the one that he promulgated in 1983,
actually called National Security Directrive 84, in which he
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proposed to put 127,000 or more government employees, outside the
CIA and NSA, under this same kind of censorship, and also
polygraph examination, that the CIA and the NSA enjoy. And I
think you, living in Washington, know that there was a tremendous
furor over that.
RHODES: ..columnists -- Bill Safire, Anthony Lewis,
Kilpatrick, editorial boards, and people writing letters to the
White House, Carl Rowan writing an article saying, in Reader's
Digest, "Mr. President, this is not Russia." A pretty sensitive
issue.
And about this time, I wrote a letter to Publishers
Weekly saying, "Gee, it bothered me too. Because if I'm writing
a novel that's totall made-up and I'm censored in this way,
extend that That came out. Then Gannett News Services called
me.
All of this has been people calling me. I wasn't going
around trying to make a big case that I had been abused. I was
going to just wing that on my own.
MAXA: Have you heard from anyone in the agency since
you came to terms on the book?
RHODES: I got -- of course I got a letter saying that
they had approved the manuscript. The whole process took about
six months because I was going back and forth with them, dis-
cussing things. And then I had to rewrite portions of about 50
pages. I had to rewrite one section that required references in
about 50 different places. So I came back to Dallas and rewrote
the thing along the lines they had requested. And of course the
briefing was so thorough that when I sent them my revised
manuscript, there was not a single objection to it.
MAXA: All right, let's throw this out for general
discussion. Here we have an ex-CIA agent who decides to write a
novel, makes up stuff, besides the plot, besides the characters,
makes up a system; and the CIA objects. Does it bother anybody?
Does it bother you? Is there some huge reason that Philip
Elliott might be missing, in his objection to what he calls
nitpicking a novel? He calls it that in a Society of
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Professional Journalists' piece he wrote in which -- I like your
line, "The CIA has no proprietary right to the law of physics."
RHODES: Well, I've given this a tremendous amount of
thought. And of course it's gone way beyond my story. I'm not
concerned anymore about myself. I can take care of myself. I
can write something else, or I can go into another line of
business, if it bothers them all that much. It's not that big an
issue. But it's what it means to hundreds of thousands of other
people. It's sort of like the tip of the iceberg that you take
an extension of: If they do this to a person who's making things
up, goodness gracious, what's going to happen to the rest?
And as you probably know, there's even a bill in the
Congress now, H.R. 4681, introduced by Jack Brooks, which would
prohibit the Administration from promulgating any more censorship
or polygraph rules for anyone outside of NSA and CIA, just flat
prohibition against it. And I stay pretty close in touch with
some people in Washington, and I think there's a reasonably good
chance that that'll pass in some form this session.
MAXA: Good morning. You're on WRC with Philip Elliott.
MAN: I think what the CIA doing is perfectly legiti-
mate. They have to keep a control on the officials and agents
who have worked for them. Using your pure imagination was also
gotten from your experiences in the Central Intelligence Agency.
RHODES: I don't have any quarrel with the fact that
they have to do something. As a matter of fact, I've been
writing some very strong statements that I think the law needs to
be beefed up, if you can believe that. I think that it needs
tobe changed.
Let me just go back to the experience factor. I'm 52
years old. When I wrote the book I was in my forties. I have
been involved in electronics since I was 12 years old. I had
eight years experience with the agency. So I tried to make the
point, and I continue to make the point, that I have a tremendous
wealth of information from my whole life about electronics,
criminal investigation, and those sorts of things. And so
somewhere in there, I think, there's an inequity that's never
been resolved.
What I'm saying now, in all the things that I write and
all the conversations that I get involved in on the radio, is
that I think that there ought to be some kind of a broad-based
law that's based on criminal statute that would encompass anybody
who writes about intelligence matters. And I'm willing to go
under it. I'm willing to give up this contract, which really is
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kind of a toothless tiger, in many respects, to go under a
criminal law that would also include people who write books like
the one I just cited, who have never been in the CIA, who have
good sources inside CIA and who write things that are much more
revealing than I've ever written or ever will write. There are
just many, many books that curl my hair when I read them. And
there are many columnists that come out and say, "Based on top
secret documents which I have had access to." That's wrong, in
my opinion.
So, I don't have a basic disagreement with the idea.
I'm disagreeing with prior restraint and with the exaggerated and
overzealous way in which case of fiction was handled.
MAXA: Okay, caller?
MAN: Okay. Thank you.
MAXA: Hi. You're on WRC with Phil Elliott.
WOMAN: I would just like to know how anyone in your
position can be absolutely sure that you...
RHODES: Could you speak up a little bit, ma'am?
WOMAN: Yes. I would just like to know how anyone in
your position could be absolutely sure that you can be just
objective about it, having privy to such secret information and
everything. How can you be absolutely sure that you're not
drawing on some kind of secret information in the back of your
memory bank?
RHODES: That's a very good question. And we had long
discussions about that during the course of the time I was up
there.
One of the things that happened as a result of my
discussion with them was that I sat down after I came back to
Dallas and I took out some things that they had not asked me to
take out because I heard the kind of thing you're saying and I
felt an obligation, because, as I say, I'm a patriot, not
somebody who's trying to destroy the agency. But on the other
hand, I had a number of people who had high clearances who looked
at some of this stuff and they sort of got me going on this,
saying, "Well, this is ridiculous."
So, I don't disagree with the point that somewhere in my
subconscious there may be some things. And what I'm suggesting,
and I wrote in "Freedom of Information" for Gannett a rather long
article, I'm suggesting that the Congress quit avoiding its
responsibility and pass a criminal statute that would relate to
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everyone who writes about national security.
suggesting that there be pre-publication
these sensitive agencies that would take
over, call the writer in, if he so chose
"Here are some sensitive areas. We'd
And then if the writer refuses to avoid
to indict them criminally.
But I'm further
review boards in each of
a manuscript in, look it
or she chose, and say,
like you to avoid them."
them, they have an option
And I don't get anybody in Washington -- and I'm
corresponding with a tremendous number of people. I don't get
anybody who argues with that. They just say, "It's probably not
going to happen. We've just got to try to hold the line where we
are this session. And if 4681 goes through, that'll be a minor
miracle in itself."
(End of transcript due to technical difficulties)
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