A WORSE-THAN-USELESS CIA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01314R000300010054-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 18, 2004
• Sequence Number: 54
• Publication Date: February 1, 1975
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

S6c S7-772
Approved For Release 2004/10/28 : CIA-RDP88-01314R00930U0`'f~443
STATE
OF THE
NATION
P - /o I) 4 sky
THE WALTER BAGEHOT RESEARCH COUNCIL
ON NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY* NEWSLETTER *
soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it. " WALTER BAGEHOT
INTELLIGENCE - GATHERING FOR WHAT?
A Worse-than-useless CIA
HENRY PAOLUCCI
For this brief study of what ails the CIA we assume
with WalterBagehot that the strengths and weaknesses
of a government like ours are best understood if we
start off by dividing its constituent parts into two
classes: "first, those which excite and preserve the
reverence of the population- the dignified parts; and
next, the efficient parts-those by which it, in fact,
works and rules. "When he drew that distinction in the
1870s, Bagehot had before him an English Constitu-
tion that had just suffered the shock of Disraeli's
"reforms" and an American Constitution virtually
decapitated by the impeachment crisis of the Andrew
Johnson Presidency. It was a time, in other words,
very like our own. Since 1961, and especially during
these Kissinger- Watergate years, the parts of our
Constitution have steadily lost both efficiency and
dignity. Our Presidency is inoperative; our Congress
vies with rioters for newsmedia attention; and our
courts, ultimate custodians of our legal stability, let
themselves be used for political advantage by self-
righteous factions and persons of great private wealth.-
What ails our once dignified and efficient Central
Intelligence Agency is thus typical of what ails our
Government as a whole.
?ne after another our chief national-defense institutions
are being placed in the newsmedia pillory and forced to
confess their incompetence. First it was the military and the
FBI; now it is the turn of the CIA. The top officials thus far
pilloried have seemed to take it passively, not to say hopeless-
ly. Why? Perhaps it is because they vaguely sense that, in having
clung too long to jobs manifestly stripped of purpose, they
have themselves helped to make their public disgrace virtually
inevitable.
Military discipline up and down the ranks, vast networks
of centralized investigation and intelligence-gathering-for
what? Surely we don't need fabulously expensive land, sea, and
air forces or elaborate cloak and dagger operations for the
ends prescribed for us by Henry Kissinger "and the Presidents"
(as Senator Adlai Stevenson III of Illliinnois has aptly phrased it)
who have served undXrphpi ove8sI- elease la &Vi2
reuruary Iwo
to purchase peace with the communist powers at all cost. And
he pursues it by means of a wandering diplomacy which, to
quote Stevenson again, consists in always "leaving something
behind" to save face: "a little treasure here, a little blood
there, a little of the nation's prestige and influence every-
where."
Senator Stevenson's speech against the "aggrandizement
in the hands of one man of more power than any man could
wisely employ" was delivered on Lincoln's Birthday (CR, Feb.
12, 1975, pp. S 1852-3). Its warning is suitably Lincolnesque,
and a far cry from the partisan ambiguities one has come to
expect these days from the other side of the Senate aisle, Mr.
Stevenson argues that our current foreign policy, or rather,
lack of it, is crippling our government, stripping its major
organs of their reason for being. "Almost any foreign policy,"
he says, "is better than none. Given a policy, the Congress and
the military might begin to gear military expenditures to our
purposes in the world instead of planning expensively for every
conceivable contingency. The CIA and all agencies could act
with some concert in support of some purpose. The United
States has no foreign policy, only the odysseys of Secretary
Kissinger, his dreams and secrets. The agencies of government
are cut loose to fend for themselves with little direction or
input."
Kissinger's so-called strategy for peace denies our armed
services a distinctly military mission. His plans require their
maintenance exclusively to help prevent, not to wage, a general
war. If one could be certain that war would not result from
unilateral disarmament, there would be no reason, from
Kissinger's standpoint, not to disarm unilaterally. The rub is
that, if an American government dared to disarm unilaterally-
so Kissinger argues the point with his more radical admirers -
the mass of Americans might react fiercely; Kissinger-type
peace activists might be forced out of government and tradi-
tional standards of military preparedness might again become
authoritative, as they have not been since 1961, in presidential
decision-making.
The sums funnelled into our military under the circum-
hesumtu?nell06f~6-60,fM5or] order as the pay-
 offs made to riot leaders in the city ghettos under the guise of
poverty programs. Hanson Baldwin has stressed the danger of
a well-paid military that has no real military mission and
doesn't protest that fact. "More of our high-ranking military
leaders," he pleads, "if faced with a dilemma of supporting
policies which they believe to be dangerous to the nation's
future, should resign their posts not as a mutinous gesture but
as conscientious indication that they cannot carry out the
policies of the administration without fatally compromising
their duty to the country and their loyalty to the men they
command. Resignation, particularly by high-ranking military
men, should never be a casual gesture but it can represent the
only honorable alternative."
The admonition applies with equal force to top officers
in our intelligence-gathering agencies. Indeed, in the case of the
CIA there are additional dangers. Our military strength can be
deprived of its reason for being by Henry Kissinger's supra-
nationalist peace strategy, but it cannot easily be diverted to
serve supranationalist, not to say anti-nationalist, ends. Our
Armed Services fly the American flag, and where that flag is
flown the American national will is manifest, to be openly
challenged by avowed or secret enemies only at their great
peril. It is otherwise with the CIA. Precisely because it cannot
fly the flag, it needs to be thoroughly imbued with an uncom-
promised sense of purpose, animated by an unmistakably
American national will. Otherwise it is in danger of becoming
a body without a soul, and thus liable to penetration and
possession by an alien will.
Cord Meyer's Sanctuary
Up until the late 60's, the CIA, chartered with the Nation-
al Security Council in 1947, remained a haven of secrecy, not
only against investigative reporting but also against congres-
sional inquiries of the kind that have now become only too
fashionably easy to pursue. At Yale in 1958, CIA chief Allen
Dulles was able to boast without danger of protests that the
"National Security Act of 1947 has given our Intelligence a
more influential position in our government than Intelligence
enjoys in any other government." That didn't much upset any-
body on campus then-perhaps because during the 50s that
same Allen Dulles had provided a sanctuary in his CIA for many
a projected "victim" of Senator Joe McCarthy's badgering
search for security risks in high places.
Stewart Alsop, who despised McCarthy, noted in The
Center (Harper & Row, 1968), how Allen Dulles had "bravely
defended" top CIA man William Bundy "against an attack by
Joseph McCarthy in the early 50s." And Merle Miller, whose
autobiographical articles on "What It Means To Be A 1-Iorno-
sexual" suddenly qualified him in 1971 to speak, at least for
the New York Times, as a moral authority on all sorts of
subjects, put in a similar good word for Dulles in an article on
Cord Meyer Jr. (titled: "Long Journey-From a One-World
Crusade to the Department of Dirty Tricks") that appeared in
the Jan. 1973 issue of Times Magazine.
Cord Meyer Jr., one needs to recall, was the wounded
war veteran who went to San Francisco in 1945 as an aide to
Harold E. Stassen at the founding of the UN, and who in the
late 40s founded the United World Federalists to "achieve
peace through a wA pr Meth tt ReJeaj 2(0*WV3/28i:
1951 and, as Miller notes, it was Allen
to do so. "But in those days," Miller a
able--even an admirable-thing for a 1
to do. It was necessary to keep the age
the reactionaries, and some years later
then still a knight in fairly shining a
government? And hadn't he named
examples?"
Meyer's presence in the CIA, e
Bundy's, had aroused McCarthy's wrat
prevailed upon him to call off public
of national security." But McCarthy i
of a thick FBI dossier, that Meyer
"trial" lasted several months. But, as
it had a happy ending. "On Thanks
Dulles called Meyer to say that his bri
factory, that the charges had been dr
return to work the following Monday.
Throughout the Eisenhower and
McCarthy credentials kept the CIA
liberal criticism. The Invisible Govern
Thomas B. Rose didn't appear until
bullet had brought Lyndon Johns
Advertised as an expose, it became a
detailed review of the-abortive Kenned
invasion of Castro's communist strop
criticism was more implied than state
had cancelled the essential second air
Bissell,CIA architect of the invasion,
mind to the President when Dean Ru
over-as was also the fact that the ag
inception as an ant i-McCarthyite haven
ing of the potential dangers, the a
Government drew precisely the sort
have prompted a Cord Meyer to join t
"The solution lies not in dismantlin
bringing it under greater control."
A change came for the CIA
revolutionary strategy of the momen
sanctuaries-particularly elitist uni
centers-be singled out as targets
protests. Ramparts magazine, in the
thus chose to reveal the obvious; na
had recruited Cord Meyer in 195
"recruit" almost the entire elitist i
Indeed, while recruiting Meyer in 195
supply funds to set up MIT's Center
headed by Walt Rostow, who late
national security affairs. By 1967, i
academic groups had become incred
headed it? Cord Meyer Jr. Why h
moment to publicize Meyer's role?
President Johnson might soon be o
for cleaning out the CIA's university
in fact soon thereafter offered righ
Defense Secretary Robert McNamar
Ales vdho pressed him
eral and humane man
cy out of the hands of
idn't McGeorge Bundy,
or, say that there were
than any place else in
eyer as one of the best
. Vice-President Nixon
earings "in the interest
sisted, on the strength
e purged. The security
iller is pleased to relate,
iving Day, 1953, Allen
f had been judged satis-
pped, and that he could
ennedy terms, its anti-
irtually immune from
ent by David Wise and
964, after an assassin's
estseller. Yet even in its
-authorized Free-Cuban
. That Kennedy himself
trike, and that Richard
had failed to speak his
handed him the phone
ever, completely veiled
ncy had served from its
In the end, while warn-
thors of The Invisible
e CIA in the first place:
this machinery but in
n 1967. The Marcusite
required that old liberal
for violent "new left"
anguard of the reversal,
ely, that the CIA which
had since gone on to
tellectual establishment.
1, it had also managed to
for International Studies
ecame LBJ's advisor for
s network of subsidized
ly vast-and, guess who
d Ramparts chosen that
Perhaps it was fear that
fered right-wing grounds
network, even as he was
-wing grounds for firing
Lest any of its readers mistake the significance of the
moved quickly to pro-
 vide a "decent" perspective. Its Man in the News feature for
March 30, 1967, was accordingly devoted to Cord Meyer Jr.
and titled "A Hidden Liberal." "In the late 1940's and early
1950's," an introductory paragraph explained, "many liberals
who wished to serve their country found in the CIA not only
a personal haven, safe from the onslaughts of McCarthyism,
but also an opportunity to bring to bear on the problems of the
cold war a realistic and liberal understanding of the pluralism
of emerging countries. Mr. Meyer and many high officials in
the CIA are cases in point."
With new leftist critics. tempted to assign Meyer "a high
place in their current demonology," the Times urged fair-
minded readers to recall that Meyer had in fact founded the
United World Federalists, that McCarthy had tried in vain to
have him purged from the CIA, and that, so far from having
turned on his old idealism, "at 47, Mr. Meyer seems no less
dedicated to the CIA than to world federalism."
The same issue of the Times carried President Johnson's
approval of a Katzenbach-John Gardner-Richard Helms recom-
mendation to discontinue CIA educational subsidies at once,
with a proviso that it be done "without destroying valuable
private organizations before they can seek new means of
support." And Stewart Alsop's The Center, published the
following year, provides this significant postscript:
"Oddly enough, after the student association and other
front organizations were blown sky-high, the man who was in
charge of them all was promoted; another bureaucratic ten-
dency. He is Cord Meyer, a liberal., and wounded war veteran
who, like Bundy was also once a target of McCarthy's charges.
Meyer is, as this is written [1968], deputy to [Thomas H.]
Karamessines, and his heir-apparent as DDP [chief of `dirty
tricks']."
In the end, the only person really hurt by the 1967 CIA
revelations was President Johnson. While Meyer moved up in
the CIA, Johnson, who might have "wished" to use the agency
to help win the war in Vietnam, moved down in the Presidency.
By March 31, 1968, Kennedy's gruff successor had been literal-
ly dumped and the CIA had ceased to be an effective instru-
ment of Presidential power.
What has happened to the CIA since the start of the
Kissinger-Nixon term is of course current news, spelled out in
headlines as one after another of the agency's remnant of loyal
functionaries is led to the pillory to confess the purposeless-
ness of his service. Cord Meyer's name has surfaced only once
during these years. And here again, as in 1967, a timely dose of
leftwing pseudocriticism has served quite unmistakably to
shield him from serious right-wing criticism.
In 1972, a story surfaced about how Cord Meyer had
tried to censor in advance a book touching on the CIA's oper-
ations in Southeast Asia. Eventually the New York Review of
Books ran a "documentary" on the affair, publishing all the
relevant papers, and soon thereafter Merle Miller made it the
focus of his Times article on Meyer from which we earlier
quoted a passage. As Miller tells the story, Meyer "went into
the offices of Harper & Row to ask, among others, his old ally
of the world government movement, Cass Canfield, to let the
CIA see "galleys" of a book, publication of which "might ...
be against the best interests of this country." The CIA eventu-
ally saw the galleys, but in the end the book was published un-
changed. The thing w plprWve8roie or Miller., baU' O Yrl 1
"Of course the CIA would try to-well, not censor books ...
just make publishers a little more timid next time . . . . You
know the only astonishing thing about the whole affair? That
Cord Meyer Jr. was the man to make the request. Not to be
believed .... It happened, though, and I wondered why."
The rest of Miller's article provided a tender review of
Meyer's career as a champion of world government, punctuated
with anguished surmises about what could have happened to
such a man to make him willing to censor books. It was just
the sort of skin-pricking that suffices to vaccinate and immun-
ize. The Times didn't offer an editorial response of its own
this time. But during the next two weeks several letters ap-
peared defending Cord Meyer and hinting at the incompetance
of an avowed-petulantly avowed-homosexual to sit in judg-
ment on a matter of such complexity as Meyer's equal dedica-
tion to world federalism and the CIA.
One such letter came from Zbigniew Brzezinski, Director
of the Research Institute on International Change at Columbia
University, a man who may soon take Kissinger's place as
advisor for national security affairs. For Professor Brzezinski,
Miller's article was "an exercise in cowardly journalism."
Of the "quotations with which the author spices his personal
attacks," it is significant, he notes, "that-with the exception
of those few that are positive toward Cord Meyer-they are all
anonymous. No respectable paper would publish an anonymous
letter, yet somehow it seems acceptable to publish a piece
based heavily for its effects on gossip and melodramatic mush
about a man who has served this country with exceptional
dedication for several decades.:"
We need to note that Professor Brzezinski is himself, like
Meyer, a long-time champion of evolutionary or indirect con-
vergence upon the common goal of an enforceable world. peace.
In his Political Power: USA/USSR, jointly authored with
Samuel P. Huntington, he had not hesitated to conclude: "It
takes a strong government to score diplomatic, political, and
military successes in a cold war. It takes an even stronger one
to negotiate detentes, to carry off retreats, and to survive re-
verses in a cold war. The American government may well be
strong enough vis-a-vis its enemies to accomplish the former;
it may not be strong enough vis-a-vis its own people to accom-
plish the latter." Those words were written before Kissinger's
ascendancy in our government. Since then we have had no end
of detentes, retreats, and reverses in the cold war. And all the
while, as if to "prove" that it takes strength to lose, our CIA
has been kept busy with worse-than-useless clandestine
activities everywhere, serving thus to substantiate the worst
sort of propaganda charges of "capitalist imperialism."
As architect of America's retreat around the world,
I
.HENRY PAOLUCCI is Professor of Governmen ;, nd
Politics at St. .John's University. He: was Eleanorax lase
Traveling Fellow and l-'ulbright Sc/wlar from .Columbia
University, where he received his Ph.D.; He--h-a- s-pubhsl,~ie
books on St. Augustine, Hegel, lrislotlc', Galileo
Machiavelli, Beccaria, Maitland, as well as on the 1968
presidential crisis and Henry Kissinger; h is articles havel
frequently, appeared on: the Times Op, Ed,pag and in
Eicropcan political journals.
R# 8' 0-13148000300010054-3' .~
 Kissinger has studiously guarded his right flank by offering the
American people hawkish doubletalk coupled with brutal
sacrifices of American lives in empty shows of strength, like
invading Cambodia, mining Haiphong, and bombing Hanoi only
after American forces in the field were in precipitous retreat.
Today, in the final phases of retreat, the hawkish cover consists
in calls for pittances of aid to abandoned puppet governments
in Southeast Asia and tongue-in-cheek protests against left-wing
disclosures of FBI and CIA dirty tricks that are dirty only
because the men who continue to perform them ought long
since to have resigned in protest against assignments manifest-
ly devoid of national purpose.
Kissinger's CIA
On taking office in 1969, Kissinger projected a complete
overhaul of national security intelligence. His Harvard colleague,
James Schlesinger, was employed to complete a restructuring
study in 1970, after which he served briefly as Chairman of the
Atomic Energy Commission before becoming Director of Cen-
tral Intelligence where he could implement directly the
Kissinger-ordered overhaul. Once that job was done, Schlesinger
moved on to his present post as Defense Secretary, and
William Colby, whose eldest son John worked for Kissinger
in the National Security Council, took over at CIA.
How Colby made it to the top in the CIA, and what
happened to Cord Meyer in the process, was reviewed in a
Times Magazine article on Colby (July 1, 1973) by David Wise,
co-author of The Invisible Government. Updating his CIA
chronicle of 1964, Wise noted that Colby was the "third chief
of Dirty Tricks to be named head of the CIA-- the two others
being Allen Dulles and Helms." After Helms left the dirty
tricks post in 1966, Desmond FitzGerald came in; but he died
in 1967-to be succeeded "by the `blackest' and least known
of the operations directors, Thomas Hercules Karamessines, a
New Yorker and Columbia graduate who served in the OSS
and worked for the CIA in Athens, Vienna, and Rome under
embassy cover."
In 1973, Karamessines seemed likely to succeed Helms
as head of the CIA. And that would probably have raised his
deputy Cord Meyer to chief of dirty tricks-just when the CIA
was about to be led, like the Armed Services and the FBI
before it, into the newsmedia pillory. How, if not why Meyer
was spared the risk of that ordeal is briefly reviewed by Wise:
" `Tom K,' as he is known among the operators, was
retired last March [1973] in the Schlesinger shakeout, along
with several other big-name spooks, like Bronson Tweedy and
Archibald B. Roosevelt Jr., both former London station chiefs.
Very prestigious station, London, and Cord Meyer Jr.has been
selected for the post. That's fine, of course, for Cord Meyer,
but not so fine for some of the old Grotonians with the
reversible names who have been put out to pasture while Bill
Colby made it to the top."
And so Cord Meyer is safe. Types far more vulnerable
are being led to the pillory as CIA spokesmen, on notice either
to resign (as James Angleton and three of his aides have recent-
ly done) or cooperate with confessions of incompetence, if not
immorality. Angleton has told friends that he was "done in"
by Kissinger because of his "outspoken doubts about the US
-CI -----_- J1314Fwoo30
forced Angleton's resignation, as on s v ral occasions .. .
appeared to blame the Secretary " for or eringthe very kinds
of covert operations that are now b ing di dged up to
humiliate CIA operatives.
Paul Nitze's Example
While Kissinger flits about the w rld expounding his
cosmopolitan dreams and keeping his secrets, the parts of our
government that depend on his guidance are rapidly becoming
empty shells staffed by hollow men. T e time requires not
rearguard defenses of such shells but exemplary resignations of
'
the kind Hanson Baldwin has urged on th military.
Consider the case of Paul Nitze, who recently resigned
as Assistant Secretary of Defense for SALT. His resignation
came on the heels of Kissinger's mud -publicized attempt,
back in May, 1974, "to achieve what hey referred to as a con-
ceptual breakthrough" on the MIRV I
breakthrough required American piecem
principle that the MIRV throw-weight
equal." That was too much for Nitze,
congressional subcommittee, "such an
accepted the negation of one of the pr
advantages which made the inequalitie
side in the Interim Agreement accepta
achieve his breakthrough at any price w
Soviet negotiators immediately seized
concession as an opportunity to demand
gaining position was thus thoroughly un
Mr. Nitze closed his testimony
"It is my view that nuclear war is best av
no potential aggressor sees grounds for
in a course of action that could pote
peace are politically useful, but do
necessarily contribute to the above assn
gentlemanly, but their meaning is plain:
able service has become impossible for a
al "agreement on the
of the two sides be
or, as he later told a
greement wouldhave
ncipal offsetting US
favoring the Soviet
e to the US side in
ssinger's eagerness to
s so obvious that the
upon his piecemeal
ore, and the US hat-
ith this admonition:
ided by assuring that
optimism in engaging
tially lead to nuclear
ing the desirability of
not, by themselves,
ance." The words are
nder Kissinger honor-
an like Nitze.
Thus for our SALT negotiators, Ias well as for our top
military, FBI, and CIA officers, Henry Kissinger's continued
dominance in government, after the d'is race of the President
who brought him in, is a destructive don
branch has failed to protect itself. And i
trial. It is "moving ponderously." as Se
in his Lincoln Day speech, "to arrest thi
States in the world." It needs guidance, r
of exemplary resignations. But mea
warns, " it has no duty to endorse erro
authority in the architect of nationa
rather] to protect the Nation from tl
Secretary of State."
finance. The executive
low the Congress is on
iator Stevenson put it
decline of the United
articularly in the form
twhile, as Stevenson
and repose unlimited
decline- [its duty is
ie egocentricity of its
. STATE O THE NAA]0N
40-05 149th PI., flushing, Y. 11354
/
policy of detente wiApp t p j?le se 1db 'I 0 18 1: - - JU01 00 -
,1 GRIFFON-11011SE I'UI;LIGATION