WHO KILLED THE CIA?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000404610002-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 6, 2010
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: October 1, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/06: CIA-RDP90-00552R000404610002-6
ARTICLE APZUM
ON PAGE aS_
Who Killed the CIA?
The Confessions of Stansfield ~
Edward Jay Epstein
ADMIRAL Stansfield Turner commanded
a destroyer, a guided-missile cruiser,
a carrier task force, a fleet, and the prestigious
Naval War College before he was shunted away to
a NATO post in Italy in 1975. When he was
abruptly summoned back to Washington in Feb-
ruary 1977 by his former classmate at Annapolis,
President Jimmy Carter, he expected to be ap-
pointed to a high naval position or to the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. Instead, the new President asked
him to be Director of Central Intelligence (DCI).
Although Turner had had little previous ex-
perience in intelligence, he viewed it simply as a
problem of assessing data, or, as he described it to
his son, nothing more than "bean counting." Ac-
cepting the position of "chief bean counter," he
assumed that he could bring the CIA, and Amer-
ican intelligence, to the same standard of opera-
tional efficiency he had brought the ships under
his command. The four-year effort to achieve this
goal is the subject of his book, Secrecy and De-
mocracy: The CIA in Transition.'
He quickly found, however, that the CIA was a
far more complex and elusive entity than he had
expected. To begin with, the acting CIA Director,
Henry Knoche, rather than behaving like a ship's
"executive officer," surprised Turner by refusing
his "captain's" first order: a request that Knoche
accompany him to meetings with congressional
leaders. As far as Turner was concerned, this was
insubordination (and Knoche's days were num-
bered). When he met with other senior executives
of the CIA at a series of dinners, he found "a dis-
turbing lack of specificity and clarity" in their
answers. On the other hand, he found the written
CIA reports presented to him "too long and de-
tailed to be useful." He notes that "my first en-
counters with the CIA did not convey either the
feeling of a warm welcome or a sense of great
EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN, whose books include Legend: The
Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald and Inquest: The War-
ren Commission and the Establishment of Truth, is cur-
rently completing a book on international deception. His
articles in COMMENTARY include "Disinformation: Or, Why
the CIA Cannot Verify an Arms-Control Agreement" (July
1982) and "The War Within the CIA" (August 1978).
competence"-an asse
ment of many of these senior officers.
Turner was further frustrated by the system of
secrecy that kept vital intelligence hermetically
contained in bureaucratic "compartments" within
the CIA. Not only did he view such secrecy
as irrational, he began to suspect that it
cloaked a wide range of unethical activities. He
became especially concerned with abuses in the
espionage division, which he discovered was
heavily overstaffed with case officers-some of
whom, on the pretext of seeing agents abroad,
were disbursing large sums in "expenses" to them-
selves, keeping mistresses, and doing business with
international arms dealers. Aside from such petty
corruption, Turner feared that these compartmen-
talized espionage operations could enmesh the en-
tire CIA in a devastating scandal. The potential
for such a "disgrace," as he puts it, was made
manifest to him by a single traumatic case that oc-
curred in the 1960's-one which he harks back to
throughout his book, and which he uses to justify
eliminating the essential core of the CIA's espio-
nage service.
The villain of this case, as Turner describes it,
is James Jesus Angleton, who was chief of the
CIA's counterintelligence staff from 1954 to 1974;
the victim was Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who
began collaborating with the CIA in 1962 and
then defected to the United States in 1964, and
who claimed to have read all the KGB files on Lee
Harvey Oswald. The crime was the imprisonment
of Nosenko, which, according to Turner, was "a
travesty of the rights of the individual under the
law." It all began in 1964, after Nosenko arrived
in the United States. Turner states that Angleton
"decided that Nosenko was a double agent, and
set out to force him to confess. . . . When he
would not give in to normal interrogation, Angle-
ton's team set out to break the man psycholog-
ically. A small prison was built, expressly for him."
Nosenko was kept in this prison for three-and-
one-half years, although he never admitted to be-
ing a double agent. He was then released and sub-
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/06: CIA-RDP90-00552R000404610002-6