THE TRENCHCOATS RETRENCH

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91B00134R000400130009-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 4, 2009
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: February 1, 1981
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2009/02/04: CIA-RDP91 B001 34R000400130009-7
VOTHER JONES
0151 PAGE _..__ Feb./March 1981
T he morning after the Re-
publican election victory,
Louis. Wolf went to 'work as
usual in the National Press
Building, a few blocks from
the White House. Bleary-eyed
from the long election night;
Wolf bought coffee at the take-
out counter in-the. lobby and, i
with 'an armload of newspa
pers, slipped into the elevator`
crowded with reporters for the
five-floor ride to his office.'
. By::four o'clock 'that after-
noon;- the!?slirn' 40-year-old
man began- pasting strips of
copy on layout'..sheets for his
publication. On the strips were
names-names of Central In-
telligence Agency undercover
officers in American embas-
sies around the world.' - -
Lou Wolf has. been exposing
the identities of CIA agents for
about five years now. He and?.
his associates.-Washington".
D.C., -.attorney-, William
Schaap. and filmmaker- Ellen .
Ray=have; with the help of renegade for=
mer CIA agent Philip Agee, ripped the
,cover off more than 2,000 officers in the
'pages of their journal, Covert Action In-
formation Bulletin; and in two books: Dir-
.ty Work l: the CIA in Western Europe and
Dirty Work 11: the CIA in Africa.
The CIA,-.and now the-Congress, has
labeled these.four.people everything from
traitors to Russian agents- But for the past
five years;. legislation to put them out of
business has been stymied by a wobbly
congressional .concern for. the +First
Amendment=.and by revelations 'during
.the-.'70s of CIA misdeeds-dossiers on
American, citizens,, assassination at-
tempts, the set-up of the coup in Chile.
But now; times have changed. On. the
congressional:-docket is the Intelligence
Identities-Protection Act, . which would
make it a crime punishable by three years
in jail -and a $10,000 fine to publish the
names of CIA personnel, even ifthe infor-.
mation has: been -gathered from- public
Prospects for the bill's passage were
`' favorable even in last year's Democrat-
controlled Congress.. They have been ad-
vanced immeasurably by.:the November
defeat of half a dozen key liberals and by
the' rantings of groups like the Heritage
Foundation, demanding that Congress act
on "domestic terrorists." The bill's prob-
able passage this year will set the stage for
a classic First Amendment showdown
with unpredictable. results. In the months
ahead; the Intelligence Identities Protec-
tion Act and the constitutional issues
raised by-it-just what can journalists re-
veal about the CIA-may prove an impor-.
tint indicator of the' Reagan administra-
tion's real interest in restricting free
speech and progressive political debate...
Bill Schaap put it succinctly: "For more
than a year now, we've been saying to the
press that there's no such thing as a bill
against us and not against you." And as
Schaap has pointed out.again and again.
there are clearly unconstitutional aspects
to the act. Under: the legislation, it would
be illegal not only to publish the names of
agency
critics.
CIA personnel gathered from -public I
Approved For Release 2009/02/04: CIA-RDP91 B001 34R000400130009-7 -
sources but also to. publish
names of federal informants'
undercover in an organization
-you belonged to.
=These thorny free-speech
issues were brushed aside
when' the Senate considered
the bill :? ..:,:
ill, this get Agee?" was.
-W
all- one-senator wanted to
?know`'when 'the Judiciary
:'Committee marked up the act.
":'responded .Ted
Kennedy, his eyes fixed on the
.text'* f the legislation. The bill
stalled after passing the com-
miftee and will have to be rein-
troduced in the current session
of Congress...
When "getting Agee or
"getting Coven Action Infor-
mation Bulletin becomes the
task, when it is paramount to
'pass legislation aimed not at
restricting government infor-
mation but at restricting publi-
cation of information about
=A uncomfortable realities, then
we are faced with a constitutional. threat
T he CIA has been gritting its teeth,
over Covert Action Information, BuI. ~- .
letin (and its predecessor. Counterspy,'a
publication which continues under differ-
ent management) for years, trying unsuc-
cessfully through a 'series of propaganda
maneuvers.to rustle up widespread sup--
port for jailing its.editors. The. problems
for the journal began with the murder of
Richard Welch.
In December 1975, official Washington,
and especially the intelligence commun-
ity, was in a tumult. Nixon had been top-
pled. The Church Committee, the Rock
efeller Commissionand the press were
dragging. CIA skeletons out of the closet
one by one: Cuba; the Congo; Chile; Bra=
zil; Guatemala; and Operations Phoenix,
MK-ULTRA and CHAOS. Assassina-
tion attempts, drug testing, mail openings,
break-iris. CIA efforts to'move covertly
into Angola were thwarted by intelligence
_ :..- --
 rnuaueipma ousnca..afl11I.7, we ww .uwug LU LULuc u[ Italnuig
conscientious objector. and had joined In- names-is necessary. Just because the
ternational Voluntary Services, a church I Congress has not held public hearings on
group, to perform alternate service ( CIA misdeeds for.five years now, the.`:
And in a little suit Approved For Release 2009/02/04: CIA-RDP91 B00134R000400130009-7 and Ray agree that
ington's Dupont Circle, ::mall group 0(1~
r.c-military intelligence officers had begun:,
to publish a journal called Counterspy. In
one issue in 1974, they printed the name of
a CIA officer in Peru, one Richard Welch.
In late 1975, Welch was transferred to
Athens as CIA station chief, and Coun-
terspy noted the move in its December
issue. Two weeks later, Welch was mur-
dered;.a left-win.g.group took credit?for
the,hit...In background briefings, CIA
spokesperson Angus Thuermer blamed
Counterspy for Welds death.
In at short but meticulous review of the
Welch affair, which appeared afew weeks
kite r' irr:The Washington. Post,. however,
former Kissinger aide Morton Halperin
badly damaged the C LA s case.. "It was a.
classic disinformation -campaign ' Hal-
perin.vvrote::The Cl\itself;Halperin i
ported, had warnerli-V;elcb. not to move
into his house in arr Athens suburb;. a
house well-known to-have belonged to a
succession of CIA station chiefs. The poli-
tical atmosphere in Athens was poiso-
nous, with anti-American fever directed
largely at the, CIA. Despite a flurry of
cables between Welch and CIA headquar-
ters at Langley, Virginia,. Welch rejected
the advice:
_
_" the disinforr-tatirnrcnmpaign was .
success,": Halperiin.?note& `?rhe stories
filed out of V hingtnn on.Welch's death
that night all noted tharhe'had been.listed
in Counterspy. None mentioned the CIA
warnings to Welch astohis place of resi-
de'ce."
.-.-Inside, Counterspy,,'a-debate broke out
over the best?tactics forthe futur.."Many
of us felt we had gotten on the map, and
now was the time to ease up," said Harvey
Kahn, then a member of the group.'e
felt that continuing to name names would
just provide easy ammunition for the CIA
to attack all its critics, not just us, so, a
consensus began to take hold that we
should. continue to expose,the CIA's se-
cret foreign policy in investigative articles,
but not print lists of names.", -
It was about the time of the Welch epi-
sole that:Ellen.Ray and Bill Schaap re-
turned from: Okinawa, where they had
been counseling antiwar GIs and organiz-
ing workers at the huge Ameri can airbase.
Counterspy seemed. a logical place for
them to go to work..: '
The debate over tactics inside Counter
spy had badly- split the staff. "A lot of
'people were. saying that they ' wondered
about naming names," Ray. remembers.
-,.Arose who objected.to the confrontation
al approach were leaving. Ray. and Schaap
favored. such. tactics and eventually took
among the peasants of Laos. From 1964 to I
1967; Wolf tried to bring reading, rice and
well-digging skills to the Meo and other
Laotian peoples. But his anger grew as the
daily barrage of napalm and B-52 block-
busters brought rural Laos into the war in
Southeast Asia and blew off the map the
villages Wolf had worked to build.
-.::. In 1973, two years before Welch's mur-
three say, and just because the press has
generally retrenched on the intelligence
and intervention issues does not mean
that covert U.S. penetration of the Third
World has come to a halt. As Wolf says,
"The most provocative thing is not what
we do, but what the CIA does."
9 ' his past July.2, Lou Wolf, at a press
der, the U.S.-backed military coup I conference in Kingston, Jamaica,
crushed the elected socialist government j named 15 U.S...embassy personnel who,
of Salvador Allende in Chile, and Philip he said, were CIA undercover officers
Agee, a Jesuit who had been one of the I operating in Jamaica. A few nights later,
CIA's most talented case officers, pub-
. I
lished his book Inside The Company: CIA
Diary. Agee's turnabout-from CIA gol-
den boy in Latin America, a. dedicated,
back-alley cold warrior in the service of
America's secret police, to self-
proclaimed "revolutionary socialist"-
galled the CIA enough to go after him
with no holds barred. CIA Diary drained
Agee's mind of every agent, code name
and cover operation he could remember.
Then, Philip Agee and Lou. Wolf met in
London in 1975.
Wolf was part of a research collective of
Americans and Europeans studying the
pperations of not only the CIA but British
and French intelligence as well. Agee, fac-
lug possible U.S. prosecution, was living
in England at the time., ;.., ..
"Phil's role," Wolf explains, "was not
that of a catalyst so much as [a resource];
people came to him with information and
asked him what he thought of it. `Is this
the way you work? Does this ring true?'
And so on. He didn't have as much to do
with the gathering of names as the intelli-
gence people like to suggest." .. ? .
These days, Agee is still trying to avoid
prosecution while revealing CIA excesses.
Wolf spends most of-his time in the stacks
of the National Archives, picking through
unidentified attackers' sprayed automatic
rifle fire at the home of N. Richard Kins-
man, the man Wolf identified as the'CIA
station chief, a fact that the CIA has never
denied.
For two.years, Jamaica had.been
trapped in a tightening knot of food short-
ages, strikes and violence reminiscent of
conditions planned by the U.S. in its se-
cret campaign in Chile. At the same time,
socialist Prime Minister Michael Manley,
who had won a second term in 1976, was
fighting an unsuccessf it battle with West-
ern-dominated international banks to
finance a refitting of the Jamaican econ--
omy by diluting foreign ownership of its
-prime export' commodity, bauxite (see
"Jamaica's Hot Politics," MJ. Sept./Oct.
'80). But, like Allende in Chile in the,
1970s, Manley had to cope with the hostil-
ity of the multinational corporations and
the coolness of the U.S. government to-
ward his plans for democratic socialism.
Wolf, Schaap and Ray detected in
Jamaica another "destabilization"' cam-
paign orchestrated by the CIA. After
Wolf's. press conference and the-subse-
quent attack on Kinsman's house, more
questions were raised about CIA involve-
ment in Jamaican politics. ? =
"All we know," says Schaap about the
.?. rr:..e...n.....r:.7o... '4e rt,.,r ;. l,.r,varl rnm_
Bi
hi
'
t'
c reamer, tracing ...-
ograp
en
as
records-of employment'until he notices
something a little offbeat: perhaps a man
with three years' duty as a "political
analyst" at the Pentagon; then, a transfer
to the Agency for International Develop-
went in Chile during the Allende period;
next, a short stint with the Army as a
. 'research consultant" in Saigon before
the fall; now, a position as aU.S. official in'
El Salvador orJamaica. These are sonic of
the signs that alert Wolf to a poseur, an
undercover,,CIA officer in the ranks of the
State Department. All of this is checked
attack it was the most silly, bumbling
attack one has ever heard of. The family,
except for Kinsman, was away on vaca-
tion. The reports here said that the house
had been bombed. Now the facts of that
from Jamaican papers are that in front of
the house was a hole about the size of a
grapefruit. That was picked up here as a
'bombing.' Do you bomb a house by drop-
ping a grenade on the lawn half a football
field.away from it?" Schaap adds that
Kinsman's first move?was not to call the
police -but -to notify the Daily Gleaner,
Jamaica's anti-Manley newspaper. .
and doublechecked before any names are i
revealed. It's slogging; often boring work.
charge of the publication.
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ley was a vote for Fidel Castro.
tion to outlaw the naming'' 't IA agents
suddenly found new m'o.aentum and
sailed through a complex of House and
Senate committees. Wolf says, "There are
those who say we should have kept our
mouths shut in Jamaica, but it seems to me
just the reverse, because the nature and
scale of what we discovered there was
comparable to Chile." .: .
In late October 1980, Michael Manley's
party was overwhelmingly defeated at the
polls (losing 51 of 60 seats in the parlia-
ment) by Edward Seaga's pro-Washing-
ton. anti-Havana, business-oriented Ja-
maica. Labor Party. I went back to Wolf
and asked him to evaluate his actions in
light of the election results..-'
-'Well, ?I think we got the, idea of CIA
intervention into the Western press,"-he
said thoughtfully: "And until the election,.
I thought-we had helped stem.the tide of
forces who supported the CIA. I'm not so
sure now.
It would of course be absurd to lay. any
responsibility for Manley's defeat on.
Covert Action Information Bulletin. Vio-
lence had-already been-.endemic in
Jamaica's polarized political and econom-
ic environment, and Seaga had long been
pounding the theme that a vote for Man-
South . Africa or. Chile or El.-Salvador-
.-which isa big public debate now,'' Schaap
.says;:::`.you can discuss:it.as public issue:
::-.When the CIA is doing it secretly, that
kind of debate never occurs. :
Time and again the CIA has maintained
that it is-not debate it fears, but violence.
The agency tells Congress that-revealing
the names of agents and their activities
sets its people up Eke ducks in a shooting
gallery.: In reality, Wolf has found that
"better than half' of the CIA officers
under cover in U.S. embassies around the .
world are. kept in their assignments after
they have been named in the Bulletin.
When the U.S. gives military aid to
. discussion of the CIA.
not only to print available details of covert
actions d how the agency works but also
to nam names, ifthere :is to be open
bile the hysteria whipped up'by the
anti-Manley propagandists was
blown way out of proportion, it is instruc-
tive to note that the role Cuba had or
might play in Jamaican politics became a :
source of heated,debate during the elec-
tion. It is the lack of debate here over the
United States' continuing involvement in
Third World affairs-when our actions are
carried out secretly by the CIA-that con-
vinces the Bulletin people: it is necessary
-
ca was manufatj _ d by the CIA ornot-
and we may not know until another con=
gressional investigation comes along-
Covert Action Information Bulletin's re-
lentless naming of names still begs that
final "What if" question. What if a CIA
man or woman were to be murdered by an
armed revolutionary group-a group the
Bulletin might be sympathetic toward--
subsequent to his or hername popping up-
for the first time in the Bulletin?
To this question, Wolf, Schaap and Ray
respond with cool directness. "We've
named thousands of agents so far, and it's
never happened," says Wolf. "I'm not
saying it can't. But in any event, we are
unalterably opposed to assassination of
CIA personnel. For one thing, it gives
them- a martyr status and sympathy they
don't deserve. But the question really is,,
was that person hurt because of his or her
covert CIA activities in that country, or
because of us?" '_-
Jeff Stein is the Washingron, D.C., edit
oi
of The. Progressive and has written. foi
numerous publications.
ITING"F
SUPR-ME t't ua.Bacarwr..'last years-
information from being disclneed despite..
,_ the Freedom of Information Act'(FOIA).
Laws recently enacted exempt virtually all';
' FederaETiadeCcmmrssiortfitas aswell.as~
secunty plans and procedures: for nuclear''
power plants_lepebytheNudearRegula ;.
I torn Commbsiorr +. ; .
The FBI is tobbyuto har d to have its files:!
exemptedaswdLThebut usfervorma}
be explained in part by a US. district caure!
finding that it has been illegally destroying
field office files for years in, part: to-avoid :;
compliance with FOIArequests and.dam-
aae,suits filed bhy~[. outraged citizens.. over!
constituttonat rightsviolations.The CIA is:
also pushing. for laws to l.eep its mforma
non ,secret and the: Departments of De?
fensa:and Labor may be-grantedpartial?'
FOJA exemptionsunder proposed I
trop - -- . tix i ' f
The Ralph Nader affiliated Freedom or.
Information Clearinghouse has- more inri
formation on %i hat Congress Maybe. to
this session .. Contact the Clearinghouse at?
P.O. ?Box 19367, Washington, D.C.20036; -
?he Campaign for Political Rights has.
information about the Intelligence Identi
ties Protection Act as well as the FOIA. It
is located at. 201. Massachusetts Avenue,.:
N.E:, Washington; D.C. 20002.: --
- DeborahBranscum
.. Approved For Release 2009/02/04: CIA-RDP91 B001 34R000400130009-7