WITHOUT CLOAKS OR DAGGERS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP81M00980R000600080073-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 24, 2004
• Sequence Number: 73
• Publication Date: June 5, 1978
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

ARTICLE APPEAnr:D
0 ?ACE Approved For Release 44'9v/OISEr1(~F-RDP81 M00980R000600080073-
C sw0
WITHOUT
CLOAKS OR
DAGGERS
BY DANIEL SCHORR
RAT OLD GRAY memoir, she ain't what she used to
be. The cool twilight recollection of ancient battles has been
replaced-at least on the government-conspiracy front-by
late afternoon salvos from vanquished combatants who
have one eye on the market, the other on the target. So Bob
Haldeman snipes at Charles Colson, John Ehrlichman at
Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon at everybody and cruel fate.
And all of them blame each other-and the CIA-for our
national trauma.
Their books sell well because we feel that we have not yet
gotten to the bottom of the matter, that maybe the next
memoir will answer the still unanswered questions. But as
the volumes accumulate they merely seem to add to the mys-
tery, reinforcing an impression that Watergate was only
one incident in a more complex and longer-lasting abuse of
governmental power than we had imagined. The names of
Richard Helms, Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy, Lee Har-
vey Oswald, Howard Hughes, James Angleton and Nixon
swirl in some turbulent eddy; a line from Watergate leads
back to the Bay of Pigs, from there to Vietnam; the CIA's
Operation Phoenix, against guerrillas in Vietnam, merges
with Operation Chaos, against dissenters in America.
There has been a strange interplay between the visible gov-
ernment in the White House and the invisible government
of intelligence-the schemes of politicians crossing the
schemes of spymasters-and in the hidden recesses of pow-
er bitter conflicts erupt of which we know virtually nothing.
One of these has been a struggle for the soul of Ameri-
ca's espionage empire. It is illumined in the latest of the
memoirs, Honorable Men (Simon and Schuster, 493 pp.,
$12.95), the first authoritative view from inside the CIA.
The author, William E. Colby, had the dubious fortune of
being swept into the office of Director of Central Intel-
ligence in 1973 by the backwash of Watergate. James
Schlesinger, who succeeded the ousted Richard Helms, was
suddenly moved to the Pentagon to replace Elliot Richard-
son, who was replacing ousted Attorney General Richard
Kleindienst. It was Colby's conception that, in the post-
Watergate
atmosphere, the CIA had to be brought out of
its cave into the daylight of legality; that led to a conflict
with subordinates and superiors, and eventually got him
ousted as well.
From early on in his tenure, Colby found himself at odds
with the other OSS veterans who peopled the CIA. He was
not one of those who "cliqued together, forming a sealed
fraternity ... increasingly separated themselves from the
ordinary world and developed a rather skewed view of that
world ... an inbred, distorted, elitist view of intelligence
that held it to be above the normal processes of society."
Perhaps he was able to maintain his distance because his
wife, Barbara, made sure "my off hours were filled with
normal affairs having nothing to do with secret opera-
tions," though I suspect more was involved than that.
Still, Colby was enough a part of the "sealed fraternity"
to perceive a problem of "flap potential" rather than
morality when a post-Watergate internal investigation un-
covered improper activities such as mail-opening, drug ex-
periments on unwitting subjects, surveillance of antiwar
protesters, and assassination conspiracies. To limit the
damage, he ordered these practices discontinued or phased
out. (Instructions to redirect the surveillance operation were
pp~'I+INULJ
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 ignored, for theAppr~ mieco ForueF area n ev20004/077/08 : CIA-RDP81 M00980R000600080073-8
story- and could give assurance that the assassin had no KGB con-
example of how far the institutionalized wink can go.) nection. After working him over for three years, the CIA
However, the time when the CIA could correct its mis- finally concluded that he was authentic. Angleton main-
takes and cover its tracks without telling anyone-includ- tained-and maintains-that Nosenko was a KGB plant.
ing the President-was about to, end. The catalysts were Epstein suggests that his real mission was to divert attention
disillusioned officers and former officers privy to informa- from Oswald's prior connections with the KGB, and there-
tion in the Inspector-General's report, wryly titled "The fore that the CIA's continued use of Nosenko as an infor-
Family Jewels." Some of the jewels landed on the front mant represents blindness, or worse, Soviet penetration of
page of the New York Times in a story by Seymour Hersh the Agency.
that plunged the once-immune agency into a nightmare of Colby, who never mentions Nosenko, says he fired An-
investigation and obloquy. gleton when he came to realize the counterintelligence chief
'
Colby
s recommended strategy for coping with the dete- was doing more harm than good. He contends, for ex-
riorating situation-public confession of past misdeeds and ample, that two CIA officers were irresponsibly tagged as
emphasis on safeguards for the future-was vetoed by
President Gerald Ford, who refused to release the ex lana-
tort' report the CIA director prepare or publication.
eaters were- t en ruf` e wen Colby, heeding the ob-
struction of justice warning of Acting Attorney General
Lawrence Silberman, turned over files for possible prose-
cution-implicating Helms, among others. Colby's testi-
mony before a "blue ribbon" commission-whose purpose
was "to still the outcry and thus prevent a full investiga-
tion" by Congress-was so forthcoming that the chairman,
Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, admonished him,
"Bill, do you really have to present all this material to us?"
He was reprimanded for not consulting the White House
before authorizing release of a statement to a Senate com-
mittee, and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger needled
Colby. an observant Catholic, by suggesting that "when
you go up to the Hill, . . . You go to confession."
Small wonder, given these circumstances, that Colby fell
victim to the "Sunday morning massacre" of November 1,
1975, for going too far in his effort to purge his agency of
its past misdeeds: There were simply too many people still
around, like Kissinger and Helms, who felt threatened by
his candor (although it was Ford's own indiscretion at a
press lunc
tegest secret of a11). Colby avoids discussing who did him
an w y; in act, he generally glosses over personal con-
flict and shuns vendettas. Depersonalizing issues is prob-
ably part of being an intelligence professional-"the tradi-
tional gray man," as he describes himself.
But there is one villain in his book-the individual who
personified the "old guard" in the central struggle. He is
James Angleton, who had headed CIA counterintelligence
since the Agency was created. Angleton, operationally sub-
tle and ideologically simplistic, has already fired off his
own rocket by proxy, through Edward Jay Epstein's book,
Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald. That de-
picts Angleton as having been fired in December 1974 be-
cause he refused to accept the authenticity of a Soviet de-
fector named Yuri Nosenko-a heavily symbolic issue.
Nosenko was the KGB officer whose 1964 defection
seemed a shade too coincidental when he turned up in Ge-
neva, 10 weeks after President Kennedy's assassination,
with word that he had handled the Oswald file in Moscow'
agents, that spies ehindtheTron Curtain
fmrne y eing randed as double-agents, that
valid information and useful defectors were rejected. Be-
cause cause of Angleton, says Colby, the CIA turned down, as a
suspected provocateur, the biggest Soviet catch in history
-Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who was eagerly scooped up
by British intelligence. Moreover, writes Colby, "Angleton
had never accepted the Sino-Soviet split as genuine," and
under his influence, "we seemed to be putting more em-
phasis on the KGB as CIA's adversary than on the Soviet
Union as the United States' adversary."
Y HIS PORTRAIT of Angleton, Colby has brought in-
to focus an issue that reaches beyond the intelligence com-
munity-namely, the counterintelligence syndrome in
American life, which tends to define the unknown as hos-
tile, the enemy as omnipotent. Inward-looking, it concen-
trates on what "they" are doing to us, sometimes at the ex-
pense of what we could do to "them." In its broadest sense,
fear of penetration prompted the internment of the Nisei
after Pearl Harbor, Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch-
hunt, and the FBI's warrantless-and mostly unwarranted
-break-ins on obscure Left-wing groups. For Nixon, the
danger of penetration remains the justification for the ad-
mittedly illegal Tom Charles Huston surveillance plan.
This world view is found in particularly concentrated I
form in the CIA's "sealed fraternity." Colby proposes that
it should finally be unsealed. "Intelligence," he says, "must
accept the end of its special status in the American govern-
ment.... The public can no longer be expected to follow
Helms' 1971 admonition that it 'must take it on faith that
we too are honorable men devoted to the nation's service.' "
It is clearly with intentional irony that the author draws his
conclusion, and his title, from his disingenuous adversary
who wears his deceptions as a "badge of honor." For Wil-
liam Colby must be, by all odds, the most candid American
spymaster in history. One suspects that, in his proposals to
place intelligence under Constitutional controls, he will
have more influence with the American public than with
the intelligence community thal made hint the odd titan
out.
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