SPY STORIES HONORABLE MEN [AND] SILENT MISSIONS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP81M00980R002000100028-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 1, 2004
• Sequence Number: 28
• Publication Date: May 21, 1978
• Content Type: NSPR

Sectiod 7 Copyright' 1978 The New York Times Ca All rights reserved.
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IIONOJIIIOLE MEN
My Life in the CIA:
.;:By William Colby.
Illustrated. 493 pp. New York:
Simon and Schuster. $12.95.
By Vernon A. Walters.
Illustrated. 654 pp. New York: Doubleday & Co. $12.95.
By THOMAS POWERS
When the Central Intelligence. Agency's secrets
began to tumble out in their melancholy profusion
three years ago, veterans of the agency warned that it
would not be easy to put the lid back on, more ques-
.lions would be raised than answered, and the process
.demoralized disarray. At the time, such arguments
were roughly dismissed as disingenuous, motivated
less by honest concern for "national security" - fast
replacing patriotism as the last refuge of scoundrels
Thomas Powers, who won a Pulitzer Prize for na-
tional reporting in 1973, Is completing a book on Rich-
ard Helms, former Director of the C.I.A.
d F b%_q Page 1
21 May 19 78
- than by fear of embarrassment. But it turns out the
Cassandras were absolutely right: the code-breaking
computers may still be humming, the satellites click-
ing off their high-resolution photos and the mighty
river of paper working its way toward the National Se-
curity Council, but nothing else is the same. The intel-
ligence community is divided and confused, just as
predicted, and there is probably no better place to go
for a glimpse of the awful mess than the memoirs of
William Colby, Director of the C.I.A. from 1973 to 1976.
It may come as a surprise to most readers to learn
that the intelligence community blames Mr. Colby,
not nosy reporters or the Congressional investigators
of 1975, for the uglier revelations of recent years, but
that Is the case. Few men have suffered such disso-
nant reputations. The'public probably remembers Mr.
Colby best as the architect of the notorious Phoenix
program in South Vietnam, which totted up the deaths
of at least 20,000 Vietcong political cadremen; or as a
peripheral Watergate figure who, in his own words,
"danced around the room" to avoid giving John Ehr-
lichman's name to the Federal prosecutors. But for
C.I.A. people, Mr. Colby is the man who may have
wrecked the agency with his decision to let out the
"bad secrets" concerning assassination plots, domes-
tic intelligence programs, illegal drug-testing and the
like. While at least one segment of the public is In-
clined to see Mr. Colby as a war criminal, his former
comrades think of him as a prig and snitch, a turncoat
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(or worse) who delivered secret files by the cartload
to the Pike and Church committees, who told a re-
porter about the C.I.A.'s illegal mail-intercept pro-
gram in order to engineer the removal of an arch-
rival, and who gave the Justice Department evidence
that suggested that Mr. Colby's immediate predeces-
sor but one, Richard Helms, had lied to the Semite
about C.I.A. political operations in Chile. When Mr.
Colby finally left the C.I.A. early in 1976, his departure
was not loudly lamented.
At first, or even third, glance William Egan Colby
seems an unlikely candidate for such heated
controversy. His appointment as Director of Central
Intelligence In mid-1973 seems to have been made in a
Continued on Page 32
fit of absent-mindedness while
Richard M. Nixon was busy
plugging leaks in the White
House levees. Certainly there
was nothing inevitable about it.
For the most part Mr: Colby's
years in the C.I.A. were unex-
ceptional, a steady climb from
job to job in a. manner that nei-
ther made - enemies nor left
much by ? way of anecdote
among his friends. In the early
1950's he organized stay-behind
nets in Scandinavia to harass
Russian occupiers in the event
of a third world war. A few
years later, he orchestrated
C.I.A. support in Italy for the
Christian Democrats and
backed the "opening to the left"
that brought Italian Socialists
into the Government, despite
opposition (by the C.I.A.'s
James Angleton, among others)
contending that the Commu-
nists would not be far behind.
In 1959 Mr. Colby moved on to
Vietnam to help gear up for the
war he still feels we never
should have lost. As chief of sta-
tion in Saigon, chief of the Far
East division in the clandestine-
services section of the C.I.A.
and head of the Phoenix pro-
gram, Mr. Colby spent 12 years
trying to do what the French
had failed to achieve before
him. Vietnam absorbs the larg-
est
part of his book, as it did his
life, and one is tempted to linger
over his astonishing (to me) ina-
bility to notice any but the most
particular causes of failure.
There is something odd about a
than who ' can cite so many
-'weaknesses in us - a fickle
United States Congress, . a
gloomy American press, an ig-.
.norant American public, a fire-
power-mad American military
"~wlthout ever seeming to no-
tice that American help was not
,,the solution' but the problem. I
,A,- kept expecting Mr. Colby to con-
clude that we'd have done better
if we had done less, but his style
of post-mortem is maddeningly
narrow., in the end, he says, the
collapse of Saigon was caused
by the threat of an American aid
cutoff. This is like saying that
the cause of a fatal air crash
..was harsh impact with the
ground. It will not win any
awards' for unraveling cause
and effect.
But this is ancient history,
and Pretty vague history at
'that: If you want to know what
the C.I.A. did during Mr. Col-
by's tenure, you had better read
"Decent Interval," Frank
Snepp's account of the fall of
Saigon, or, "In Search of
Enemies," John Stockwell's
Just-Published story of the III-
fated Intervention in Angola.
The latter was a foolish and
cynical undertaking of a sort
that apparently held a special
appeal for President Nixon and
Secretary of State Henry Kiss-
inger. In Angola, as iii Chile and
Kurdistan, the C.I.A.'attempted
to inflate inherently weak local
forces, because Mr. Kissinger
had the idea It would serve
United States Interests else-
where, mainly by convincing
the Russians (as he thought)
that we could still poke a stick in
their eye, despite Vietnam. Mr.
Stockwell's detailed account of
the Angola debacle has the ca-
pacity to make you mad all over
again, not so much at the way
the C.I.A. goes about its busi-
ness as at the sheer institutional
enthusiasm it puts Into opera-
tions that amount to whims on
the part of Presidents and their
foreign policy advisers. The
C.I.A. just can't say no. For Mr.
Colby, however, Angola was
only an episode, one, more em-
barrassment in a larger crisis of
confidence that threatened to
destroy the agency altogether.
From the C.I.A.'s point of
view, Watergate was the foot in
the door,, providing Congres-
sional investigators with their
first real look at the agency's
paper and tables of organiza-
tion. When the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence Ac-
tivities began its investigation
in 1975 the spell had been
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broken: the C.I.A. was fair
game, protected neither by
mystique nor by President Ger-
ald R. Ford. But despite Mr.
Ford's retreat - he believed in
secrets, but wouldn't fight to
keep them - the consensus at
C.I.A. headquarters in Langley,
Va., was Mr massive resist-
ance. No one was using the word
"stonewall," perhaps, but that
was certainly what they had in
mind.
It would have worked; as it.
had worked so often in the past,
but for one fact: Mr. Colby had
'decided the time had come to
surrender the bad secrets. To
the amazement and horror of
most of his colleagues in the
C.I.A., he elected to cooperate
with the commission headed by
Vice President Nelson A.
Rockefeller, and, .later, with
Senator Frank Church. If they
would take care of the good se-
crets, he would hand over pretty
much everything the investiga-
tors asked for. Mr. Ford and
-Mr. Kissinger were as opposed
to this as most C.I.A. people,
and Mr. Rockefeller, a lifelong
admirer of strong executives,
'tried in his way to tell Mr. Colby
.this was a whitewash they were
conducting up here, not an in-
vestigation. "Bill," Mr. Colby
quotes him as saying, "do you
ti
-really have to present all this
material to us?"
Mr. Colby felt he did, support-
ing his decision with two argu-
ments. First, he felt that the
practice of intelligence in
America had to be subject to the
Constitution, which he took to
mean that it must be equally re-
sponsible to the President and
Congress. The days of the Sen-
ate's automatic deference to the
White House in foreign-policy
matters were over. The C.I.A.,
In Mr. Colby's view, could no
longer serve as the President's
personal Saturday-night gun.
Second, Mr. Colby made a dis-
tinction between the "good se-
crets" - the names of agents,
the technical details of collec-
tion systems and so on - and
the "bad secrets," which in-
volved lapses of judgment,
"excesses" and outright
crimes. Mr. Colby felt things
had gone too far to keep the bad
secrets secret any more, that it
would be better to surrender
them all at once and it would be
better for the country to know
than to imagine the worst. Once
the secrets were out, he said,
they would not look so bad.
Mr. Colby was alone then, and
he is still almost alone. His
critics in the intelligence com-
munity think his approach was
a mistake of horrendous magni-
tude - a kind of institutional
suicide - because it betrayed
the trust of intelligence officers
and agents who acted in good
faith; because it infected the
world of intelligence with the
posturing and hypocrisy of pub-
lic men attacking the agency in
public for what they might ap-
prove quietly in private; and be-
cause it exposed an enormous
wealth of exact detail about the
C.I.A. to the scrutiny of hostile
intelligence agencies, who are
good at nothing if not the extrac-
tion of knowledge from the
scantiest facts. Letting Senator
Frank Church rummage about
in the C.I.A.'s past, Mr. Colby's
critics felt, was the functional
equivalent of giving the K.G.B.
a guided tour. That these things
were done was bad enough; that
they were allowed to be done
was worse, a sign of confusion,
timidity, surrender and de
moralization.
But that was not Mr. Colby's
worst crime, in the view of some
of his old colleagues. The worst
was an act so egregious and ill-
advised, so destructive and dis-
arming (in the literal sense)
that C.I.A. people will tell you in
a level voice that Mr. Colby's
decisions as Director of Central
Intelligence were completely
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consistent with those one might
expect of an enemy agent. The
silence that follows this bald ob-
servation, generally delivered
with direct eye contact, indi-
cates it is intended absolutely
`seriously, which I take to be evi-
dence of just what awful shape
the C.I.A.- is in. What did Mr.
Colby do to invite such hostility
and suspicion? He junked coun-
terintelligence. -
This is a subject - alluded to
but not elaborated upon in Mr.
Colby's memoirs - about which
two things might be said: it is
complicated and it does not lend
itself to clear formulation or an-,
swer, especially by outsiders.
Nevertheless, here, in extreme
summary, is what the argument
is about:
The first job of an' intelligence
agency is to protect itself from
penetration, lest it fall under the
1 control of an enemy. For nearly
20 years, until Mr. Colby dis-
charged him in 1975, counterin-
telligence in the C.I.A. was in
the hands of James Angleton. A
man with brains, tenacity and
appetite for detail, Mr. Angle-.
ton was also characterized by a
degree of intellectual arrogance
that made it hard for him to
admit he'd been wrong about
anything, from the motives of
an agent to a prediction of the
weather.
Over.the years, Mr. Angleton
developed a profound respect
for K.G.B. scheming and devil-
ish strategem. He detected Rus-
sian string-pulling everywhere,
scoffed at just about every bit of
hard-won secret intelligence as
being a clever Russian plant,
and argued that a longterm
Russian master plan was gradu-
ally putting its agents into every
government and intelligence
service of the non-Communist
world. Pretty soon, only Mr. An-
gleton would be left on "our"
side. His-skepticism was so deep
that many of his colleagues, in-
cluding Mr. Colby, concluded,
that he'd lost his grip and turned
into a. paranoiac nut.
Mr. Angleton's argument in
his own defense, according to
those who have heard bits and
pieces of it, is of a sort that sim-
ply cannot be summarized. One
can say only that it is heavily
factual in nature, that it is
based on an intimate knowledge
of Soviet-bloc intelligence serv-
ices, that it is plausible in many
particulars, that it is possible he
may be completely right and
that we are never going to know.
Here the awful mess cited above
threatens to transcend itself, to
rise to a higher plane on which it
:.becomes the Platonic ideal of
messiness, a mess of metaphys-
ical intractability.
Bewildering to outsiders, the
Angleton-Colby dispute never '
theless lies near the heart of the
current disarray of American
intelligence. Counterintelli-
gence is to intelligence as. T
epistemology is to philosophy.
The problems have to do with-
ways of knowing, are funda-
mental to the discipline and
offer heavy advantage in debate
to those who are skeptical of ap-
pearances. Mr. Angleton, in
fact, might be called the Bishop -
Berkeley of intelligence,- a man
who insists that how we know
things is a problem slipperier
than it seems.
Debate of this sort does not.
appeal to Mr. Colby's tempera-
ment. Years of experience in
the business of intelligence "--. '
although not, for the most part,,
on the classic agent-running end
of it-convinced Mr. Colby that -
Mr. Angleton's obsession with
counterintelligence was without
profit. Tired of wrangling, Mr.
Colby simply got rid of it, pretty
much in the mood of Samuel
Johnson, who kicked a stone and
pronounced, "Thus I refute.
Berkeley!" Of course, Mr.
Colby did not excise counterin-
telligence entirely; but his
critics say he reorganized' the
life out of it.
- At the heart of the current in-
telligence mess, then, are two'
questions posed by Mr. Colby:
Can American intelligence be
conducted successfully within a
constitutional framework -
that is, with a dual responsibil-
ity to both the President and the
Congress? And can it safely dis-
pense with the melodramatics
of counterintelligence?
The heat with which these
questions are debated in intelli-
gence circles has to do with the
fact that a "no" in either in-
stance means Americans will-
pretty much have to get along
without any secret intelligence
service at all, as we did before
World War II. I'm inclined to
think Mr. Colby -was right on
both counts - a C.I.A. working
exclusively for the President is-
bound to produce as much trou-
ble as benefit; and the K.G.B.'s:
master plan will turn out a
Potemkin village - but both.
questions are very far from
being settled.
Mr. Colby's book is impor-
tant, a serious treatment of a
serious subject, but at the same
time it is flavorless. This is al-
most certainly not the fault of
Mr. Colby's collaborator, Peter
Forbath, an able writer whose
recent book. "The River
Congo," shows he has a fine ca-
#;F'pacity for rich narrative and
'.evocative description, given his
,rein. In this instance he has
been held in pretty tightly. By
all accounts, including Mr. Col-
by's, the first version of his book
set a record for soporific opaci-
ty. Mr. Forbath has rescued it
from the deep camouflage of bu-
reaucratese, but beyond that
not even talent could take him.
This is partly the result of his
readers' jaded appetites: we
have grown used to revelations.
But if Mr. Colby's book ever had
.any, they were excised by the
C.I.A. before publication. Even
the color of men's eyes seems to
have been treated as a state se-
cret. But we are all adults now,
and ought to be able to make our
meals' of solid,: honest stuff,
without condiment, if neces-
sary. More damaging to the
book,' however, is the impas-
sive, almost muffled quality to
Mr. Colby's voice - the fact
that he approaches his main
points In a guarded manner - '
as well as a certain confusion of
purpose. His memoirs are ad-
dressed to the public, but they
are. aimed at his one-time
friends and colleagues, in
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particular Richard Helms. The.
title Is borrowed from Mr.
Helms's 1971 remark - "The
nation must to a degree take it
on faith that we too are honora-
ble men, devoted to her serv-
ice" - and Mr. Colby is at pains
to explain why he felt compelled
to tell the Justice Department
that Mr. Helms might have been
guilty of perjury. Mr. Helms is
not likely to accept the explana-
tion, but it shows every sign of
being earnestly intended.
If Mr. Colby's memoirs must
be read in a dutiful spirit, the
autobiography of Maj. Gen.
Vernon A. Walters, "Silent Mis-
sions," can be approached with
no other purpose in mind than
sheer pleasure. General Wal-
ters was a bit-player In Water-
gate - Deputy Director of the
C.I.A. when Mr. Nixon tried to
pressure the agency into pinch-
' ing off the F.B.I.'s investigation
- but that only takes up a single
chapter, most of it familiar,
with one or two exceptions of de-
tail and nuance. It is the rest of
General Walters's unexpected
life that makes his great block
of a book worth reading.
General Walters is a man
easy to misjudge. To begin with,
he does not appear ever to have
commanded so much as a detail
of kitchen police, but instead
built his military career on a fa-
cility for languages, surefooted-
ness and discretion, and an ap-
pealing personality. A lifelong
bachelor with a self-confessed
taste for medals, promotion and
candy, he writes almost entirely
in simple declarative sentences.
There are as few commas in his
-book as there are doubts about
the utility of military strength,
or the Iniquity of Communists.
. Not a promising mix.
But, as it turns out, General
Walters is the Shakespeare of
the simple declarative sen-
tence. He has a shrewd eye for
character and a prodigious
memory, aided by the diaries
that he began when young and
now has mined for his book. By
now these diaries must be stag-
geringly voluminous; I hope
they will be carefully protected,
as they deserve - not only for
the fund of historical and per-
sonal detail they contain, but for
a more elusive quality: General
Walters is a very funny man.
His chapters on General Mark
Clark and former Premier Mo-
hammad Mossadegh of Iran
achieve a comic intensity that is
rare in official memoirs, or any-
where else. W. Averell Harri-
man, Mr. Nixon in Venezuela,
Charles de Gaulle, Henry Kiss-
inger and a rich cast of lesser
figures have probably been cap-
tured more vividly by General
(Walters than they will ever be
again. He may not say every-
thing there is to say about his
subjects, but what he says
brings them to life.
But the best thing about the
book is the character of the man
himself. Ile is honest and unpre-
tentious, loyal to his religion
and his country, steadfast in his
faith in free societies, proud of
his achievements, respectful
and admiring of greatness in
men he has known. It is General
Walters's special gift to make
the world seem straightforward
and comprehensible. The char-
acter of the man seems to re-
deem his most outrageous opin-
ions, which are infrequent but
.uncompromising. At one point
.he describes a conversation
with a Chinese official in Paris
about the proper remedy for
heroin addiction. General Wal-
?ters says that if it were up to
him, he would execute the traf-
fickers. The Chinese official sol-
emnly agrees. This is the sort of
opinion that normally would
make me surly; coming from
General Walters, it is positively
reassuring. Exactly how he
achieves this remarkable ef-
fect, I cannot say. ^
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