THE SAME OLD DIRTY TRICKS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-01448R000401580045-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 24, 2012
• Sequence Number: 45
• Publication Date: August 27, 1988
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/25: CIA-RDP99-01448R000401580045-2
ILLEGIB
- BUSH'S C.I.A.
The Same Old
Dirty Tricks
DAVID CORN
D hector of Central Intelligence, 1976-77. That's a
line in George Bush's resume that he and his sur-
rogates like to flaunt. But his year at Langley is
never discussed in detail. In his autobiography,
the Vice President mentions little of what happened while he
was in charge of the Central Intelligence Agency, reinforcing
the general impression that he was a caretaker who managed
to raise spirits at an all-but-catatonic C.I.A. by loyally
defending its interests in bureaucratic tugs of war. But there
is plenty of material in the public record to show that while
he was at the wheel, the Company was far from moribund.
Thirteen years ago the U.S. intelligence community was in
a panic. Watergate and various press reports begat a
presidential commission and two Congressional committees,
which aired the Central Intelligence Agency's dirty laundry
in public. America was treated to a string of revelations, ab-
surd and serious: assassination plots, potions that defoliate
beards, an illegal C.I.A. domestic spying operation, drug
experiments conducted on unwitting subjects. The public
pillorying of the C.I.A. and the baring of its darkest
secrets - what insiders call the family jewels - led to a loss of
face for the spooks and a free fall in Company morale.
Enter Bush, the Republican with the golden resume. Bush
was serving as U.S. envoy to China when he received the
nod in November 1975. After being confirmed on January 27, '
1976, he held the C.I.A.'s reins for 356 days. (His agency
ties may have begun years before; see Joseph McBride,
"'George Bush,' C.I.A. Agent," The Nation, July 16/23.)
Bush did spend much of his time as director trooping to
and from Capitol Hill. By his own count, he made fifty-one
appearances before members of Congress. But during the
time he was in control at the C.I.A., the agency was not, as
current mythology would have it, comatose. With Bush at
the helm, the C.I.A. bungled operations in Angola and
Iran. There is evidence- it intervened in Jamaica before the
1976 elections there. The agency was caught bugging Micro-
nesian officials. As the nation's number-one spy, Bush met
with Manuel Noriega. He suppressed crucial evidence re-
garding the assassination of Orlando Letelier, former
Chilean Ambassador to the United States. Bush also carried
on the C.I.A. tradition of using journalists as spies. Most
important, Bush opened the agency's door to a collection of
right-wing ideologues determined to press the C.I.A. into
adopting a more hawkish view of the Soviet Union.
Angola was the Nicaragua of the 1970s-attracting
would-be Rambos and obsessing U.S. policy-makers eager
Newsweek
Time
U.S. News & World Report
1`? A o_rv f~ 57
Date
for a cold war win. After Portugal announced in late 1974
that it would withdraw from its colony, civil war erupted
between various nationalist groups. The C.I.A. jumper into
the fray, backing Jonas Savimbi's Unita and another faction
against the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola
(M.P.L.A.), By August 1975 the Company had pumped
$24.7 million into its secret war, according to John
Stockwell, who served as chief of the agency's Angola Task
Force. Congress rebelled. In December the Senate passed
the Clark Amendment (named after Iowa Senator Dick
Clark), cutting off almost all C.I.A. expenditures in
Angola. The House followed suit, and on February 9,
1976-ten days after Bush had moved into his office at the
C.I.A. -President Ford signed the amendment into law.
Bush inherited the covert action in its dying days.
Despite the presidentially-approved ban, the C.I.A. tap
wasn't shut off immediately. Stockwell, in his account of the
affair, In Search of Enemies, notes that after February 9 the
agency sent an additional twenty-two flights from Zaire to a
rebel airstrip, delivering 145,490 pounds of weapons. That
month, Bush's C.I.A. also began making, in Stockwell's
words, "generous payoffs to anyone who had been associ-
ated with our side of the Angolan war." The payoffs were
sloppy. The C.I.A., Stockwell says, passed almost $2 mil-
lion to President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, most of which
he was supposed to dole out to rebel leaders now abandoned
by the C.I.A. Mobutu pocketed the cash. The C.I.A.'s
former allies "were left starving," Stockwell writes.
The Angola program was a failure. What was Bush's
response to its ignoble end? He requested that the task force
produce recommendations for awards for the more than one
hundred people who had worked on the operation. "Writing
these commendations was the ultimate challenge of my 'pro-
fessionalism,"' Stockwell says.
The shoddy disengagement from Angola at this time was
not the only agency mess over which Bush presided. On
August 28, 1976, three Americans were shot dead while
driving through Teheran. They were working on a top-secret
C.I.A. program called IBEX, a $500 million electronic and
photographic surveillance project for intelligence collecting
in the region, including the Soviet Union. From the start
IBEX was plagued with corruption and cloaked with in-
trigue. According to a Washington Post story by Bob
Woodward, a month before the assassinations U.S. Am-
bassador to Iran Richard Helms, a former C.I.A. chief, sent
a handwritten note to Bush complaining about the project
and asking Bush to check out allegations of corruption
CONTINUED
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associated with IBEX. According to an American who
visited Helms, the Ambassador told the C.I.A., "He was
totally washing his hands of the responsibility. It would all
rest on the CIA - if it failed it was going to blow up on
them. They could do what they wished." After Helms sent
his missive, "diddley was done" at the C.I.A., an intelligence
community source familiar with the IBEX project says.
Under Bush, the program-which some experts considered
a boondoggle that wouldn't work if it was ever finished-
proceeded.
For this article, I submitted several questions in writing to
Bush, including queries on the IBEX affair. He refused to
respond to any of them.
No charge better explodes the myth that the C.I.A. was
idling in neutral under Bush than the allegation that the
Company actively worked to destabilize Jamaica right
before the divisive elections of 1976. The government of
Prime Minister Michael Manley, which had turned toward
"democratic socialism" after he was elected in 1972, was up
for re-election, and the campaign was marked by much
violence. Manley suggested the C.I.A. was behind the
bloodshed. But little evidence of agency meddling sur-
faced at the time. A year later, two investigative journalists,
Ernest Volkman and John Cummings, citing interviews with
several unnamed senior intelligence officers, maintained in
Penthouse that C.I.A. intervention had been extensive.
Volkman and Cummings reported that C.I.A. officials and
assets assisted the smuggling of weapons to the island, while
conducting a full-fledged covert campaign against Manley.
The operation, allegedly the handiwork of Henry Kissinger,
was kicked off shortly before Bush arrived at Langley,
Volkman and Cummings said, and continued throughout
1976. Senior intelligence officials told the pair that an
estimated $10 million was spent trying to overthrow Manley
and that three failed assassination attempts against Manley
had occurred with C.I.A. knowledge.
"I think we should tread very carefully on governments
that are constitutionally elected," Bush said during the
Senate hearings on his nomination as Director of Central In-
telligence. In an interview with Volkman and Cummings,
one U.S. intelligence official noted, "I'm certain the original
plan for Jamaica made no mention of assassination, but
anybody with half a brain realizes that when you're dealing
with fanatical people in a volatile situation, assassination
simply becomes another option.... and while nobody in
government ordered anything like that ... we let it happen,
because it suited our purposes."
Bush's C.I.A. was embarrassed by the revelation that the
agency was conducting electronic surveillance against
representatives of Micronesia, a U.S. colony that was ne-
gotiating its future status with the United States. Accord-
ing to Woodward, who broke the story, the C.I.A. had been
snooping on the Micronesians for the previous four years to
learn their private negotiating strategy. The C.I.A. contend-
ed that. even though agency surveillance of U.S. citizens is il-
legal, the Micronesians were legitimate targets because they
were foreigners. "It's a disgrace," one Justice Department
official told Woodward. "To look at this issue in narrow
legal terms is to miss the `Ugly American' quality."
Bush also continued the controversial practice of using
journalists as informants. In February 1976, Bush made a
pledge: "Effective immediately, the C.I.A. will not enter
into any paid or contractual relationship with any full-time
or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S.
news service, newspaper, periodical, radio, or television net-
work or station." (At the time of Bush's announcement, the
C.I.A. was employing about fifty members of U.S. media
organizations.) This categorical-sounding statement was
widely interpreted to mean the end of the agency's subven-
tion of journalists. But in April, the Senate Select Commit-
tee on Intelligence Activities revealed that the C.I.A. intend-
ed to keep on its payroll more than twenty-five journalists or
other representatives of news organizations.
The select committee expressed its "concern that the use
of American journalists and media organizations for clan-
destine operations [was] a threat to the integrity of the
press."
Had Bush lied in February? Well, not exactly. The key
word in his declaration was "accredited." The C.I.A. inter-
preted it to mean only journalists who are issued credentials
as correspondents. That left available for recruitment
freelance reporters and news executives. Bush merely was
showing that he could be as slippery as the next spook. He
did the same in July, when he admitted in an affidavit that
C.I.A. files contained information on Americans living
overseas who had been targets of surveillance and break-ins.
But in his statement, filed in connection with a lawsuit
brought by the Socialist Workers Party against the C.I.A.
and other agencies, Bush would neither confirm nor deny
that C.I.A. agents had conducted the break-ins and eaves-
dropping, and he did not indicate whether the government
had discontinued its spying on Americans abroad.
While at Langley, Bush had the pleasure of meeting
Manuel Noriega. When recently deposed by attorneys for
the Christic Institute, Donald Gregg, Bush's national securi-
ty adviser and a C.I.A. veteran, said Bush as Director of
Central Intelligence had a lunch conference in Washington
with several Panamanian officials, including Noriega. It is
unclear precisely what skulduggery Noriega was up to at the
time. But, according to investigative reporter Seymour
Hersh, the United States then possessed "hard evidence"
linking Noriega to drug dealing and other criminal enter-
prise. U.S. intelligence, Hersh reports, knew that Noriega
was directly involved in the gruesome killing of the Rev.
Hector Gallegos, a priest who helped peasants organize a
cooperative market. Gallegos was thrown, alive, from a
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helicopter. What did Bush know about Noriega's shady ac-
tions before meeting with him? Did he broach the subject
with Noriega or any of the other Panamanians? Did Bush as
director turn a blind eye, as successive Administrations have
done, to Noriega's brutality?
There are also persisting questions about Bush and the
agency's conduct before and after the Letelier assassination.
In September 1976, Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, an
American, were killed in a car-bombing on Washington's
Embassy Row. According to John Dinges and Saul
Landau's account, Assassination on Embassy Row, Bush
and other top C.I.A. brass kept critical information from
the Assistant U.S. Attorney handling the case. Two weeks
after the killing, Bush agreed to provide material to the
F.B.I. "But the CIA withheld ... the information that
Deputy Director Vernon Walters, a few weeks before the
assassination, had learned about a covert mission to Wash-
ington by two Chilean intelligence officers" who were
members of the assassination team, write Dinges and Lan-
dau. Bush, they declare, had personally read a cable report-
ing the Chileans' secret trip. When the two officers arrived,
an employee of the Chilean Embassy in Washington called
Walters at Langley. Did Bush, Walters or anyone else try to
figure out what the Chileans were up to? Dinges and Lan-
dau say there is no certain answer to that question.
"It is quite beyond belief," they write, "that the CIA is so
lax in its counterespionage functions that it would simply
have ignored a clandestine operation by a foreign intelli-
gence service in Washington." Either it was lax or it was
something much worse-complicit in Letelier's murder. As
the two authors reasonably argue, any warning to the
Chileans by the C.I.A. or the State Department would have
scuttled the assassination mission.
The agency's failure to turn over promptly the evidence of
the hit team's presence in Washington, Dinges and Landau
show, delayed the criminal investigation. Instead, Bush's
C.I.A. pushed the line that the Chilean military junta was
innocent. "The CIA has concluded that the Chilean secret
police were not involved in the death of Orlando Letelier,"
Newsweek reported three weeks after the slaying. Bush, The
Washington Post reported, shared that view. Two and a
half years later, the head and two officials of Chile's secret
police were indicted for Letelier's murder. So much for
Bush's 1976 assessment.
Exactly what Bush the spymaster knew and did about
IBEX, Noriega, Letelier and Jamaica is not easy to pin
down. Like Ronald Reagan, Bush is not a hands-on, detail-
oriented manager. A recent Washington Post profile of
Bush portrayed him as a C.I.A. director disengaged from
substance, a great equivocator who ran away when con-
fronted by a difficult issue. But one crucial decision he ac-
tually did make. That was to turn over the agency to a group
of conservative hawks, who contaminated its analysis of
Soviet power.
In June 1976, Bush handpicked seven conservatives to
draft their own version of the annual intelligence estimate
of Soviet strategic intentions. His chief criterion for selec-
tion was that the appointees have a pessimistic view of
Soviet aims. Those who passed muster included Richard
Pipes, a professor at Harvard; retired Lieut. Gen. Daniel
Graham, who would go on to form the pro-Star Wars
lobbying group Americans for the High Frontier; and Paul
Nitze, then the godfather of Washington hawks. Bush hand-
ed the group-dubbed Team B-the same highly classified
raw intelligence data used by the C.I.A.'s in-house experts.
Before Team B, cranky conservatives inside and outside
the intelligence community had complained that the C.I.A.
had gone soft on the Russians by wrongly concluding that the
Soviet Union desired strategic parity with the United States,
not superiority. Leading the charge was Maj. Gen. George
Keegan, who in 1976 was head of Air Force intelligence.
Keegan for years had claimed the Russians were preparing
to attack the United States.
Team B and the agency's analysts clashed. It was "an ab-
solute disaster for the C.I.A.," one intelligence officer said
in 1976. And the result was predictable. The hard-liners
found that the Russians were indeed striving for superiority
over the United States. Bush adopted their views as official
C.I.A. policy. This "more somber"-in the agency's lingo -
estimate, completed in December 1976, helped shape U.S.
and Soviet relations for the coming years.
"The so-called Team B report has had dramatic and con-
tinuing impact on the defense debate in the United States,
especially in Congress," wrote Arthur Macy Cox, a former
C.I.A. and State Department official, in 1980. "But the
Team B findings ... are based on misinterpretations of the
facts." Team B, for instance, asserted the Russians had
doubled their military spending, but, as Cox noted, this view
misrepresented C.I.A. intelligence showing that the share of
the Soviet gross national product devoted to military expen-
ditures was twice as high as the 6 to 8 percent previously
estimated. This meant not a doubling in military spending
but that "Soviet defense industries are far less efficient than
formerly believed," in the words of a C.I.A. report. Bush
and Team B had engaged in statistical legerdemain. The
Team B affair was a boon to future Reaganauts. It paved the
way for the hawks who did battle with Jimmy Carter and
then found a home - and jobs - in the Reagan Administration.
Back in 1976, Bush knew that the talents and experience
of a spook are not necessarily what most Americans look
for in their presidential candidates. "As far as future pros-
pects for elective office were concerned," he writes in his
autobiography, Looking Forward, "the CIA was marked
DEAD END." He probably still correctly reads the popular
attitude about working in the C.I.A.: Someone has to do it,
but it's a dirty job. No doubt that's why he chooses not to
talk about Angola, IBEX, the Letelier murder and the other
above-mentioned episodes. Hence, the convenient myth.
Nothing happened at the C.I.A. while Bush the cheerleader
was in command. Sounds like a pretty good cover story. ^
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/25: CIA-RDP99-01448R000401580045-2