THE ODDEST COUPLE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00418R000100150035-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 15, 2012
• Sequence Number: 35
• Publication Date: April 2, 1988
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

S1 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/15: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100150035-8
The Oddest Couple
STAT ver there was William Colby, former Director
of Central Intelligence, munching a salad with
researchers who spend all their days trying to un-
cover the agency's secrets. Over here was Leslie
Cockburn, the former CBS News producer who wrote a
book on the contra drug connection, chatting up Col. Nes-
tor Pino-Marina, who testified in court on behalf of a contra
supporter deeply implicated in a plot to import 350 pounds
of cocaine into the United States. It's no surprise that odd
couples abounded at a symposium held at Tufts University
February 26-27. The subject was perhaps the oddest couple
of all: Covert Action and Democracy.
Sissela Bok, author of several well-reviewed volumes on
ethical dilemmas, opened the proceedings with a classic
liberal exposition about the dangers of deceit in govern-
ment. "Respect for truth and the law are not particularly
idealistic or unworthy," she told the overflow audience in
the auditorium of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplo-
macy. She asserted that "it is not possible to keep a secret in
a democracy. You have to realize it's going to be found out
sooner or later." She spoke clearly and gracefully. She in-
voked basic civic and humane values. She was applauded.
Daniel Ellsberg spoke next and punted Bok's pleasantries
out of the auditorium. He noted that the Central Intelli-
gence Agency's covert activities in the Gulf of Tonkin in the
summer of 1964 are still largely secret. Those activities (as
even Ellsberg's fellow panelist William Colby conceded)
provoked North Vietnam into attacking a U.S. warship.
President Lyndon Johnson used the "unprovoked" incident
as a pretext for escalating the Vietnam War. To this day,
Ellsberg observed, virtually the entire American public is
still deceived about the covert action that helped plunge the
country into a catastrophic war. "You see, not all secrets are
exposed, even twenty-three years later," he said.
One of Ellsberg's jobs in 1965 was compiling lists of Viet-
cong atrocities that could be publicly cited as justification
for the Johnson Administration's carpet bombing of North
Vietnam. Ellsberg then acknowledged the more difficult
moral question: Did the terrorism of Vietnamese Com-
munists justify the much more vast violence of U.S. bomb-
ing? Ellsberg answered by citing Nietzsche: "When you
look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
Down the speaker's table, Thomas Polgar was ruffled.
Polgar is a former C.I.A. station chief in South Vietnam, Mex-
Newsweek
Time
U.S. News & World Report
-NA-mow L *4 i
Date 2 Aat' 28
ico, West Germany and Argentina, who generously came
out of retirement to work on the staff of the Iran/contra
Congressional committees. He reminded the audience of an
unpleasant truth: Congress doesn't object to being deceived
by covert action.
"Covert action, as a policy, exists; it is legal and it is
based on funds appropriated by Congress," Polgar noted,
adding accurately, "I see no inclination in Congress to
depart from covert action. We simply want more control,
to keep covert action in the boundaries of good taste and
law." As for Ellsberg's talk of morality, Polgar said that the
"morality of covert action depends on its purpose."
When an astonished undergraduate asked Polgar if he
really believed that, Polgar recanted, which I cynically
figured was just his cover story. But Colby stepped in to
confirm just how capacious the boundaries of "good taste
and law" are for former top C.I.A. officials. For successful
covert actions, Colby stressed the need for "good local
leaders like General Vang Pao" of Laos. Vang Pao, it
should be recalled, was the General Noriega of Southeast
Asia in the 1960s: a prominent U.S. ally who befriended top
C.I.A. officials, trained pro-U.S. insurgents and, by most
accounts, amassed a fortune in drug dealing.
I snuck out to interview Colonel Pino-Marina outside the
auditorium. The colonel is a Bay of Pigs veteran who now
serves as a staff member of the Inter-American Defense Board.
He stressed that he was not speaking in any official capacity.
He blurted out his defense of Maj. Bueso Rosa, the Hon-
duran military officer sentenced to five years in jail for his
role in a complex cocaine smuggling and murder plot. "I
know this man. He had nothing to do with drugs." The idea
that Bueso Rosa had been prosecuted rankled him.
"What is the only crime mentioned in the Constitution?"
the colonel suddenly demanded. "Do you know?" He
answered himself: "Treason." And who was guilty of
treason, I asked. "Supporters of the Boland amendment,"
he said. "They have given aid and comfort to the enemy."
Another reporter and I suggested that maybe opposing contra
aid wasn't traitorous. The colonel was adamant: "When it
passed, they celebrated in Moscow, Havana and Managua.
That is 'aid and comfort."' The colonel reminded us that
the punishment for treason is death.
t"
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Back inside the auditorium it was announced that Nestor
Sanchez, a thirty-five-year C.I.A. veteran and former As-
sistant Secretary of Defense, would not be able to appear as
planned. Sanchez had sent word that he had to go to
Panama on business. The morning paper had reported an
effort in Panama to oust Gen. Manuel Noriega, who is
under indictment in the United States for drug smuggling.
Sanchez, it turns out, was well known in the Pentagon for
his support of General Noriega.
On Saturday morning the conference resumed with a
session on the Iran/contra affair. Panelist Stephen En-
gelberg of The New York Times recounted all that is not
known about the scandal. He raised the possibility that
"Oliver North was raising money for the contras as a cover
for a less socially acceptable purpose." Engelberg noted that
a reprisal raid for the bombing of the marine barracks in
Beirut had been called off. "Maybe Marine Col. Robert
McFarlane and Marine Lieut. Col. North were out for
vengeance independently."
The most intriguing presentation of the conference
followed. Steven Emerson, a senior editor at U.S. News &
World Report, explained why the C.I.A. is no longer even
half of the covert tion problem. Emerson's upcoming
book, Secret Warr: Inside the Covert Military Opera-
tions of the Reagan Era, documents the massive shift of
covert operations from the agency to the Pentagon.
As Emerson explained it, the shift began after the failure
of the hostage rescue mission in Iran in April 1980. The
planning of a second rescue attempt was assigned to Air
Force Maj. Gen. Richard Secord. The mission never came
off, but Secord's plans for improving military tactical intel-
ligence and counterterrorism capabilities became the blue-
print for the Pentagon special operations of the 1980s.
"These operations continued to grow after 1981-and
grow and grow," Emerson said. "A vehicle for military
covert actions is a network of commercial front companies
all around the world. They can be used to insert agents as in-
telligence gatherers or as commandos." According to Emer-
son, "The Pentagon leadership was not even informed of
everything that was going on." Congress knew very little.
Emerson cited one of the few Pentagon special operations
whose existence has been made public, a project known as
Yellow Fruit, which collapsed amid financial irregularities
in 1983. According to Seymour Hersh of The New York
Times, the operation ferried undercover Army operatives to
Honduras, where they trained Honduran troops for bloody
hit-and-run operations into Nicaragua. Through a private
front company, Yellow Fruit also supplied rapid-fire can-
nons to the C.I.A. operatives who mined Nicaragua's har-
bors and raided oil depots in 1984. All of these activities
were carried out in violation of Congressional legislation
barring the Defense Department and the agency from taking
any action aimed at overthrowing the Sandinistas.
Afterward, I cornered John Saxon, staff director of the
Senate select committee investigating the Iran/contra scan-
dal. Saxon had said that the Army, after a series of financial
scandals involving its top-secret covert units, had instituted
"a very tight, a very good system for maintaining secrecy
and accountability." I asked how that system works.
"The Army created an office that does notning but over-
see special operations," he said. What office is that? "The
name is classified," he said apologetically. Saxon added that
the special operations oversight offices of the Navy, Marine
Corps and Air Force are less vigilant than the Army's office.
I found that less than reassuring. So I asked Bernard
McMahon, former staff director of the Senate Intelligence
Committee and special assistant to Director of Central In-
telligence Stansfield Turner from 1977 to 1979, how the
public could know that an unknown office somewhere in the
Pentagon was doing a good job of monitoring unknown
operations around the world. He assured me that the over-
sight process worked, although he acknowledged that a
loophole exists in the current oversight legislation.
He said that the existing law does not give Congress
authority over "sensitive intelligence collection" by Penta-
gon operatives. "The next covert action scandal will come in
the collection of information against terrorists. There's a lot
of political pressure to get the information, and when
there's pressure people react quickly and do stupid things."
I had to leave the conference earl but I managed to
catch the thoughtful presentation of Bode, a shaggy-
haired State Department official, on y Government Of-
ficials Lie. Bode acknowledged that his was an unpopular
proposition. He said he had protested the Vietnam War
when he was a student and had later changed his mind. He
urged the students to keep an open mind. "Someday you,
too, may be in government, and you may have to lie."
Bode explained that as a student at the University of
California, Berkeley, in the 1960s he had attended antiwar
conferences, including one where Governor Ronald Reagan
spoke. With tears welling in his eyes, Bode confessed that he
and other members of the Communist Workers Party had
snuck up to the speaker's platform before the event and slipped
seventy-five hits of LSD into Reagan's glass of water.
Actually, Bode didn't say that. I just want to work in
government someday. JEFFERSON MORLEY
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Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/15: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100150035-8