CIA CHIEF RICHARD HELMS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP74B00415R000400120008-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 24, 2005
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: November 22, 1971
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

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 THE
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MER9OCA
ft
One day in the fall of 1962, President
John F. Kennedy summoned his top
intelligence advisers to the White House
Encrypted communications : The sign
to headquarters in the Langley woods
for an urgent conference. Russian mis- new weapon or chart his order of battle,
silos had been discovered in Cuba, and orbiting cameras and over-the-horizon ra-
in planning the U.S. response that was dio scanners now deliver most of the
shortly to unfold. as the Cuban missile desired information untouched by hu-
crisis, it was essential to have the most man hands. In the once glamorous ranks
accurate possible estimate of the Soviet of the CIA, the patriotic adventurer has
capacity for nuclear war. The chiefs of given way to the earnest academic. And
military intelligence arrived from the bureaucracy has transformed what began
Pentagon with elaborate tables showing as an amateurish happy few into a
the latest projections of Russian rocket sprawling intelligence conglomerate en-
power: if the U.S.S.R. had produced all compassing more than a dozen govern-
the missiles it was capable of producing, front agencies; 200,000 employees and
they indicated, the American advantage a budget of some $6 billion a year.
in a showdown would be perilously"
slight. The man from the Central Intel- Feats of Prediction
ligence Agency, on the other hand, On the surface, it has been a remark-
broaght a single piece of paper. This ably successful transformation. The man
spare document revealed that the Soviet who has presided over it, CIA director
arsenal was in fact much weaker than Richard Helms (page 30), enjoys one of
had been feared-and thus John Ken- the most exalted reputations in Wash-
nedy discovered that he had the muscle ington. U.S. intelligence wins high marks,
to twist Nikita Khrushchev's arm in the too, from the secret services of its allies:
confrontation that lay ahead. once they shook their heads over its
The source of this crucial information humbling at the Bay of Pigs, now they
was Oleg Penkovskiy, a colonel in Soviet envy its technological wonders (page 3.8)
.military intelligence who had been pass- and admire its feats ' of prediction-the
ing vital Russian secrets to the West for Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, for ex-
sixteen months, only to be caught in No- ample, and Israel's quick victory in the
venibcr 1962 and executed six months six-day war. The Pentagon papers cred-
later. He was a brave but not particu- ited the CIA with the most hardheaded
larly admirable character, a vain neurotic and accurate official assessments of the
who liked to dress up in British or Ameri- war in Vietnam, and even some of its
can colonel's uniforms that Western in- left-wing detractors were obliged to ad-
telligence gladly lent him during his oc- mit that the spooks seemed to be doing
casional trips outside the Soviet Union; something right. The old accusaticn of an
once, when he was in London, he even "invisible government"-fueled by the
demanded-unsuccessfully-to be pre- revelations of CIA funding of thr; Na-
sented to the Queen. But he is a figure tional Student Association-has began to
of the very front rank in the history of fade, and the agency reports that its
American intelligence-not only because college recruitments are back to normal.
he was the secret hero of the Cuban mis- But all is not well within the intelli-
sile crisis, but also because he was very gence brotherhood. Criticism has sprung
possibly one of the last of a vanishing up from the unlikeliest of qua rers-
species, the big-power super-spy. within the government itself. In Co-..-,-ress,
For the American intelligence game the once-tame intelligence "watchdogs"
has changed radically since Oleg Pen- have begun to growl- with a certain
kovskiy's time-the secret agents have menace. When such old Senate friends
dwindled in numbers and their secrets as Allen Ellender and John Stennis start
have declined in importance, the cloaks talking about cutting intelligence budg-
have turned into computers and the slag- ets, when the House Armed Services
gers into satellites. Technology. is the Committee .authorizes public hearings
new order of the day: where men once ( I e
d~rl d o y th CIA
risked their lives toPtppeontedsFcorm easesx05/66/1061g:n66tA-kb B06415R000400120008-3
 00400120008-3
glut has surpassed thi4JpktFiRYqcyle Was - 5-0
absorb-"they had rooms filled with data
that weren't analyzed because there was
no analyst on the payroll to do it," reports
.one Administration aide who recently in-
vestigated the intelligence agencies.
What's more, the ttrcre availability of
an interesting fact creates an overwhelm-
ing temptation to report it, even when it
can be of no possible use. The secrets
that intelligence uncovers often seem to
serve the interests of human curiosity
rather than national security. Some Presi-
dents are delighted by these idle revela-
tions-John Kennedy and Lyndon John-
son used to love poring over raw
intelligence reports-but not, apparently,
Richard Nixon.
Every morning not long after dawn, a
black Plymouth from the CIA rolls
through the southwest gate of the White
House bearing a stiff, gray, legal-size
folder marked President's Daily Briefing.
Wally McNamee--Newswaek
Helms: Farewell to the glory days
It is a compendium of the most secret
reports on world developments of the
past 24 hours, and only three other copies
are delivered: one to the Secretary of
State, one to the Secretary of Defense
and one to the Attorney General. Henry
Kissinger carries the President's copy in-
to the Oval Office about 9:30-but or-
dinarily. the President doesn't even
bother to read it, he simply asks Kis-
singer to summarize the highlights, Mr.
Nixon does tuck it away with a batch of
memos for his evening reading, and he
may-or may not-read it later. Only rarely
does Kissinger succumb to the temptation
of giving the President a tidbit of raw
intelligence: one item that he did deliver
was the news from Hanoi that the North
Vietnamese had loosed a band of roving
barbers on search-and-shear missions
among the city's long-haired youngsters.
Mr. Nixon is simply not interested in
secrets for their own sake. All too often,
the White House complains, intelligence
reports fail to supply the analytical
THE COOL PRO WHO RUNS THE CIA
n his pinstripe business suit with pocket
handkerchief flourishing just so, Rich-
ard McGarrah Helms at 58 epitomizes
the American meritocracy. Ile could be
an urbane corporation counsel on Wall
Street, but in fact he oversees the world's
most massive intelligence complex, and
the new directive from President Nixon,
charging the director of the Central
Intelligence Agency with face-lifting the
entire American spy effort, only en-
hances Helms's awesome authority.
No other intelligence chief in the
world is so patently visible. Even NATO
allies do not admit owning a man like
Helms, although his counterparts exist.
"Europeans accept that government
should operate in a covert way," suggests
a British diplomat, "but answerability is
the whole point of your system. So I sup-
pose a Richard Helms must have an
official and open existence."
In more than five years as CIA director,
Richard Helms has emerged as a bureau-
crat of cool competence. It is not surpris-
ing that Helms should appear so serene
while Much of official Washington throbs
with self-conscious activity. Ile joined
the CIA at its birth and grew along with
it, the first director to rise through the
ranks. Ile has been privy to almost every
CIA triumph and fiasco since 1947, and
those 24 years have taught him survival,
not just overseas but back in Washington,
too. "To succeed in this town," he once
told a friend, "you have to walk with a
very quiet tread."
Candor, within the obvious limits of
his job, has become a Helms trademark.
He maintains a cozy liaison with tradi-
tionally suspicious Congressional commit-
tees. Says a Senate staffer: "Committee
members find him the most forthright of
all the administrators who come before
us. He. is certainly more frank in his
field than Mel Laird is when lie comes
to talk about the Defense Department,"
Helms's professional detachment was
taxed during the Johnson clays when Walt
Rostow massaged intelligence reports
submitted to the President by under-
lining in yellow crayon whatever but-
tressed his own persuasion. But Helms
sidestepped any confrontation, He was
so self-effacing that an LBJ lieutenant
recalls: "I thought he had the personali-
ty of a dead mackerel. But he certainly
had the respect of the President."
At White House lunches under LBJ,
Helms assiduously avoided venturing in-
to policy decisions. "If he had the facts,"
says a participant, "he presented them
quietly and quickly without any great
fanfare or interjection of his personal
opinions. If he didn't have the facts, he
would admit, `I don't know about that,
Mr. President, but I'll try to find out the
answers as soon as possible'."
Under Helms, the CIA delivered. Part-
ly as a consequence, he is among the few
holdovers from the Johnson era in a top
Washington post today. His cutback of
escalating CIA technology expenses in
1968, with a resulting budget reduction,
ingratiated him with President Nixon.
If the spymaster's more dramatic ex-
ploits remain shrouded, Helms has
dropped clues aplenty to his personality.
The son of an expatriate aluminum exec-
utive, young Dick was educated at posh
schools in Switzerland and Germany, but
it was at Williams College that he began
to show the kind of sober purposefulness
that has marked his career. By the time
he graduated in 1935, Helms had edited
the yearbook and the newspaper, served.
as junior and then senior class president
and earned his Phi Beta Kappa key.
Awed classmates voted him "most re-
spected" and "most likely to succeed."
Through a friend's father, Helms hus.
tied a job in the Berlin bureau of United
Press (now UPI) and as a 23-year-old
cub correspondent scooped up an ex-
clusive interview with Adolf Hitler. After
two years, Helms returned home to the
business side of the now-defunct Indian-
apolis Times, working up to national
advertising manager. While there, lie
married Julia Bretzman Shields, a high-
strung sculptress divorced from the Bar-
basol shaving czar, Frank B. Shields.
Into the Spy Establishment
With the war, Helms completed Navy
Reserve training at Harvard and, in
1943, volunteered for the Office of Stra-
tegic Services. He wound up at war's
end working for Allen Dulles in Berlin.
After the OSS was dismantled, Helms
followed Dulles into the embryonic Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency. Helms quickly
tuned in to the politics of the cold war.
(When a Russia-bound Williams class-
mate wrote him inquiring about Commu-
nism in 1959, Helms whipped off a
43-page typed analysis of Communist
,,aggression, which he entitled "Conversa-
tion with a Doubting Thomas.")
For fifteen years, Helms disappeared
into the CIA's "plans" section, the eu-
phemism for the group handling covert
activities. In 1962, lie took over the
section. He was bypassed for director in
favor of outsiders, but in mid-1966, after'
a stint as deputy director, was finally
appointed by Johnson to run the CIA.
But- as Helms's public fortunes rose,
his home life deteriorated. In June 1-967,
after 28 years of an increasingly unhappy
marriage, Helms left his wife. They were
divorced in September 1968. Three
months later, he married a former neigh-
bor, Cynthia Ratcliff McKelvie, the moth-
er of four children and herself newly
divorced from a prominent surgeon.
Though he earns $42,500 a year, the
Helmses live frugally in a $220-a-month
high-rise apartment in Chevy Chase,
Md. English-born Cynthia, a handsome
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for the first time, it is time for even as
peerless a Washington pro as Helms to
look to his defenses.
More serious still, the White House has
expressed its displeasure with certain
features of intelligence work. A fortnight
ago, Mr. Nixon moved to bring its quality
and costs more tightly under control. He
invested Helms with new authority to
oversee all the intelligence agencies, par-
ing away budgetary fat and professional
overlap wherever possible. With Helms
elevated to super-spymaster, day-to-day
operation of the CIA fell to his deputy,
Lt. Gen. Robert E. Cushman Jr., 56, of
the Marine Corps. And in the White
House, Mr. Nixon solidified Henry Kis-
singer's power to evaluate intelligence
reports and, in particular, to make them
more responsive to the needs of the
policyniakers.
Outwardly, these maneuvers might ap-
pear to be a mild bureaucratic rebuke to
the intelligence community; their real
punch was delivered in a supersecret
Presidential "decision memorandum"
spelling out Mr. Nixon's dissatisfactions
and desires in meticulous detail. His ma-
jor complaints are faulty intelligence, run-
away budgets and a disparity between a
glut of facts and a poverty of analysis.
Though the President holds Helms
and his agency in generally high regard,
he has been irritated by a series of intel-
ligence community failures. The SALT
talks had to be delayed for months while
the White House tried to sort out dis-
crepancies between the various agencies
on how well the U.S. could detect pos-
sible Soviet violations of any arms con-
trol agreement. Estimates of the Viet
Cong supplies that used to flow through
the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville
were off by several orders of magnitude,
and there was a complete failure to pre-
dict the ferocity of North Vietnamese re-
sistance to the ill-starred campaign in
Laos early this year. The-elaborate com-
mando raid on an empty North Vietnam-
ese prison camp at Son Tay still rankles, computer and the hypersensitive radio 'It and theq iiitAahVdd a ei> @)5/O O~tI rP~ O0 15 i 20008-3
ence communit for not catching sooner act ets into a mighty ocean o a a. e
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the Russian-built surface-to-air missiles
that suddenly sprouted in the Middle
East cease-fire zone in 1970.
Some of these gripes may conceal mis-
takes more properly laid at the Adminis-
tration's own door. Intelligence officers
insist, for example, that they gave clear
warning that Egypt would use the cease-
fire to strengthen its forward defenses,
but that the policyniakers chose to ignore
them. In any case, Mr. Nixon seems in-
tent upon removing all possible bugs
from the intelligence system as it faces
what is likely its most critical test of re-
cent years: solving the mystery of the
apparent Soviet missile build-up.
Secret of the Silos
For about a year, the Russians have
been digging new silos at their missile
sites, some of them bigger than any holes
they have ever dug before. What is go-
ing to fill them-an improved version of
the giant SS-9, accurate enough to knock
out the U.S.'s underground Minutemen,
or perhaps some entirely new missile
with capacities as yet unknown? And
what intent lies behind these develop-
ments=are the Soviets possibly striving
for a "first-strike capability" that would
break the current nuclear standoff be-
tween the two superpowers? Upon the
answers to these questions hinge several
key U.S. decisions-in the SALT talks, in
the Middle East, in defense budgeting.
"We are at a moment of transition, a very
critical moment," says a, top Pentagon
planner. "Either the Soviets slow down,
or we must speed up."
The technological boom in intelligence
gathering has produced a cascade of
raw data without any accompanying im-
provement in methods of analysis. In the
intelligence trade, where according to
ancient tradition, an apparently insignifi-
cant fact may offer the key to some vital
revelation, there seems to be an irresist-
able urge to collect all the information
possible-and the age of the satellite, the
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 Approves , or ReIea
NATIONAL
SECURITY
AGENCY
National
Cryptologic
Command .
The code makers and
the code breakers;
20,000 staffers, mostly
at Fort Meade, Md.
DEFENSE
INTELLIGENCE
AGENCY
Designed to coordi-
nate military intelli-
gence. Direct budget
of $100 million; spends
an added $700 million
through armed forces;
5,500 staffers.
ARMY
38,500 intelligence
staffers; budget of
$775 million; does
most of its spy work
for the NSA.
e VP6,it?01
NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL
The basic decision-making body, All In-
telligence for the President flows through
the NSC and Its chief, Henry Kissinger.
NSC Intelligence Committee
A new unit headed by Kissinger, Its job:
to give assignments to the intelligence
community and to 'review' the results.
Net Assessment Group
Another new panel, to make specific com-
parisons of power balances In the world.
U.S. INTELLIGENCE BOARD
The board of directors of the intelligence
community. All agencies have a seat at
the table; Helms of the CIA is the boss.
CENTRAL
INTELLIGENCE
AGENCY
The premier intelligence agency.
Budget estimated at $750 million;
staff of 15,000. Evaluates much of
the Input of DIA and NSA.
NAVY
10,000 intelligence
f
staffers; same budget
as the Army; has
phased out spy ships.
ing to one former Air Force man, the
worst features of the American intelli-
gence system are here on most glaring
'display: it is, he says, "like some giant
vacuum cleaner picking up millions of
pieces of lint that we store in our compu-
ters." Recently, DIA has trimmed itself
down and toned itself up a bit, but there
is more to be done. Just this month, a
new post-Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Intelligence-was created for precise-
ly that purpose.
ARMY, NAVY AND AIR FORCE INTELLI-
GENCE: These are the big spenders.
Some $5 billion of the $6 billion annual
intelligence budget pours out of military
coffers, but this is because the services
manage most of the vast hardware in-
volved; the Air Force, with the recon-
naissance satellite program, carries the
main load. If major budget cuts are to be
made, they will fall most heavily here:
Senator Ellencler, for example, has de-
manded that $500 million be trimmed
forthwith.
STATE DEPARTMENT INTELLIGENCE
AIR FORCE
60,000 staffers; $2.8
billion budget, mostly
spent on spy-satellite
program.
400128 N
INTELLIGENCE
ADVISORY BOARD
Blue-ribbon advisory
panel; meets bimonthly.
'FORTY COMMITTEE'
OR
'303 GROUP'
A secret panel, chaired by Kissin-
ger, advises the President on 'co-
vert' operations.
' INTELLIGENCE
RESOURCES ADVISORY
COMMITTEE
A spin-off of the Intelligence
Board, headed by Helms, de-
signed to pare down budgets.
STATE DEPARTMENT
Intelligence and
Research Bureau
Tiny but authoritative;
headed by ex-CIA man.
FEDERAL BUREAU
OF INVESTIGATION
Main responsibility for do-
mestic counterespionage.
ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION
Interprets data on global
nuclear developments.
TREASURY DEPARTMENT
Focuses on drugs and
economic intelligence.
AND RESEARCH DIVISION: No spies need
apply here; INR's main sources are For-
eign Service officers in U.S. embassies
abroad. It scores high on analysis, but
CIA's technological tricks give the agen-
cy a huge advantage that has recently
left INR farther and farther behind in
the competition for the President's ear.
A former top CIA man, Ray Cline, was
made head of INR, and its star may rise
again.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION:
All eounterspying against foreign agents
within the U.S. is conducted by the FBI.
Besides the obvious defensive benefits,
counterespionage can yield important
clues to the limits of an enemy's knowl-
edge by spotting the targets of his spy-
ing within your own borders. "In one
case a few years ago," recalls a counter-
intelligence agent, "we traced a pattern
of Russian efforts to obtain data here
that gave us an absolute picture of their
level of development in long-range sub-
marines." Unfortunately, during the de-
clining years of J. Edgar Hoover's reign,
Fonga & Berkovit>
the quality of FBI counterspying has
deteriorated sharply, and working rela-
tions between the bureau and the CIA
have grown distant and, strained.
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: This,
of course, is the hub of the American in-
telligence universe. Its director is chief
not only of his own agency but also-even
before Mr. Nixon's latest directive rein-
forced his powers-of the entire U.S.
information-gathering enterprise. Its em-
ployees compose what is very likely,
with the possible exception of the Mafia,
the most closed corporation in American
society. The road to their sprawling
headquarters in the woods of Langley,
Va., is marked with a modest sign an-
nouncing Fairbank Highway Research
Station (a Transportation Department
agency that does indeed maintain an
outpost nearby). They work together,
play together and sometimes live to-
gether; they go to the same doctors and,
if need be, to the same psychiatrists;
their talents and triumphs are rarely
sung outside the agency's walls and of-
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redhead, works part-time for the Smith-
sonian Institution's radio station. She is
also a dedicated ecologist who helped
found Concern, Inc., a Washington con-
servation group that focuses on recycling.
Cynthia Helms has even converted her
husband. Now everything they buy must
come in biodegradable containers.
Helms knows how to leave his prob-
lerns at the office and he can sleep sound-
ly at night. "I know when Dick has
had. a bad day just because he looks that
way when he comes home," Cynthia
Helms told NE1VVSWELK's Elizabeth Peer,
"but I also know he's not going to tell me
about it." Before dinner, he drinks a
single Scotch. On Fridays, he abandons
himself to a dry Martini with a lemon
twist; Cynthia trots out beforehand to
buy the weekly lemon. Once a week
they take in a movie. Helms also enjoys
reading spy novels sent by his son, a
New York attorney. Weekends, the
Hel.mses commute to Wit's End, Cynthia's
shore cottage in Lewes, Del.
Security precautions are elaborate but
imperceptible. A CIA specialist periodi-
cally combs the Chevy Chase apartment
for "bugs." The phone number is unlisted,
though it appears in the Washington
social register. Helms also has a direct
line to CIA headquarters. A third phone,
.
to the White House, was taken out,, black Chrysler takes him to the CIA cam-
during an LBJ economy drive. , pus across the Potomac in Langley, Va.,
Helms is second only to Henry Kis- where he rides a private elevator to his
singer as a prize catch on the Washing- cream-colored office. After perusing the
ton social circuit-partly because it's chic overnight reports, Helms meets his top
to .have a master spy to dinner and
partly because he is such an attentive
companion for the ladies. Washington din-
ner parties invariably degenerate into
shop talk, and Helms is in no position to
chime in. So he finesses the situation.
"He has that nice quality of letting a
woman talk, too," says Mrs. Jack Valenti,
wife of the former LBJ aide. Helms
used to carry a pocket-size beeper so
Wally McNamee-Newsweek
Wife Cynthia: A lemon every Friday
the agency could always summon him,
but "the damned thing kept going off
during the middle of dinner parties."
So CIA technicians have devised one
that now vibrates discreetly instead.
`Let the Wordsmiths Handle That'
Helms logs a ten-hour workday, with
a half-day Saturday. Sometimes he rises
early to play tennis, wearing long white
flannels even in muggy summer
Then a
aides for 9 a.m. coffee in the conference
room. He dislikes long meetings and can
dismiss a subject with an impatient:
"Let's let the wordsmiths handle that."
The agency structure is still informal
enough that a vital field report can reach
Helms's desk minutes after it arrives, but
Helms insists that all regular memos be
tight, literate and neat. Before he leaves
at 6:30 p.m., he-reads over the intelli-
gence summary to be given the Presi-
dent the next day.
In reorganizing the intelligence net-
work, Helms will. have less time for
agency routine, though he has been able
to assume important new responsibilities
without having to surrender many old
prerogatives. Henry Kissinger still stands
between him and President Nixon, but a
White House aide notes: "Henry re-
spects Helms as much as he respects
anyone around here." Indeed, Richard
Ilelms may yet be able to parlay his
position into the sort of lifetime tenure
enjoyed by J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI.
"Richard Helms has to be the real pro
in government today" says one top intel-
ligence specialist. "He's not the big
operator like Allen Dulles. And whether
he's the manager that John McCone was
we're going to find out. His brief has
always, been cool, careful professional-
ism." At a time when the United States
seeks a lower profile abroad, Helms's cal-
Hetrns at play: F1aA'~~0~leleQ8~r100#?~d1uRZB00415
bridges that a policymaker needs to-cross
the gap from information to decision. The
word has been passed to collect fewer
facts and assess them more fully. And
the new Kissinger review panels are de-
signed not, as some critics suggested
last week, to screen out views contrary to
Administration policy but to draw in more
information in a form that is useful.
Overruns and Overlaps
Technology has also infected the in-
telligence agencies, as it has the Penta-
gon, with cost overruns. "The overruns
on these satellites," says a horrified White
House staffer, "make the C-5A transport
plane look like a piker." Modern spying
does not come cheap, the Administration
is quite prepared to admit, but neither
does it require the extravagant overlaps
between different intelligence agencies
or the excesses of trivia amassed in the
name of thoroughness. Hence Helms's
reinforced powers as intelligence super-
chief, with authority to oversee other
agencies' budgets and to reorder their
priorities.
Neither Richard Helms nor Richard
Nixon wants to weld the intelligence
gatherers into a single streamlined mech-
anism. The President, according to one
of his aides, "has given careful thought to
what degree diversity in the intelligence
community is an essential luxury of a
democratic society." If there were only a
single agency and if on some crucial
point its information were wrong, this
staffer warns, "by God, it would be all
over. Having some diverse views coining
to the White House as they do now
means one intelligence service is effec-
tively acting as a check on another." So
the revamped order of battle of the in-
telligence community (chart, page 32)
will probably endure for some time. Its
main intelligence-gathering components:
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY: These
are the code breakers. They sponge up
the secret communications of foreign
governments (both friendly and other-
wise), feed them into what is probably
the most elaborate computer system any-
where in the world and reportedly boast
remarkable success in cracking the most
complicated modern ciphers. They also
devise the encrypting systems used by
the U.S. Government. The American
world lead in computer technology gives
the U.S. a sizable edge over the Soviets
in .this critical area, but it is shrinkng.
NSA's staff of linguists, analysts and
mathematical wizards, is based behind a?
dense security curtain at Fort Meade,
Md., but it also directs a network of elec-
tronic surveillance throughout the world.
DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: De-
fense Secretary Robert McNamara de-
vised this outfit in 1961 to try to consol-
idate the various service intelligence
units. Unfortunately, says one former
top intelligence official, it was "a brain-
child that died at birth." The three serv-
ice units still exist separately, and DIA
OD 400alaw0a officers on loan and
wit out much power of its own. Accord-
- )7JtjraeCr
 ten not even ,vitliii-ip#~ ?`
be sure that they are not simply estab-
lishing a deeper cover. The CIA is not a
profession; it is a way of life.
It is a changing one, however. In the
cold-war days-from the CIA's founding
in 1947 until, say, the mid-1960s-its
emphasis was on covert operations, on
spying and, as they came to be nick-
named, "dirty tricks." The mainstay of
the agency then was the officer overseas.
He bribed the local journalists to plant
stories favorable to the United States
("I guess I've bought as much newspa-
per space as the A&P," chortles a former
CIA man), or quietly helped bankroll a
political movement that might be of use
some day (the headquarters that Charles
de Gaulle maintained in Paris until his
return to power in 1958 was partially
funded by the CIA). The CIA man
checked on private lives or credit ratings
to see who might be' blackmailed or
bribed into working as agents. - (The
agents who volunteered, such as Pen-
kovskiy, were almost always the best-
"when you buy a spy," points out a vet-
eran, "you're really renting him until
someone comes along who offers him
more money.")
Pursuit of a Red Face
The old-time agent kept an eye on the
Russian opposition, with occasionally
amusing results. "I remember only too
well," recalls a British secret agent, "one
occasion when I was on post in Berlin
and we. were given the word that a
`face' [Soviet double agent] was coming
in. My brief was to follow him, to pick
him up at a certain house near the bor-
der. This I did, and I stayed with this
chap for days. Thought I was really on
to something. He appeared to have ac-
cess to U.S. military II.Q in Berlin and
.freedom of the embassy in Bonn. My
people were getting terribly excited
about the whole thing. We eventually
discovered that the chap I was following
was CIA, and he was following me, send-
ing in reports about my access to the
British Embassy and so on. Never located
the face, either."
Occasionally there was derring-do of
a more momentous nature-some of it
well-known by now. There was the 1953
coup in Iran that returned the Shah to
power and thus kept rich oil fields from
the Russians, the Guatemala uprising in
1954 that overthrew a leftist government,
the 1955-56 Berlin tunnel through which
U.S. operatives tapped the telephones
from East Berlin to Poland and Moscow
-Helms had a hand in planning and
executing this affair.
And many exploits have remained ob-
scure. There was, for example, the here-
tofore untold story of successful intrigue
in the Congo. Early in 1961, Antoine
Gizenga sprung from the motley ranks of
Congolese politics to make his bid for
dominance of the infant republic. He had
attended the Prague Institute for African
1Affairs, had spent six weeks in Russia
AV
The medium and the message: Henry
Kissinger and the top-secret PDB
and was clearly, as Washington saw it,
Moscow's new man in the Congo. Gizen-
ga broke away from the United Nations-
backed Congolese Government and set
up a regime of his own in Oriental Prov-
ince, arming 6,000 troops with smuggled
Russian guns and paying them, thanks to
Soviet financing, at the princely rate (for
Africa) of $180 a month. The word was
sent out from the White House authoriz-
ing covert operations to stop him.
It was clear to the CIA that Gizenga's
Russian support-both the money and the
weapons-was arriving via the Sudan, and
a message arrived from friendly Euro-
pean agents that a Czech ship was bound
for Port of Sudan with a cargo of guns
disguised as Red Cross packages for
refugee relief in the Congo. A direct
appeal to the port authorities to inspect
the crates would never work, the CIA's
man in Khartoum realized; the Sudanese
would have to be faced with public ex-
posure of the contraband. Appropriate
arrangements were made on the wharfs
before the Czech ship docked. "If my
memory serves me right," a former CIA
man says, "it was the second crane load.
The clumsy winch operator lot the crates
drop and the dockside was suddenly
covered with new Soviet Kalashnikov
rifles."
That left the money. By late in 1961,
Gizenga's troops had grown restive: they
had not been paid since the first Soviet
subsidy arrived' months before. Gizenga
appealed to Moscow, and KGB opera-
tives obligingly delivered $1 million in
U.S. currency to Gizenga's delegation
in Cairo. From an agent who had pene-
trated Gizenga's Cairo office, the CIA
learned that a third of the money was to
be delivered by a courier who would
take a commercial flight to Khartoum,
wait in the transit lounge to avoid the
baggage search at customs, and then
proceed by another plane to Juba, a town
on the Congolese border. Plans were laid
accordingly.
When the Congolese courier arrived
in Khartoum and settled into the transit
lounge, his suitcase between big knees,
he was startled to hear himself being
paged and ordered to proceed immedi-
ately to the customs area. After a me-
Tony Rollo-Newsweek
ment of flustered indecision, he took the
bag over to a corner and left it unob-
trusively near some lockers before leav-
ing for customs. At that point, a CIA man
sauntered out of the men's room, picked
up the suitcase, and headed out the
back door where two cars were waiting
with motors running. Not long afterward,
Gizenga's government fell; it was said
that his troops suffered from shortages
of arms and were upset because they
hadn't been paid.
Rule of the Knights Templar
These were the glory days, albeit
overcast now and then by disasters such
as the Bay of Pigs. A rousing sense of
mission invigorated the agency then, the
camaraderie of unheralded warriors on a
lonely battlement of the free world. Few
would have expressed it quite that way-
spies are an urbane lot on the whole-but
that was the spirit of the fraternity, and it
called forth a special breed. Mostly East-
ern and Ivy League, often well-born and
moderately rich, they were moved ty a
high sense of patriotism and a powerful
undercurrent of noblesse oblige. Ma:ay of
them were veterans of the elite Of?c~, of
Strategic 'Services under the ec.lo-?[ul
"Wild Bill" Donovan during World 'ar
11, and they carried forward its high
esprit. Men such as Allen Dulles, Kerinit
Roosevelt, Frank Wisner, Richard Isis-
sell, Tracy Barnes, Robert Amory aid
Desmond Fitzgerald-the "Knights Tem-
plar," one former colleague calls them-
ruled the agency in the cold-war days
and set its adventurous tone.
But this created problems. The bright
young men attracted into the agency
tended to assume that the road to ad-
vancement lay strewn with "dirty tricks."
Trained to bribe, recruit and suborn, that
is precisely what they did when they
were sent into the field, even when the
Approved For Release 2005/06/06 : CIA-RDP74B00415R000400120008-3
 THE
Approved For Release 2005/06/06 : CIA-RDP74B00415R0004001200 8 ~?
EEP, BLINK AND `rH U i OF SPY GAD T Y
C n a mountain top outside Taipei, a
P U.S. Air Force Chinese-language
specialist tunes his radio receiver in on
mainland China's air-defense network
anad starts a tape. Across the continent,
a supersonic aircraft called the SR-
(for strategic reconnaissance) 71
streaks along the Soviet border, its
"side-looking" radar recording elec-
tronic "pictures" of a missile installa-
tion 50 miles inland. Somewhere over
the Arctic, a giant "Big Bird" recon-
naissance satellite ejects a film pack
containing close-up photos of still an-
oilrer installation; the film is snatched
in midair by a rendezvousing plane
and whisked back to a U.S. air base
for analysis. Around the world-and
above it-whole battalions of super-
sephisticated devices, beeping' and
blinking and thrumming round the
clock, provide the electronic eyes and
ears of U.S. intelligence. -
The nation's arcane arsenal of gadg-
etry includes the massive $1 billion
code-breaking and data-storage com-
pJ!ex that the National Security Agen-
cy operates from its Fort Meade,
b?[d., headquarters-one of the largest
conglomerations of computers in the
world. But the bulk of the costly
hardware is arrayed on the frontiers
of the Communist world where the
American intelligence-gathering proc-
ess actually takes place.
Targets: The Air Force's SR-71 is
the chief spy plane in the arsenal-a
2,000-mph, extremely high-altitude
successor to the U-2. The U.S. long
ago stopped intelligence flights over
China and the Soviet Union. But the
SR-71 still cruises the borders of both
nations, loaded with cameras and
side-looking radar that can pinpoint
intelligence targets (often selected by
the CIA) many miles inland.
Nowadays, however, most of the
peeping is done by Air Force satellites
stuffed with an astonishing assortment
of gadgets. They are equipped with
black-and-white, color and TV cam-
eras, of course. But in addition, these
eyes-in-the-sky carry sight "sensing"
devices, including infra-red cameras
for night photography, radar to peer
through cloud cover, radiation count-
ers to detect nuclear explosions, heat
sensors to record rocket launches, and
even an experimental -infra-red, sensor
and microwave radar to detect a sub-
merged nuclear submarine by the
slightly wanner water it leaves in the
wake of its reactors.
The new mainstays of the U.S.'s
skyborne early-warning system are
multipurpose Project 647 surveillance
satellites. Working in pairs, these
"constellations," as they are called,
sweep across all of European Russia
and the Asian land mass in "dwelling"
The high-spying SR-71: In an ar' ane arsenal, super-eyes and -ears
eras in satellites 100 miles high can
clearly photograph objects on the
ground the size of small cars (though
tales of pictures of anything smaller
are most likely science fiction).
For- communications interception-
which some experts say accounts for
90 per cent of the nation's raw intelli-
gence-radio and radar gear take the
place of cameras in satellites. These
orbiting ears (called "ferrets") are
capable of picking up every form
of electronic communication except
those sent on land telephone lines
and line-of-sight microwave transmis-
sions. They can read radar pulses
from ground stations and in-flight mis-
siles as well. They are joined in the
skies by so-called "Black Air Force"
aircraft-usually lumbering old C-121
Super Constellations that can tarry
in one area for as long as six or eight
hours and carry far heavier, and fan-
cier, equipment than the swift SR-71.
The Navy has mothballed all its Pueb-
lo-type intelligence ships. But one
experimental Navy Super Connie
dubbed "The Blue Buzzard" was em-
ployed in Vietnam as an airborne re-
lay station that could cut in on, and
countermand, orders that North Viet-
my unit commander by nothing more
than a regional accent in his voice.
But as good as- the techniques of
collection are, there -are problems of
interpretation. Says one senior intelli-
gence officer: "You can't tell strategic
or political intent from a photograph.
And you can't tell what the enemy
may have on his drawing boards."
The astonishing escalation of in-
genious gadgetry over the last decade
has caused still another problem-in-
formation overkill. A special Presi-
dential team reviewing the intelli-
gence community discovered that 95
per cent of the estimated $6 billion
spent annually was going into intel-
ligence collection, only 5 per cent
into analysis-and Washington's intelli-
gence headquarters were being inun-
dated with mountains of perishable,
unsifted information. The report was
one of the key elements leading to
the President's decision to reorganize
the intelligence community. "They
were trying to monitor everything
all over the world," explains Senate
Armed Services Committee Chairman
John Stennis. "We simply don't need
to keep sight of every blade of grass
and every grain of sand."
Approved For Release 2005/06/06 : CIA-RDP74B00415R000400120008-3
orbits 22,000 miles high. On board is
still more equipment for sniffing out
nuclear blasts and rocket firings=as
well as long-range TV cameras to'flash
instant pictures back to intelligence
centers on earth if a blast or a launch=
ing goes off.
`Bird': The most recent addition
to U.S. reconnaissance snooping is a
10-ton satellite called "Big Bird," first
launched at Vandenberg Air Force
Base in California last June. Streaking
through its orbit, Big Bird scans broad
land areas with one wide-angle cam-
era, radios what it sees back to
ground stations, and, on order, turns a
giant "narrow angle". second camera
on targets of special interest for close-
up pictures-a multiple function that
used to require at least two less so-
phisticated satellites. One of Big Bird's
first orders: to find and fix the dozen
or so medium-range ballistic missile
sites believed to be deployed through-
out China. And it probably did: eam-
namese officers radioed to their troops.
The major portion of America's ra-
dio intercept intelligence probably
derives from a super sensitive; global
network of ground stations like the
one the Air Force maintains at Onna
Point, Okinawa, 16 miles north of
Kadena Air Base. Here, inside a win-
dowless concrete compound on a crag-
gy coastal promontory, Chinese-lan-
guage specialists, Morse code "ditty
catchers" and tactical analysts man
banks of radio consoles round the
clock. Their job, and that of more
than 50,000 Army, Navy and Air
Force specialists like themat listening
posts scattered from Wiesbaden, Ger-
many, to the tip of the Aleutians, is
the tedious, detailed and never-end-
ing surveillance of the armed forces
of potential enemies-their strength,
whereabouts and * disposition. One
measure of how well they do their job
is the fact that language specialists
have been known to identify an ene-
 Approved For Release 2005/06/06 : CIA-RDP74B00415R000400120008-3
potential fruits of such labor were meager
and the damage to American prestige
very great if they were exposed. Partic-
ularly as the cold war waned and as
technology took over the ' most critical
tasks, the best thing that most agents
abroad could do was nothing at all, but
this was not what bright young adventur-
ers had in mind, and so they began to
quit or not to apply in the first place.
Thus a critical shift of both personnel
and function took place within the "agen-
cy during the latter 1960s. In part it was
a. natural evolution, `in part encouraged
by the new director, Dick Helms. The
focus of attention and prestige within
CIA switched from DDP (for Deputy
Director-Plans, the covert operations) to
`DDI (Deputy Director-Intelligence, the
information-sifting unit). The prime re-
cruits were no longer bright young Social
Register types but state university Ph.D.'s.
A current CIA recruitment manual is
.pitched to, among others, biologists, for-
esters, aerodynamicists, artists, cartogra-
pliers, geologists, geodesists, mathemati-
cians and astronomers. "Our people,"
Helms (who himself was once head of
DDP) boasted in a rare public address
this year, "have academic degrees in 298
major fields of specialization." A former
intelligence man marvels that "when you
ask -the agency evens the most obscure
question, they always trot out some little
old lady who has made that subject her
life study."
Exit the Tennis Players
DDI' still exists, of course, but the
watchword for operatives in the field is
now, as one wag puts it, "Don't do some-
thing-just stand there." As for the type
of person attracted into this side of the
i shop, a former agency man speaks wryly
of the "change from tennis players to
bowlers." Many of the dirtier tricks in
Vietnam-notably the "Phoenix" program
that used torture and assassination to try
to root out the Viet Cong infrastructure
-were assigned to temporary "contract"
agents: retired Array officers, Special
Forces spinoffs or former Stateside po-
licemen. Since 1969, however, the agen-
cy has cut back on these activities.
CIA insiders say it has given up the
coup business entirely, though there are
many who are convinced that it had a
hand in the Greek colonel's take-over in
1967 and the overthrow of Prince. Si-
hanouk in Cambodia last year (at least
to the extent of not blowing the whistle
on plots of which it, was aware). A few
years ago, Gen. Joseph Mobutu of the
Congo tried to interest Langley in a
putsch against the Marxist regime in
Brazzaville across his western border, but
the agency was not interested.
This is not because it has lost the ca-
pacity for such enterprises. It has, after
all, been not so secretly training, equip-
ping and virtually leading a 95,000-man
army in a reasonably successful war in
Laos for nearly a decade. It is currently
and blow up a huge dam. And it has
concocted a delightful little ruse to
spread disaffection against the exiled Si-
hanouk among the Cambodian peasantry
that once revered him. A gifted sound
engineer using sophisticated electronics
has fashioned an excellent counterfeit
of the Prince's voice-breathless, high-
pitched and full of giggles. This is
beamed from a clandestine radio station
in Laos with messages artfully designed
to. offend any good Khmer: in one of
them, "Sihanouk" exhorts young women
in "liberated areas" to aid the cause by
sleeping with the valiant Viet Cong.
But this sort of escapade is far less fre-
quent these days, and some top agency
hands gladly accept the charge that the
Cushman: Minding the shop
CIA has turned into a grou) of gray
bureaucrats. Things may have teen more
exciting during the Dulles years, there
may have been an elan in those days
that has faded now, but it was this elan
that helped produce the Bay of Pigs.
The agency may have become less color-
ful, according to this view, but this simply
marks its passage from exuberant ado-
lescence to responsible maturity.
However staid a bureaucracy the CIA
may have become, there are still some
very peculiar features of going. to work
there. First of all, one of the prerequi-
sites for employment is a lie-detector
test. "The lie detector is the big hurdle,"
recalls a former spy. "Guys are really
scared of that, scared of what it will
show. I remember a friend of. mine had
stolen some money when he was running
his fraternity's soft-drink concession. He
was so worried it would show up that he
told them. They said, `Oh, that's OK.
Glad you told us,' lie's still with the agen-
cy." The agency is not particularly prud-
ish about its staff, unlike the FBI or the
KGB. "It doesn't mind the flawed. gen-
ius," a onetime employee says. "It will
overlook an individual's aberrations-as
e
tort lai r froea m ashinangton rf o pla Ieaon rkd s -ar~ll
"the farm," a secret training base on the
East Coast where they are schooled in
various techniques of the spy game:
codes, drops, agent handling, weaponry,
demolition and hand-to-hand combat.
But the vast majority of recruits are
bound for DDI, and a life centering
in the huge CIA compound in Langley.
The agency encourages clannishness.
"There's one street in McLean [a suburb
next to Langley] where the entire block.
is filled. with CIA types," one spy says.
More important, security precautions dic-
tate a certain motherliness. "From the
day you start your career," a veteran
says, "you're encouraged to go to the
agency for help, to tell them everything."
If a CIA employee gets into trouble-,
drunk driving, for example-he is told to'
call the agency's security office immedi-
ately. If his house is robbed, he's to
notify security before the police. If he
gets into financial problems, the agency
has a benevolent fund to help him out.
It buys him theater tickets, advises his'
children on where to go to college, se-
lects security-cleared physicians and psy-
chiatrists (and requires a fellow CIA
man to be on hand during -any treatment
requiring an anesthetic that might in-
duce loose talk), offers him guidance
on stock-market investments, provides an
indoor gym, athletic teams and even na-
ture walks.
No Room at the Top
There is a certain insulation about it
all-and, some critics say, about its work
as well. With the rapid expansion of re-
cent years, layers of bureaucracy have
begun to clog the channels along which
raw intelligence flows upward. And
there is very little new blood coming in
at the middle levels or the top; the agen-
cy has a logjam of twenty-year men.
Agency people are also sometimes ac-
cused of one of the oldest of spies"fail-
ings-refusing to believe anything unless
it -has been discovered clandestinely.
Some voices within the government are
now calling for a radical shift toward,
candor in almost all intelligence work.
They argue that the great bulk of the in-.
formation that CIA and the rest of the
spy network gleans ought to be made
public to anyone who is interested. At
the same time, virtually all covert para-
military operations-the dirty tricks-
should be abandoned entirely.
In effect, this is a new and expanded
version of President Eisenhower's old
"open skies" plan. It rests upon the propo-
sition that dirty tricks generally do more
harm than good to, the nation's interests,
and that intelligence does most for the
cause of peace when its fruits are dis-
played for all -to see. Most American
strategists have long since accepted the
notion that the world is made safer and
more stable when each of the superpow-
ers knows a fair amount about what the
other is up to-the U.S. makes no real
effort to conceal the full range of its mili-
RQ,00 loc3attesssof11 op`e,Vinn Why 5 sknot,
ies,
r1~r,t.i rued
 carry this philosopl4p 'frgledsEQr JRglease 2005/06/06 CIA-RDP74B00415R000400120008-3
step further?
It is almost surely too soon for that;
perhaps it would never be practicable.
The world still has its ugly secrets, and it
is probably best for everyone's peace of
mind that most of them are kept in
private. But the very fact that the ques-
tion is being put is a sign of the wrenching
adjustments that American intelligence
has had to make in its long metamorphosis
from the days of Wild Bill Donovan and
the Knights Templar. Today, the fear-
some weaponry of the two superpowers
has grown so sophisticated that virtually
no intelligence coup, no' matter how extra-
ordinary, could alter the balance of po-
tential destruction' on both sides. The
gaudy era of the adventurer has passed
in the American spy business; the bu-
reaucratic age of Richard C. Helms and
his gray specialists has settled in.
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