Blank Spots on the Map Page 19
As I sat in my rented car back on Farm Credit Drive, illegally stopped along the red-lined sidewalk surrounding the National Counterterrorism Center, there was really nothing to see beyond the manicured lawns and corporate landscaping. I knew that the facility was a sinkhole for black dollars, but its mirrored windows simply reflected the landscape around it. To understand how this place, the black budget, and the secret state in general came into existence, I needed to turn my attention away from its architecture and toward its archaeological record, preserved in the yellowed pages of the Congressional Record.
12
Nonfunding the Black World
United States Capitol, Washington, D.C., 20515
It was 1947 and the House chambers were in bad shape. Congressmen complained about the wooden row seats creaking, about the dilapidated interior, and about the bad acoustics, which made it difficult to hear congressional proceedings. Above the chamber’s blue-green carpet and white marble rostrum backed by a hanging American flag and portraits of George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, a bare steel frame was all that kept the chamber’s aging and corroded roof from collapsing. For years, renovations promising new “theatrical splendor” and “Technicolor” halls had been planned, but the Second World War and the ensuing postwar recession had put the remodeling project on the back burner. The chamber wouldn’t be renovated until the summer of 1949. The smaller Senate chamber, in the other wing of the Capitol, wasn’t in much better shape. It was here, in the crumbling and cavernous legislative chambers where congressmen could barely hear the day’s proceedings, that the secret world went from being an ad hoc (and possibly illegal) infrastructure to being enshrined as a legitimate part of the state.
It began with the National Security Act. Signed on July 26, 1947, it laid the contemporary foundations of the military and intelligence communities. It created the Department of the Air Force as an independent branch of the military (it had previously been under the Army) and combined it with the Department of War and the Department of the Navy to form the Department of Defense. The law created the National Security Council to act as an arm of the executive branch. And it created the Central Intelligence Agency.
The idea of having a secret, peacetime intelligence agency wasn’t without its critics: The recently defeated Nazi regime in Europe had shown what atrocities became possible when agencies like the S.S. and Gestapo were given dual powers of secrecy and coercion. Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson told the president that he had the “gravest forebodings about this organization” and that the agency was being set up in such a way that “neither [the president], the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it.” During the congressional debate over the 1947 bill, Congressman Clarence J. Brown stood firmly against the proposed agency, declaring that the president should not have “a Gestapo of his own.” But the CIA’s advocates quelled Congress’s fears enough to pass the bill. Future CIA director Allen Dulles assured Congress that the agency would consist of no more than “a couple dozen people throughout the United States” and a “certain number” of people abroad. Future secretary of defense James Forrestal promised the CIA would never conduct secret operations. The CIA’s advocates won out, and the agency came to life when President Truman signed the National Security Act into law.
Section 102 of the National Security Act outlines the CIA’s duties, all of which seem relatively harmless, even boring. The National Security Act charges the CIA with correlating, analyzing, and evaluating intelligence, and “[performing] such other functions and duties relating to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” In these “other functions” was a loophole, a subtle yet open-ended set of powers that would come to define much of the agency’s activities. These exceptions would come to define the rule: The CIA would be much more than the graduate-school study group Dulles had helped sell to the legislature. Immediately after the bill’s passage, the NSC began expanding the CIA’s powers, and by the end of 1947, Forrestal, who had assured Congress only a few months before that the CIA would never conduct secret operations, was ordering the CIA to begin a secret war against the Soviets. Its first task was a covert operation to prevent a Communist victory in the upcoming Italian election.
In May of 1948, the NSC issued directive NSC-10/2, creating the Office of Policy Coordination. Like the Manhattan Project’s Engineering District, this was another instance of a nondescript line item concealing something far more interesting. The OPC was, in short, the CIA’s covert action arm: NSC-10/2 authorized the CIA to practice “economic warfare; preventative direct actions, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures,” and “subversion against hostile states.” The CIA was now authorized, in secret, to wage equally secret wars against anyone the president deemed hostile. The authority for the CIA’s entry into the covert action business came from that single, ambiguous line in the National Security Act of 1947: the “other functions and duties relating to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.”
But NSC-10/2 contained another provision that would have an equally important legacy. Even as it authorized the CIA to act as the president’s secret paramilitary force, it directed these covert operations to be “so planned and executed that any U.S. Government responsibility for them is not evident . . . and that if uncovered the U.S. Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.” When the CIA fought the president’s secret wars, it was to conduct them in such a way that the president could lie about them and get away with it. Policies and de facto laws associated with the CIA were established so that the agency and its activities were, paradoxically, legally immune from legal oversight.
Curiously, the agency did not yet have any funding, at least on paper. During the 1947 deliberations, Walter L. Pforzheimer introduced a clause into the CIA section of the National Security Act that would have authorized “covert and unvouchered funds” for the agency but withdrew it because it would have “opened up a can of worms.” He decided that “we could come up with the house-keeping provisions later on.” In the meantime, the CIA’s budget was surreptitiously gleaned from disguised Pentagon appropriations. In 1949, the director of intelligence, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, brought Pforzheimer’s “house-keeping provisions” to Carl Vinson, Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The result was the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949—a law that allowed the agency to have a seal of office, authorized training for officers, and laid out employment conditions for CIA employees. Furthermore, the act would permit the CIA to circumvent normal government employment practices: the CIA could “borrow” officers from other agencies (for example, the Air Force) and hire political defectors. Finally, and most importantly, the bill would formally create a black budget to fund the agency.
Congressman Vito Marcantonio of New York was among the few dissenters to the CIA Act of 1949. Addressing his colleagues, Marcantonio warned that they were on the verge of creating a precedent of profound significance: “I call the attention of the Members of the House who are present to the language on page 6 of the report,” he began. “I think that it can be said without any fear of contradiction that this is the first time in the history of the United States that this language is found in any report accompanying a bill coming before the Congress. It reads as follows.” Marcantonio continued, quoting from the text in front of him:
The report does not contain a full and detailed explanation of all of the provision of the proposed legislation in view of the fact that much of such information is of a highly confidential nature. However, the Committee on Armed Services received a complete explanation of all features of the proposed measure. The committee is satisfied that all sections of the proposed legislation are fully justified.
“Let us look at this a moment,” Marcantonio exclaimed. “We are being aske
d to vote for legislation without having full explanation of all of the provisions of the bill.” He was pointing out one of the most startling aspects of the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949: The bill itself was secret. Only members of the Armed Forces Committee had seen the bill’s entire contents.
As Marcantonio continued his address, the congressman lamented that “as a result of the hysteria under which this bill is being passed I suppose a majority of the House will vote for the bill, even though in doing so you are suspending your legislative prerogatives and evading your duty to the people of this Nation. . . . I refuse to believe that our Nation is so unsafe from a security standpoint that we have to suspend not only the civil liberties of the people but the legislative prerogatives of the Representatives of the people in the Congress.”
That same day, the bill passed 348 to 4 in the House. The Senate went on to pass it in a voice count.
The Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 was, and remains, the only statutory basis for the black budget; one of its key provisions was that the CIA’s funding would be exempt from congressional oversight. The CIA’s budget would be hidden within the line items of other governmental bodies, agencies, or programs in a collection of secret earmarks—pieces of the CIA’s finances could be hidden in the Air Force budget, or in the Department of Agriculture, or anywhere else, for that matter. With the Central Intelligence Agency Act, the doctrine of “plausible deniability” extended from the specific operations of the fledgling agency to the lifeblood of the agency itself. The act would ensure that not a single congressperson or senator would know what was actually in the budgets they were called to vote upon.
When Congress passed the secret CIA Act that year, they may have imagined themselves in the same situation Leo Szilard, Niels Bohr, and the other progenitors of the Manhattan Project had felt a decade earlier as the Nazi war machine rolled across Europe. In 1949, the Cold War’s intensity was increasing day by day, and the fear of communism—whether imagined or real—was bringing the nation’s temperature to a feverish state. The Hollywood blacklist was now two years old. Howard Hughes shopped scripts like I Married a Communist to test his directors’ patriotism. That spring, eleven leaders of the Communist Party USA were found guilty under the Smith Act of promoting communism in the USA, and party leader Eugene Dennis landed on the cover of Time magazine. Defense lawyers for the party members were imprisoned on contempt of court charges. Less than a year later, Joe McCarthy would famously claim at a speech to the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, to have information on fifty-seven Communists working in Truman’s State Department. It would be twenty-five years before Congress revisited the question of the black budget. Meanwhile, the money flowed.
Revelations that the CIA had raised an army in Laos (a continent and ocean away from the Capitol) and was spending more than $300 million a year on a secret war in Southeast Asia put the first chink in the agency’s armor. The proprietary airline it ran for clandestine logistics, Air America, had grown into one of the largest air carriers in the world, and agency pilots were moonlighting couriering Golden Triangle Hmong heroin from the Laotian hinterlands to Long Tieng and Vientiane.
Some of the main players in Laos were men whose names would come up over and over again in connection with off-the-books covert actions. Richard Secord was part of the spooky teams of Special Forces operatives, CIA officers, and local paramilitaries who ran the secret war. So was Jim Rhyne, who’d go on to found Aero Contractors, a CIA airline, in the late 1970s. In Vietnam, Felix Rodriguez flew helicopters for the CIA and trained “provisional reconnaissance units” for the CIA’s PHOENIX program.
Congress balked at the news stories. On the Senate floor, Senator J. William Fulbright of the Foreign Relations Committee asked Senator Allen Ellender of the Appropriations Committee about Laos. “It has been stated that the CIA has 36,000 there. It is no secret. Would the Senator say before the creation of the army in Laos [the CIA] came before the committee and the committee knew of it and approved it? . . . Did the Senator approve it?” Ellender responded, “It was not—I did not know anything about it. . . . I never asked, to begin with, whether or not there were any funds to carry on the war in this sum the CIA asked for.”
Laos was the first crack in the wide levee holding back the CIA’s secrets: Leaks turned into streams, then a torrent and flood. In December 1971, Congress cut off funding for the war in Laos, the first time that the American legislature had attempted to exert some control over the agency. More attempts followed.
On June 17, 1972, police arrested a group of men caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex, on the Potomac’s banks just a couple of short miles from the nation’s Capitol. They were no ordinary burglars: James McCord was a former chief of security at the CIA; Bernard Barker was attached to the Bay of Pigs; Eugenio Martinez was a former CIA boat captain; Frank Fiorini, aka Frank Sturgis, was a longtime CIA agent. The team’s leader was E. Howard Hunt, who’d cut his teeth as a CIA operative back in the 1954 coup in Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs. During the 1960s, Hunt rose to become chief of covert action in the Domestic Operations Division. The CIA wasn’t supposed to have a domestic operations division—the agency was legally barred from operating against Americans. At the time of the break-in, Hunt had officially retired from the CIA but held on to his connections to the agency. Hunt was using a CIA-supplied fake identity to conduct much of the job’s logistics work.
The extent of CIA involvement in Watergate may be debated by historians for years to come, but revelations about former CIA personnel working for Nixon to discredit Nixon’s enemies set off a campaign by journalists and, later, congressmen to find out just what the agency had been up to since its murky inception.
That didn’t stop Nixon from trying to hold back the gathering waters—a few days after the break-in, Nixon conspired with H. R. Haldeman to use executive secrecy and “national security” to thwart the looming FBI investigation. Their conversation, recorded on a White House taping system, would eventually become the “smoking gun” leading to Nixon’s resignation.
When special prosecutor Archibald Cox subpoenaed Nixon’s White House tapes, Nixon responded with the “Saturday Night Massacre.” The president forced Attorney General Richardson to resign and ordered Solicitor General Robert Bork to fire the special prosecutor. It was a desperate and transparent move. Protesters outside the White House held up signs saying HONK TO IMPEACH, turning Pennsylvania Avenue into a circus of protest and blaring horns. The new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, picked up where Cox had left off. Nixon continued resisting the subpoena, citing national security. In July of 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend articles of impeachment against Nixon. That same month, the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon had to release the tapes. Ten days later, Nixon resigned.
In the meantime, Nixon replaced Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms with James Schlesinger, an intelligence outsider with instructions from Nixon to turn the agency upside down. Helms suspected that Schlesinger’s appointment as DCI was part of a White House plan to deflect Watergate in the agency’s direction. Before leaving office, Helms destroyed records of the CIA’s drug experiments from the fifties and sixties. Helms, like the White House, also had a taping system in his office that allowed him to record his conversations and held the transcripts on thousands of pages of paper in his files. On his way out of office, Helms destroyed every last page.
Schlesinger’s tenure at the CIA was short and bitter. The new DCI set about cleaning house by firing more than a thousand CIA employees. He expected his deputy directors to give him a list each morning of people to cut. Schlesinger was so hated in the agency that the Office of Security provided him with extra bodyguards. When his portrait went up in the CIA’s main corridor, a hidden surveillance camera was aimed at the painting to catch anyone trying to deface it.
A few months into his tenure, the new director got hit with devastating n
ews. On April 15, 1973, John Dean reported to federal prosecutors about the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in Los Angeles, a scheme engineered by E. Howard Hunt. The point of the burglary was to find information that could go into a CIA psychological profile of Ellsberg, who’d leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. The CIA had previously created profiles on Ellsberg twice at Hunt’s request, developed the film Hunt used in the “black bag” jobs, and provided Hunt with the sterile identity he was working under.
When Schlesinger found out about the agency’s ties to Watergate, he was enraged and threatened to “fire everyone if necessary.” Schlesinger didn’t want any more unseen land mines detonating under his feet. William Colby, Schlesinger’s deputy director for operations, proposed that the DCI issue an agency-wide order directing anyone who had information about anything the CIA may have done outside its charter to come forth with the information. The order was distributed on May 9; in it Colby instructed all agency employees with damning information to “call my secretary (extension 6363).” That same day, Nixon appointed Schlesinger secretary of defense. Colby became DCI. Extension 6363 started ringing off the hook.
Colby proceeded to do what spies are never, ever supposed to do. He made a list of secrets, taking the most sordid details of the agency’s improprieties—facts that had been compartmented, made “need to know,” “eyes only,” and operations so black that there wasn’t a paper trail at all—and put them all in one place. In the charged political atmosphere of the Watergate era, listing the secrets was like stockpiling dynamite in a match factory.