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  As the calls rolled in, Colby’s list grew to 693 single-spaced pages. CIA officers gave the sensitive file a nickname: the “Family Jewels.” The dossier teemed with everything from the merely immoral to the downright inhuman, from petty improprieties to out-and-out felonies. The CIA had bugged and burgled Americans in their homes, put dissidents under illegal surveillance, and experimented on unwitting people with dangerous drugs. The NSA tapped countless Americans’ phones. And then there were the assassination attempts: Lumumba in the Congo, Castro in Cuba, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic—incidents that the CIA was either directly involved with or far too close to. The stockpile of combustible secrets grew. On December 22, 1974, someone lit a match.

  HUGE CIA OPERATION REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES, OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS, read the headline of The New York Times. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh had spent more than a year picking up bits of the Family Jewels. In his front-page exposé, Hersh detailed Operation CHAOS, the CIA program to report on antiwar activists. The CIA had infiltrated antiwar groups, photographed protestors at antiwar marches, and was keeping files on more than ten thousand antiwar activists. The agency even put members of Congress under surveillance.

  Hersh’s article was one of countless revelations that brought a newfound activism to Congress. After revelations of the secret wars in Laos and the bombings of Cambodia came to light, Congress overruled a Nixon veto to pass the 1973 War Powers Resolution, requiring presidents to consult with the legislature before engaging U.S. military forces around the world. On December 30, 1974, Congress passed the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, requiring the president to issue written “findings” for each CIA covert operation and to report all CIA covert operations to relevant congressional committees.

  On January 27, the Senate voted 82 to 4 to form the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Idaho Democrat Frank Church, which became known as the Church Committee. The House moved to establish the Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by New York Democrat Otis Pike. The star witness would be CIA director William Colby.

  William Colby is one of the more peculiar figures in the black world’s history. He was one of the last CIA directors whose legacy went back to the agency’s prehistory as the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime spy outfit whose ranks swelled with Ivy League playboys, businessmen, and Eastern aristocrats. Himself a Princeton man, Colby twice parachuted behind enemy lines, and he led a sabotage mission into Norway. After the war, Colby briefly worked at OSS director William “Wild Bill” Donovan’s New York law firm. One of the firm’s projects involved helping establish Civil Air Transport (CAT), the aviation firm that would evolve into Air America and later Aero Contractors. Donovan’s law firm played a central role in establishing the CIA’s front companies or proprietaries. But Colby isn’t usually remembered for his clandestine operations during the Second World War.

  On one hand, there was William Colby the loyal soldier: He had overseen the Vietnam War’s notorious Phoenix program and its architecture of secret prisons, death squads, torture, assassination, and massacre. During Colby’s confirmation hearings, “wanted” posters for him appeared all over town. On their face was an ace of spades—a symbol used in Vietnam to signify death or killing—with a drawing of Colby’s face. The posters echoed tactics employed in the Phoenix program. During his confirmation, Colby put the Phoenix body count at more than twenty thousand.

  On the other hand, water-cooler gossip at the agency held that the new director himself might be a Soviet agent planted into the intelligence community’s heart at its very inception. To some people in the agency, Colby’s performances before Congress were at best designed to cripple the intelligence community. At worst, as hallway murmurings attested, Colby’s testimony was tantamount to treason. According to his memoirs, Colby was convinced “that [the Rockefeller Commission, convened by President Ford, which preceded the Church Committee] would not be the end of the matter, and that the President’s carefully circumscribed investigation of CIA’s domestic affairs would not stop Congress from conducting its own probe . . . the atmosphere in the nation had far too radically changed—in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate—for the Executive Branch to get away, as it always had in the past, with keeping the cloak-and-dagger world of intelligence strictly its own prerogative and affair. . . . Intelligence,” he mused, “was entering a new era, and the country was in the process of redefining its correct position under the Constitution.” And so, in his testimonies before the investigative committees, Colby was far more forthright than any of his predecessors.

  Before the Rockefeller Commission, Colby revealed so much that the commission’s chairman, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, pulled him aside and said, “Bill, do you really have to present all this material to us? We realize that there are secrets that you fellows need to keep and so nobody here is going to take it amiss if you feel that there are some questions you can’t answer quite as fully as you seem to feel you have to.” In his memoirs, wrote Colby, “I got the message quite unmistakably and I didn’t like it. The Vice-President of the United States was letting me know that he didn’t approve of my approach to the CIA’s troubles, that he would much prefer me to take a traditional stance of fending off investigators by drawing a cloak of secrecy around the agency in the name of national security.”

  Colby believed that if the CIA was going to survive, he had to cooperate with Congress. Stonewalling Congress, he thought, would challenge them to dismantle the agency altogether. By employing a policy of moderate openness with the committees, Colby reasoned, he could get Congress to “buy into” the intelligence community. Colby would recruit Congress like a spy recruiting a foreign agent. If the CIA could weather the congressional investigations, the intelligence community might come out even stronger. Thus, Colby started talking, and he instructed his officers to do the same.

  Drawing from his experience at William Donovan’s law firm, the CIA director would later explain that his strategy was based on how he beat antitrust investigations: “In those cases, an enormous number of documents are demanded by the prosecution, meticulously examined and then three or four specific papers are extracted to prove the case. The only real defense in such actions,” Colby wrote, “was not to fight over the investigators’ right to obtain the documents, as the courts would almost invariably rule against you, but to come forward with the documents and information so as to place in proper context the documents selected by the investigators and to explain that they had another significance than guilt.” But, Colby realized, “Since this strategy often required the revelation of even more material than the investigators sought, it was greeted with very little enthusiasm within both the administration and the intelligence community.” That was an understatement.

  Richard Helms, Colby’s old boss at the CIA, was livid: “It was Colby’s sworn responsibility to protect ‘CIA sources and methods, ’ ” he wrote, a responsibility Colby abdicated as he went about “dumping files on the Rockefeller Commission, and subsequently the Senate and House committees.” Helms compared Colby’s testimony before Congress to the Bolsheviks opening up the czar’s intelligence files after the revolution, or the Allied intelligence services pillaging secret Nazi files after World War II. “The DCI’s unilateral actions effectively smashed the existing system of checks and balances protecting the national intelligence service,” Helms concluded, without explaining what those “checks and balances” actually consisted of.

  Colby was fired.

  On November 2, 1975, President Ford instigated a staff shakeup the press called the “Halloween Massacre.” In the span of a few days, Ford fired Henry Kissinger as national security advisor (he retained his position as secretary of state), William Colby as CIA director, and James Schlesinger as secretary of defense. Moving up the ranks to become secretary of defense was Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney became chief of staff. In Colby’s place, For
d put a man named George Herbert Walker Bush.

  In June of 1975, the Rockefeller Commission issued its report. Appointed by the president and designed to draw attention away from exposing the intelligence community, the Rockefeller Commission strongly suggested that the black budget was unconstitutional: “Congress should give careful consideration to whether the budget of the CIA should not, at least to some extent, be made public, particularly in view of the provisions of Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution.”

  During the hearings, DCI Colby explained that the black budget was legal in his opinion. The crux of Colby’s argument was that since House members could view congressional subcommittee hearings on the CIA budget, the constitutional requirement had been fulfilled. The Church Committee disagreed: “Not only does [Colby’s] position ignore the plain text of the Clause, but is not supported by the debates, either at the Constitutional Convention or in the ratifying conventions in the various States . . . the Constitution requires that the public know how its funds are being spent” (emphasis in original).

  “It is clear,” concluded the committee, “that the present secrecy surrounding the appropriations and expenditures for intelligence—particularly the inflation of unspecified appropriations in which funds for intelligence are concealed—vitiates the constitutional guarantee. Under the present system neither the public nor the Congress as a whole knows how much is being spent on national intelligence or by each intelligence agency. In addition, both Congress as a whole and the public are ‘deceived,’ as one Senator put it, about the ‘true’ size of other agency budgets. . . . It is impossible for most Members of Congress or the public to know the exact amount of money which actually is destined for any government agency.”

  Despite the bad blood between himself and his predecessor Richard Helms, Colby joined Helms to testify at a 1978 hearing on “whether disclosure of funds authorized for intelligence activities is in the public interest.”

  Colby and Helms advanced the standard argument against the budget’s disclosure: “The single figure I don’t have any great problem with one way or the other. I just think it is a mistake to take that first step.” For Colby, “any effort to release an official figure for the intelligence budget would have to be accompanied by considerable description of exactly what kinds of programs were covered and what kinds of programs were excluded . . . this kind of clarification would have to go on until a very clear line appeared between the kinds of operations covered under the budget and those left out.” This, in his estimation, would lead the country down a dangerously slippery slope: “The result would be only to outline in public more and more details of our overall intelligence program.”

  George Bush concurred. “I have concluded that one figure, standing alone, is all but meaningless,” he wrote, but “this ‘meaningless’ figure will inevitably lead to a demand on the part of some for more detail. . . . I worry about the whittling away process that might take place.” Like Helms and Colby, Bush’s conclusion was clear: “I hope this Committee will resist the urge to move towards accommodation by revealing the budget figures. The demand will not cease.”

  No one from the intelligence community—not a single person—argued that publicly disclosing the intelligence budget would put anyone’s safety in jeopardy. The Church Committee had refuted the “slippery slope” argument in its 1976 report, pointing out that “for many years, Congress has refused to reveal the figures for the national intelligence budget and the aggregate budgets of the intelligence agencies. It seems unlikely that given this past history, Congress will suddenly reverse itself and fail to protect information whose disclosure would endanger the national security.” Congressman Ed Koch summed up the committee’s argument, saying:

  The real fear on both sides of the aisle that some have expressed is, “Gee, if we do that, that is the first step.”

  Maybe it is, but, whatever the second step is, it is what this House wants it to be, and if this House decides that this is the last step, so be it. If the House decides that it wants to have more information it will have to have a vote on it.

  What’s wrong with that? That is what is called the democratic system. We are sent here to be a part of that system.

  In conclusion, the Church Committee argued that the “slippery slope” rationale could legitimize anything. “It could be used to justify much greater secrecy. It could be used to justify the withholding of all information on the Defense Department because information which the Congress wishes to protect would be threatened by pressures caused by the publication of any information on that Department.”

  The intelligence budget stayed an official secret. And then one day it wasn’t. Sort of.

  In 1998, the Federation of American Scientists prevailed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit aimed at forcing the CIA to disclose the intelligence budget. On March 20, 1998, CIA director George Tenet wrote, “After careful review, I am announcing the release of the aggregate amount appropriated for intelligence and intelligence-related activities for fiscal year 1998 because it has been determined that this release will not harm national security or otherwise harm intelligence sources and methods. The fiscal year 1998 figure was $26.7 billion.” The following year, however, Tenet changed his mind, and the top line was reclassified. Still, the top line crept out from time to time, mostly when intelligence officials slipped up and inadvertently revealed the number. At a speech in 2005, Deputy Director of National Intelligence Mary Margaret Graham let it slip that the number was $44 billion.

  When the 9/11 Commission took up the question of the black budget, they came to the same conclusion that the Church and Pike commissions had come to decades earlier. The intelligence community was “too complex and too secret.” Keeping the intelligence budget’s top line secret was symbolic of an intelligence community marked by fiefdoms and by a lack of coordination and cooperation, a community that hoarded secrets to hoard power at the expense of the country’s greater good. The commission blamed the intelligence failures leading to the attacks, in part, on secrecy itself:

  Secrecy, while necessary, can also harm oversight. The overall budget of the intelligence community is classified, as are most of its activities. Thus, the Intelligence committees cannot take advantage of democracy’s best oversight mechanism: public disclosure. This makes them significantly different from other congressional committees, which are often spurred into action by the work of investigative journalists and watchdog organizations. . . .

  To combat the secrecy and complexity we have described, the overall amounts of money being appropriated for national intelligence and to its component agencies should no longer be kept secret. . . . The top-line figure by itself provides little insight into U.S. intelligence sources and methods. . . . But when even aggregate categorical numbers remain hidden, it is hard to judge priorities and foster accountability.

  The executive branch stuck to its traditional line. In 2003, George Tenet had told a federal court in response to a Freedom of Information Act suit, “Information about the intelligence budget is of great interest to nations and non-state groups (e.g., terrorists and drug traffickers) wishing to calculate the strengths and weaknesses of the United States and their own points of vulnerability to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies.” Disclosing the top line would cause “serious damage” to national security, he testified. The Bush administration opposed a bill to implement the 9/11 Commission’s recommendation to disclose the top-line budget figure: “The Administration strongly opposes the requirement in the bill to publicly disclose sensitive information about the intelligence budget,” said a Bush administration policy statement from early 2007.

  Nonetheless, the bill passed. With little fanfare, the number $43.5 billion for fiscal year 2007 was declassified. The administration had lost. Sort of.

  Although Congress compelled the director of national intelligence to disclose the top lines of the National Intelligence Program for 2007 and 2008 (after that, the president could reclas
sify the top line by issuing a memorandum to that effect each year), it didn’t exactly reveal the true scope of the intelligence budget. The National Intelligence Program, whose budget disclosure Congress had compelled, was only one branch of the intelligence community at large. In addition to the NIP, there’s TIARA (Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities), which involves tactical intelligence for the military, and the JMIP (Joint Military Intelligence Program), the Defense Department’s own intelligence infrastructure, which supplied the DoD with information that isn’t part of the National Intelligence Program. The budgets for those two programs, TIARA and JMIP, remain classified.

  Reluctant disclosures from the director of national intelligence notwithstanding, the most accurate top-line number may have been located when R. J. Hillhouse of the Spy Who Billed Me blog downloaded an unclassified PowerPoint presentation from the Office of the Director of Intelligence. Hillhouse, a former history professor who blogs about intelligence privatization from her home in Hawaii, was interested in a pie chart contained in the PowerPoint showing the intelligence budget percentage going to outside contractors: The chart revealed that a staggering 70 percent went straight to private companies. Another PowerPoint slide illustrated the growth of intelligence outsourcing since 2001. The graph showed a clear rise, but the actual dollar numbers were hidden. Using the “edit” function in PowerPoint, Hillhouse accessed the spreadsheet used as a basis for the graph. And there it was: The graph showed $42 billion in contracts for the fiscal year. From there, it was just a matter of some simple math to calculate the total budget: 70 percent (the number of intelligence dollars going to contractors) of X (the total budget) is $42 billion. To solve for X, divide $42 billion by .7 and you get the total: $60 billion. It’s hard to say what’s more shocking—the $60 billion figure (a number roughly comparable to what the Chinese military—the second-largest military in the world—spends each year), or the fact that a whopping 70 percent—$42 billion—is outsourced to private industry.