Facing Reality - From World Federalism to the CIA by Cord Meyer (University Press/Harper & Row, 1980)
For my wife, Starke Patteson Meyer
Acknowledgements
I also wish to express my appreciation to Richard Helms and Samuel Halpern, who as former colleagues at the CIA took the trouble to read the manuscript and to make useful suggestions correcting errors of fact and interpretation.....
AFTER LOSING EYESIGHT IN ONE EYE IN COMBAT IN THE USMC IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC AND STARTING A VETERANS COMMITTEE
Chapter 3 - Peacekeeping (p. 35)
In April 1945 Mary and I were married in her mother's New York apartment by Reinhold Niebuhr....A few days later I boarded the official train in Washington that was taking the lower-ranking members of the national delegation to San Francisco [to the conference convened by the Allied powers to establish the structure of the new United Nations organization]...and Mary flew out to join me with press credentials from the North American Newspaper Alliance....
In a luncheon conversation with Alger Hiss, who was the secretary general of the conference,...we might be misleading our own people as to the limits of what was actually being accomplished....
Suddenly, in the middle of May, reality crowded in upon me in a much more personal way. I was awakened one morning by a telephone call from my parents in New York, who told me through their tears that they had just been informed that my twin brother had been killed in action. He was a lieutenant with the First Marine Division, which I knew was engaged in the desperate fighting against the entrenched Japanese on Okinawa....
During 1949, I became convinced that our attempts to transform the United Nations had been overtaken by events that could no longer be ignored or explained away....In the fall of 1949, I resigned as president of the United World Federalists, to be succeeded by Alan Cranston, who was later elected to the Senate from California, and I returned to Harvard to take up the remaining two years of my fellowship.....My mentor was a Harvard professor named Arthur Smithies....
My next interview was with Allen Dulles, who was at that time deputy director for plans of the Central Intelligence Agency. We had met as participants on radio and TV talk shows in New York, and we had a number of friends in common at whose houses we had played tennis together on Long Island weekends. However, I did not know him well and knew little about his wartime career in the OSS. He was kind enough to give me more than an hour of his time, and we had a fascinating discussion. In a serious and careful way, he spelled out the nature of the world situation as he saw it and the complex challenge with which we were confronted by Stalin's regime...At the end of the meeting, he made me a firm offer of a job with the Agency at a middle level of executive responsibility and assured me that the work would be suited to my abilities and past experience, although for security reasons he could not describe the job in any detail. I took with me the voluminous personal history forms that had to be filled out and said I would let him know within a week....
Therefore, before leaving Washington, I asked Walter Lippmann for his advice on whether to take the job...
On my return to Cambridge, I found that my wife was all in favor of the move to Washington. Her sister and other good friends lived there and she looked forward to a change in scene....
By early October 1951 I was at work with the Central Intelligence Agency in one of the dilapidated buildings along the reflecting pool that lies below the Lincoln Memorial.
After a brief period of training, I was assigned to what was then called the Office of Policy Coordination, headed by Frank Wisner, which was responsible for the conduct of covert operations abroad. By chance, I arrived just as a new presidential directive called for an intensification of covert operations to cope with what was seen as a worldwide Communist political and propaganda offensive. This directive, [National Security Council] NSC 10/5, was issued on October 21, 1951, and clearly assigned to the CIA the responsibility for mounting an expanded covert action program with policy guidelines to be supplied by an NSC subcommittee.
In fact, I happened to join the Agency at a time when its responsibilities, its budget, and its manpower were expanding rapidly as the result of presidential decisions that had the full support of the relevant committees of Congress....
On August 31, 1953, I was summoned to a meeting with Richard Helms. At that time, Helms was chief of operations and second in command under Frank Wisner of what had become the Directorate of Plans....
AFTER SURVIVING BEING ACCUSED OF BEING A COMMUNIST BY MCCARTHY
Less than a year after the charges against me had been dropped, Allen Dulles proved that he had meant what he said when he assured me that my career at the Agency would not be damaged. When Tom Braden decided to resign from the CIA in order to publish a newspaper in California, Dulles approved my appointment as Braden's successor as chief of the International Organizations Division in September of 1954.
In that capacity, I became head of one of the major operating divisions of the Directorate of Plans, with a growing budget and a wide policy mandate under a new National Security Council directive to counter with covert action the political and propaganda offensive that the Soviets had launched through their control of a battery of international front organizations.
In March of 1962, the International Organizations Division was merged with the Covert Action Staff. As the new head of an expanded Covert Action Staff, I became responsible not only for international operations but also for reviewing and providing policy guidance to the geographical area divisions in their conduct of covert activity authorized by the NSC directives.
This bureaucratic history is relevant because it explains why my name inevitably came to figure prominently in the wave of publicity that crashed over the Agency in 1967. Up to that time, there had been very few leaks, and over a period of fifteen years many American citizens and private voluntary organizations had cooperated discreetly with the CIA in joint efforts to cope with the Soviet political offensive.
The immediate cause of the rash of publicity concerning Agency involvement with American voluntary organizations that broke in the spring of 1967 was the publication of three articles in Ramparts magazine in February of that year.
They revealed that he National Student Association (NSA), the organization representing American college students, had for several years secretly been receiving funds from the CIA to help finance its international activities, and that its senior officials had cooperated with the CIA in this program....
The source was a rather young radical NSA staffer who never had met with CIA officials and no direct experience of how the relationship between the two organizations functioned. Having learned about the secret funding as the result of a conversation with an excessively loquacious NSA officer who did know the facts, this young man, Michael Wood, decided that it was his duty to expose the whole relationship.....
None of those arguments moved Wood. He proceeded to take his story to the editors of Ramparts magazine, who were at that time riding the rising tide of New Left opposition to the Vietnam war. Their published version of the CIA's role in supporting the NSA cast the relationship in the worst possible light and accused the Agency of having seduced, bribed and manipulated a generation of American college students for its nefarious purposes.
The James Bond image of the Agency in the public mind as being exclusively associated with the shadowy world of espionage gave credibility to theses charges. As the first public exposure of the CIA role, the Ramparts coverage set the tone and colored the content of the massive press and media publicity that followed.
The challenge of the Soviet front apparatus and the serious political purposes of the CIA assistance were explained by a few respected journalists like James Reston of the New York Times, but their voices were drowned out in the general clamor for termination of a program that was widely identified as malevolently manipulative.....(1961) Helsinki (World Youth) festival, I was required to review with him in detail the plans we had worked out with the American student leaders. At the conclusion of the Helsinki festival, he was so impressed by the results that he asked to meet with four or five student activists who had been the principal organizers. We met in his office, and he congratulated them on their effective performance and assured them that the Kennedy administration would continue to support such programs....
When I succeeded Thomas Braden as chief of the International Organizations Division in September of 1954, I also inherited from him responsibility for the Agency relationship with two unique organizations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. In 1971, the widely held belief that these two radios received mos of their funding from the CIA was officially confirmed by Republican Senator Clifford Chase of New Jersey.
As a result of this disclosure, the Congress took action to terminate all CIA funding and connection to them and to provide for their continued existence by open appropriations....
Secretary of State Dean Acheson, approached a veteran retired diplomat, Joseph C. Grew, with the proposition that he head up a private group of prominent American citizens to find useful employment for the distinguished exiles and to help them communicate with their people. Grew accepted the assignment and on June 1, 1949, he announced the incorporation of the National Committee for a Free Europe, later to become known as the Free Europe Committee. The original membership of the committee included, among others, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Adolph Burke, Mark Ethridge, Allen Dulles,...General Lucius Clay, and agreed to head up an organization called the Crusade for Freedom to raise funds for the endeavor from business corporations and the general public....
During vacations, we either visited my family on the New Hampshire shore or stayed with Mary's mother on the Pinchot estate in Milford, Pennsylvania, where dear and bear roamed in the pine woods and three miles of river gave the boys a chance to learn early how to cast for spotted trout.
The stream descended in a series of small cascades and deep pools to a dramatic waterfall, where the mist from the crashing water filled a dark gorge. The pools that the water had carved smoothly out of black basalt were natural swimming holes filled with froth and bubbles by the swift current.
So the seasons went, and we had no warning that the good times were coming to an end,
Then one late afternoon in December of 1956, I received a call at my office from one of the neighbors children that Michael had been hit by a car while running across the road in front of our house.....
Joined by our shared sorrow, Mary and I were closer after this loss than we had been for some time, but then we grew apart. Caught up in my work at the Agency, I took too little care of her interests and concerns.....We sold the old house in Virginia and moved into a more manageable house in Georgetown, from which I took my sad departure in September of 1957.....Every divorce is different....
In October of 1964, I was in New York City attending a meeting when I received a call from an old friend, Wistar Janney. As gently as he could, he broke the news that Mary had been found dead on a tow path along the canal that boarders the Potomac, apparently murdered that afternoon by an unknown assailant......
A man was found by the police in the area where Mary's death had occurred. He was later tried for her murder but the evidence against him was circumstantial. No weapon was found, and he was acquitted. Nevertheless, I was satisfied by the conclusions of the police investigation that Mary had been the victim of a sexually motivated assault by a singe individual and that she had been killed in her struggle to escape.
Later on, some journalistic speculation was published to the effect that I was convinced that Mary's death was the result of some complicated Communist plot. There was no truth whatever to these stories, and I never suspected the tragedy of having any other explanation than the one the metropolitan police reached after careful investigation of all the evidence.
In January of 1966, I married Starke Patteson Anderson. We had met and fallen in love some months before....She had come to Washington from Memphis, Tennessee, and had found an interesting job working for Roger Stevens in his capacity as chairman of the newly established National Foundation for the Arts.
As a result of the untimely death of Deputy Director for Plans Desmond FitzGerald, in July of 1967, his deputy, Thomas H. Karamessines, was appointed to succeed him by Helms, who had by then become Director of Central Intelligence. I was appointed assistant deputy director for plans, and for the next six years served as Karamessines' number two in the management of the Agency's over-seas-operations. The Directorate for Plans, as it was then called, was a euphemism to describe the section of the Agency responsible for the collection of secret intelligence abroad, for the provision of counterintelligence protection against foreign agents, and for the conduct of covert operations abroad, whether political, paramilitary, or propagandistic in nature.
Within the Agency, this directorate was commonly referred to as "the clandestine service" and in the press it was later saddled with the title of "the department of dirty tricks."
Now officially rechristened the Directorate for Operations, it is organized today much as it was when Karamessines and I were in charge, although its budge and personnel have been reduced. The basic components of the organization were the geographical area divisions, and the division chiefs were responsible to Karamessines and to me for the management of their headquarters component and for the overseas CIA stations and bases in their respective areas. There was a supporting structure of specialized staffs to assist us in the running of this large and complex undertaking, including the Covert Action Staff, which I had previously headed.
In effect, Tom K., as we called him, and I were responsible to Helms for carrying out whatever programs and missions abroad were assigned to us by the National Security Council.
In this task, our main opponent and competitor was the Soviet KGB, together with its sister military intelligence service, the GRU......
Tom K....His father had been a Greek immigrant who had been wiped out by the Depression...Tom K. worked his own way through Columbia University and its law school and became one of Tom Dewey's bright young deputy assistant attorney generals in New York in those racket busting days. When World War II broke out, he entered the army as a private but later was assigned to the OSS because of his knowledge of Greek language and history, and rose to the rank of major. After the war he joined the CIA at its inception and devoted his entire life to government service.....
On the evening of Saturday, June 17, 1972, CIA Director Richard Helms received a phone call at his home from his chief of security, Howard Osborn, a call whose consequences were to have a drastic effect on his career and on the Agency he headed, although at the time he had no way of foreseeing what was in store. Osborn reported that the men involved in the Watergate burglary of the Democratic National Headquarters the night before had been identified. Two of them, Howard Hunt and James McCord, proved to be ex-CIA staff employees, and the Cuban Americans had past associations with the Agency related to the Bay of Pigs.....
;...A file check showed that Eugenio Martinez, one of the five who broke into the Watergate, had been employed as a contract capacity with the Agency in the mid 1960s in Cuban operations and was still employed on a part-time basis by the CIA station in Miami on a $100-a-month retainer as an informant on Cuban exile activities.....
In February of 1974 I was called back to Washington from my post as station chief in London to testify in executive session before the Senate subcommittee that had been established under the chairmanship of Senator Howard Baker (R. Tenn.) to investigate the extent of CIA involvement in Watergate....
The amount of misinformation that has been published on the subject of American espionage is so extensive that is not surprising that the average citizen is confused and wonders whether there isn't a better way to spend his tax dollar.....
Any attempt to disentangle the truth from this web of fiction and propaganda faces one obvious obstacle. There is no way of setting forth the most convincing evidence for the American public so that it can judge for itself.....
The Agency officers serving under cover in the stations overseas are known as case officers. Under the supervision of the station chief, they are America's front-line troops in the continuing effort to extract from human sources the information that policy makers require but which cannot be obtained from either the media , communications intercepts, or satellite surveillance....
In the long run, the true test of an agent's reliability is the accuracy and significance of the secret information that he is able to produce when checked against observable events and collateral evidence.....
Accurate and extensive biographic records maintained over a period of many years are the indispensable institutional memory of any competent intelligence service. Without such records, the Agency would be at the mercy of hostile intelligence services in the same way that a man suffering from amnesia is easy prey for the first confidence man who comes along.
The Counterintelligence Staff in the headquarters of the Directorate for Operations in Washington has a vital role to play in the long process of determining the bona fides of a new agent.....the CI Staff must maintain its professional skepticism in researching and testing every aspect of the new agent's motivation and career. For many years, a good friend of mine, James Angleton, served as chief of the CI Staff until his retirement was forced by Colby......
For my wife, Starke Patteson Meyer
Acknowledgements
I also wish to express my appreciation to Richard Helms and Samuel Halpern, who as former colleagues at the CIA took the trouble to read the manuscript and to make useful suggestions correcting errors of fact and interpretation.....
AFTER LOSING EYESIGHT IN ONE EYE IN COMBAT IN THE USMC IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC AND STARTING A VETERANS COMMITTEE
Chapter 3 - Peacekeeping (p. 35)
In April 1945 Mary and I were married in her mother's New York apartment by Reinhold Niebuhr....A few days later I boarded the official train in Washington that was taking the lower-ranking members of the national delegation to San Francisco [to the conference convened by the Allied powers to establish the structure of the new United Nations organization]...and Mary flew out to join me with press credentials from the North American Newspaper Alliance....
In a luncheon conversation with Alger Hiss, who was the secretary general of the conference,...we might be misleading our own people as to the limits of what was actually being accomplished....
Suddenly, in the middle of May, reality crowded in upon me in a much more personal way. I was awakened one morning by a telephone call from my parents in New York, who told me through their tears that they had just been informed that my twin brother had been killed in action. He was a lieutenant with the First Marine Division, which I knew was engaged in the desperate fighting against the entrenched Japanese on Okinawa....
During 1949, I became convinced that our attempts to transform the United Nations had been overtaken by events that could no longer be ignored or explained away....In the fall of 1949, I resigned as president of the United World Federalists, to be succeeded by Alan Cranston, who was later elected to the Senate from California, and I returned to Harvard to take up the remaining two years of my fellowship.....My mentor was a Harvard professor named Arthur Smithies....
My next interview was with Allen Dulles, who was at that time deputy director for plans of the Central Intelligence Agency. We had met as participants on radio and TV talk shows in New York, and we had a number of friends in common at whose houses we had played tennis together on Long Island weekends. However, I did not know him well and knew little about his wartime career in the OSS. He was kind enough to give me more than an hour of his time, and we had a fascinating discussion. In a serious and careful way, he spelled out the nature of the world situation as he saw it and the complex challenge with which we were confronted by Stalin's regime...At the end of the meeting, he made me a firm offer of a job with the Agency at a middle level of executive responsibility and assured me that the work would be suited to my abilities and past experience, although for security reasons he could not describe the job in any detail. I took with me the voluminous personal history forms that had to be filled out and said I would let him know within a week....
Therefore, before leaving Washington, I asked Walter Lippmann for his advice on whether to take the job...
On my return to Cambridge, I found that my wife was all in favor of the move to Washington. Her sister and other good friends lived there and she looked forward to a change in scene....
By early October 1951 I was at work with the Central Intelligence Agency in one of the dilapidated buildings along the reflecting pool that lies below the Lincoln Memorial.
After a brief period of training, I was assigned to what was then called the Office of Policy Coordination, headed by Frank Wisner, which was responsible for the conduct of covert operations abroad. By chance, I arrived just as a new presidential directive called for an intensification of covert operations to cope with what was seen as a worldwide Communist political and propaganda offensive. This directive, [National Security Council] NSC 10/5, was issued on October 21, 1951, and clearly assigned to the CIA the responsibility for mounting an expanded covert action program with policy guidelines to be supplied by an NSC subcommittee.
In fact, I happened to join the Agency at a time when its responsibilities, its budget, and its manpower were expanding rapidly as the result of presidential decisions that had the full support of the relevant committees of Congress....
On August 31, 1953, I was summoned to a meeting with Richard Helms. At that time, Helms was chief of operations and second in command under Frank Wisner of what had become the Directorate of Plans....
AFTER SURVIVING BEING ACCUSED OF BEING A COMMUNIST BY MCCARTHY
Less than a year after the charges against me had been dropped, Allen Dulles proved that he had meant what he said when he assured me that my career at the Agency would not be damaged. When Tom Braden decided to resign from the CIA in order to publish a newspaper in California, Dulles approved my appointment as Braden's successor as chief of the International Organizations Division in September of 1954.
In that capacity, I became head of one of the major operating divisions of the Directorate of Plans, with a growing budget and a wide policy mandate under a new National Security Council directive to counter with covert action the political and propaganda offensive that the Soviets had launched through their control of a battery of international front organizations.
In March of 1962, the International Organizations Division was merged with the Covert Action Staff. As the new head of an expanded Covert Action Staff, I became responsible not only for international operations but also for reviewing and providing policy guidance to the geographical area divisions in their conduct of covert activity authorized by the NSC directives.
This bureaucratic history is relevant because it explains why my name inevitably came to figure prominently in the wave of publicity that crashed over the Agency in 1967. Up to that time, there had been very few leaks, and over a period of fifteen years many American citizens and private voluntary organizations had cooperated discreetly with the CIA in joint efforts to cope with the Soviet political offensive.
The immediate cause of the rash of publicity concerning Agency involvement with American voluntary organizations that broke in the spring of 1967 was the publication of three articles in Ramparts magazine in February of that year.
They revealed that he National Student Association (NSA), the organization representing American college students, had for several years secretly been receiving funds from the CIA to help finance its international activities, and that its senior officials had cooperated with the CIA in this program....
The source was a rather young radical NSA staffer who never had met with CIA officials and no direct experience of how the relationship between the two organizations functioned. Having learned about the secret funding as the result of a conversation with an excessively loquacious NSA officer who did know the facts, this young man, Michael Wood, decided that it was his duty to expose the whole relationship.....
None of those arguments moved Wood. He proceeded to take his story to the editors of Ramparts magazine, who were at that time riding the rising tide of New Left opposition to the Vietnam war. Their published version of the CIA's role in supporting the NSA cast the relationship in the worst possible light and accused the Agency of having seduced, bribed and manipulated a generation of American college students for its nefarious purposes.
The James Bond image of the Agency in the public mind as being exclusively associated with the shadowy world of espionage gave credibility to theses charges. As the first public exposure of the CIA role, the Ramparts coverage set the tone and colored the content of the massive press and media publicity that followed.
The challenge of the Soviet front apparatus and the serious political purposes of the CIA assistance were explained by a few respected journalists like James Reston of the New York Times, but their voices were drowned out in the general clamor for termination of a program that was widely identified as malevolently manipulative.....(1961) Helsinki (World Youth) festival, I was required to review with him in detail the plans we had worked out with the American student leaders. At the conclusion of the Helsinki festival, he was so impressed by the results that he asked to meet with four or five student activists who had been the principal organizers. We met in his office, and he congratulated them on their effective performance and assured them that the Kennedy administration would continue to support such programs....
When I succeeded Thomas Braden as chief of the International Organizations Division in September of 1954, I also inherited from him responsibility for the Agency relationship with two unique organizations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. In 1971, the widely held belief that these two radios received mos of their funding from the CIA was officially confirmed by Republican Senator Clifford Chase of New Jersey.
As a result of this disclosure, the Congress took action to terminate all CIA funding and connection to them and to provide for their continued existence by open appropriations....
Secretary of State Dean Acheson, approached a veteran retired diplomat, Joseph C. Grew, with the proposition that he head up a private group of prominent American citizens to find useful employment for the distinguished exiles and to help them communicate with their people. Grew accepted the assignment and on June 1, 1949, he announced the incorporation of the National Committee for a Free Europe, later to become known as the Free Europe Committee. The original membership of the committee included, among others, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Adolph Burke, Mark Ethridge, Allen Dulles,...General Lucius Clay, and agreed to head up an organization called the Crusade for Freedom to raise funds for the endeavor from business corporations and the general public....
During vacations, we either visited my family on the New Hampshire shore or stayed with Mary's mother on the Pinchot estate in Milford, Pennsylvania, where dear and bear roamed in the pine woods and three miles of river gave the boys a chance to learn early how to cast for spotted trout.
The stream descended in a series of small cascades and deep pools to a dramatic waterfall, where the mist from the crashing water filled a dark gorge. The pools that the water had carved smoothly out of black basalt were natural swimming holes filled with froth and bubbles by the swift current.
So the seasons went, and we had no warning that the good times were coming to an end,
Then one late afternoon in December of 1956, I received a call at my office from one of the neighbors children that Michael had been hit by a car while running across the road in front of our house.....
Joined by our shared sorrow, Mary and I were closer after this loss than we had been for some time, but then we grew apart. Caught up in my work at the Agency, I took too little care of her interests and concerns.....We sold the old house in Virginia and moved into a more manageable house in Georgetown, from which I took my sad departure in September of 1957.....Every divorce is different....
In October of 1964, I was in New York City attending a meeting when I received a call from an old friend, Wistar Janney. As gently as he could, he broke the news that Mary had been found dead on a tow path along the canal that boarders the Potomac, apparently murdered that afternoon by an unknown assailant......
A man was found by the police in the area where Mary's death had occurred. He was later tried for her murder but the evidence against him was circumstantial. No weapon was found, and he was acquitted. Nevertheless, I was satisfied by the conclusions of the police investigation that Mary had been the victim of a sexually motivated assault by a singe individual and that she had been killed in her struggle to escape.
Later on, some journalistic speculation was published to the effect that I was convinced that Mary's death was the result of some complicated Communist plot. There was no truth whatever to these stories, and I never suspected the tragedy of having any other explanation than the one the metropolitan police reached after careful investigation of all the evidence.
In January of 1966, I married Starke Patteson Anderson. We had met and fallen in love some months before....She had come to Washington from Memphis, Tennessee, and had found an interesting job working for Roger Stevens in his capacity as chairman of the newly established National Foundation for the Arts.
As a result of the untimely death of Deputy Director for Plans Desmond FitzGerald, in July of 1967, his deputy, Thomas H. Karamessines, was appointed to succeed him by Helms, who had by then become Director of Central Intelligence. I was appointed assistant deputy director for plans, and for the next six years served as Karamessines' number two in the management of the Agency's over-seas-operations. The Directorate for Plans, as it was then called, was a euphemism to describe the section of the Agency responsible for the collection of secret intelligence abroad, for the provision of counterintelligence protection against foreign agents, and for the conduct of covert operations abroad, whether political, paramilitary, or propagandistic in nature.
Within the Agency, this directorate was commonly referred to as "the clandestine service" and in the press it was later saddled with the title of "the department of dirty tricks."
Now officially rechristened the Directorate for Operations, it is organized today much as it was when Karamessines and I were in charge, although its budge and personnel have been reduced. The basic components of the organization were the geographical area divisions, and the division chiefs were responsible to Karamessines and to me for the management of their headquarters component and for the overseas CIA stations and bases in their respective areas. There was a supporting structure of specialized staffs to assist us in the running of this large and complex undertaking, including the Covert Action Staff, which I had previously headed.
In effect, Tom K., as we called him, and I were responsible to Helms for carrying out whatever programs and missions abroad were assigned to us by the National Security Council.
In this task, our main opponent and competitor was the Soviet KGB, together with its sister military intelligence service, the GRU......
Tom K....His father had been a Greek immigrant who had been wiped out by the Depression...Tom K. worked his own way through Columbia University and its law school and became one of Tom Dewey's bright young deputy assistant attorney generals in New York in those racket busting days. When World War II broke out, he entered the army as a private but later was assigned to the OSS because of his knowledge of Greek language and history, and rose to the rank of major. After the war he joined the CIA at its inception and devoted his entire life to government service.....
On the evening of Saturday, June 17, 1972, CIA Director Richard Helms received a phone call at his home from his chief of security, Howard Osborn, a call whose consequences were to have a drastic effect on his career and on the Agency he headed, although at the time he had no way of foreseeing what was in store. Osborn reported that the men involved in the Watergate burglary of the Democratic National Headquarters the night before had been identified. Two of them, Howard Hunt and James McCord, proved to be ex-CIA staff employees, and the Cuban Americans had past associations with the Agency related to the Bay of Pigs.....
;...A file check showed that Eugenio Martinez, one of the five who broke into the Watergate, had been employed as a contract capacity with the Agency in the mid 1960s in Cuban operations and was still employed on a part-time basis by the CIA station in Miami on a $100-a-month retainer as an informant on Cuban exile activities.....
In February of 1974 I was called back to Washington from my post as station chief in London to testify in executive session before the Senate subcommittee that had been established under the chairmanship of Senator Howard Baker (R. Tenn.) to investigate the extent of CIA involvement in Watergate....
The amount of misinformation that has been published on the subject of American espionage is so extensive that is not surprising that the average citizen is confused and wonders whether there isn't a better way to spend his tax dollar.....
Any attempt to disentangle the truth from this web of fiction and propaganda faces one obvious obstacle. There is no way of setting forth the most convincing evidence for the American public so that it can judge for itself.....
The Agency officers serving under cover in the stations overseas are known as case officers. Under the supervision of the station chief, they are America's front-line troops in the continuing effort to extract from human sources the information that policy makers require but which cannot be obtained from either the media , communications intercepts, or satellite surveillance....
In the long run, the true test of an agent's reliability is the accuracy and significance of the secret information that he is able to produce when checked against observable events and collateral evidence.....
Accurate and extensive biographic records maintained over a period of many years are the indispensable institutional memory of any competent intelligence service. Without such records, the Agency would be at the mercy of hostile intelligence services in the same way that a man suffering from amnesia is easy prey for the first confidence man who comes along.
The Counterintelligence Staff in the headquarters of the Directorate for Operations in Washington has a vital role to play in the long process of determining the bona fides of a new agent.....the CI Staff must maintain its professional skepticism in researching and testing every aspect of the new agent's motivation and career. For many years, a good friend of mine, James Angleton, served as chief of the CI Staff until his retirement was forced by Colby......
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