I will tell you, now that summer is officially here, that it has been pure heck trying to get to the Church Commission. Mac is going to be relaxing at the beach, and we won’t be able to get to Willow to talk about the seminal Congressional panel that changed fundamentally the way we Spooks are permitted to do business.
To get there we have to talk about Mac’s doppelganger, a man who is the diametric opposite to him in almost every way. Mac was an officer of honor, and complete and undisputed integrity.
Investigative journalist Sy Hersh is not. He is the one who brought the whole Spook paradise tumbling down when he published the overview of the Family Jewels documents in the New York Times in December of 1974, and he has been merrily blowing whistles- and distorting facts- ever since.
To get to that, though, you have to remember what was going on, and why everyone was just about completely fed up. Washington was still reeling from the Watergate revelations. Gerald Ford, everyone’s genial Uncle Jerry, was trying to convince us all that everything was fine and that there was no deal about pardoning Nixon.
The North Vietnamese were closing in on a victory in SE Asia, and no one wanted to get involved again- there was too much healing to be done, or something, and the Mideast was still simmering after the Yom Kippur War that Israel nearly lost and brought the Soviet Union and the United States to the brink of thermo-nuclear exchange.
They say that Dick Nixon was drinking a lot in those days, and henry Kissinger ought to get more credit for keeping a steady hand on the tiller.
It was a looking glass world, and one that all of the graduating class of 1973 looked at with a healthy dose of skepticism. Unfortunately, we have to walk a little but backward to get to what happened after Sy Hersh spilled the beans.
The adage “Only Nixon could have gone to China” is a popular one these days. I am not quite sure what it means, except in the most general sense that only a fervent anti-communist could go and talk to them frankly. That was certainly the realpolitik view of Henry-the-K, but not everyone thought that way.
The Joint Chiefs were of the opinion that while armed hostilities were in progress in the War, the pursuit of détente with the Soviets and the PRC was the moral equivalent of selling out the kids were dying. Accordingly, with the approval of Chairman Moorer (Mac worked for him in Hawaii), a spy ring was set up inside the National Security Council office in the White House.
Petty Officer Charles Radford removed thousands of pages of White House secret documents and delivered them to the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for review. The operation went on for more than a year, and was not disclosed until someone got mad enough at what they read to whisper to rogue journalist Jack Anderson that America was considering a change to the policy about Pakistan.
Anderson’s column in December of 1971 (Two weeks before Mac retired from the Navy at DIA) revealed information that could only have come from the highest levels of the Pentagon or the White House, and an investigation was commenced in both places. Over the next week, CI officers identified Yeoman Radford as the likely suspect, and he confessed, along with his handler, Admiral Robert O. Welander.
Nixon was furious, but chose to cover the matter up to avoid a public mess with the Chairman. Still, the cover-up may have contributed to a perceived need to the create the Plumbers and the paranoid attitude his Administration had to just about everyone. Remember: it is only paranoia if “they” are actually not out to get you.
Radford later had a chatty interview with the New York Times about what he did, and Sy Hersh piled on with an article in The Atlantic years later about what was happening with American policy to Chile.
Hersh is the opposite of Mac, like I said. Sy is more of a mailbox than he is an investigator, and he doesn’t mind making up a source if it helps to get him to a higher truth.
Don’t ask me on that- no lesser light than historian (and former JFK staffer) Arthur Schlesinger called Sy: “the most gullible investigative reporter I’ve ever encountered.”
And mendacious. His 1997 book “John F Kennedy: The Dark Side of Camelot” contained some truths and some wild and undocumented claims, but some of the whispers were true. The one about the alleged first wife, the one before Jackie, is widely lampooned, but years ago a couple my folks knew matter-of-factly mentioned that they partied with the future president and “the wife he had before Jackie.” They said she was nice, and it was too bad.
There is so much from those days strange enough to boggle the mind.
In June of 1970, during the wave of domestic protest centered around the war in Vietnam, President Nixon approved a 43-page set of recommendations known as the Huston Plan, after its author, Tom Charles Huston.
Huston was a piece of work. He was a zealous young conservative when he arrived at the White House. His enthusiasm about combatting the rising wave of protest gained him the nickname “Secret Agent X5” on the staff. His plan called for the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence agencies to conduct wide-ranging intelligence-gathering activities against dissident groups and individuals. Most of these activities were patently unconstitutional, and after initially approving the plan, Nixon revoked the secret plan five days later.
The Huston Plan was based on the assumption that “hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans, mostly under 30—are determined to destroy our society.” Those are Dick Nixon’s words, by the way.
I am not sure that is what we were thinking at the time. As I recall, most of us just wanted to avoid being drafted into the infantry and be allowed to party hearty without government interference.
Nixon believed that there was complicity between antiwar demonstrators and Communists. It was not an unreasonable assumption; Sergeant First Class Volsko told me one night on the mid-shift in Korea years later that he had monitored Black Panther groups were using code techniques they had been taught by the Russians.
In 1971, Nixon established the “Interagency Committee on Intelligence,” with aging Jedgar Hoover chairing the new ad hoc group with Richard Helms and Huston as the White House liaison.
Commentators have later observed that the elevation of a junior White House Staffer to the company of the DCI and Director of the FBI was a calculated insult, and part of a plan to exert presidential control over the parts of the government he cared most about: foreign policy, military matters, intelligence, law, criminal justice, and domestic order.
Parts of the Huston Plan were implemented. The FBI lowered the age of campus informants, thereby expanding surveillance of American college students as sought through the Plan. In 1971, the FBI reinstated its use of mail covers and continued to submit names to the CIA mail program.
As details of the Huston Plan unfolded during the Watergate Hearings, it came to be seen as a part and parcel of what Attorney General Mitchell referred to as, “The White House Horrors.”
Those, in general order, included the Plumbers Unit, the proposed fire-bombing of the Brookings Institution, the burglary of the office of Pentagon Papers compiler Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, the establishment of the Enemies List, and the use of the IRS to punish political opponents.
The whole thing seems like a bad dream, or a really severe hang-over. The funny thing about it all is the way the pendulum swings. There are a lot of things in the Huston Plan that were immediately terminated by the Church Committee.
And they came right back in the Patriot Act. We will have to talk about that tomorrow, and I am eager to talk to Mac and get his take on what he had to do on the IC Staff when the secrets were all revealed.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com