“They were very specific about their effort to destroy American intelligence…It was Senator Church who said our intelligence agencies were ‘rogue elephants.’ They were supposedly out there assassinating people and playing dirty tricks and so forth…”
– Robert Ellsworth, US State Department
It is the longest day of the year, which is wrong, of course, since the day is precisely as long as any other, but the wobble of the globe will deliver us more sunlight in the northern hemisphere than any other. So it is a day tinged with a certain regret that from here on it is shorter days and more darkness until we slide into the fall and then snows of winter.
I hung up with Mac yesterday, realizing that his trip to the beach would provide me some time to poke around and see what I might discover about the end of the long afternoon of covert action and executive outcomes. The Family Jewels eventually all dribbled out by the mid-1970s. The Agency was involved with assassinations- Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, the Diem brothers in the RVN, General Rene Schneider and Salvador Allende of Chile.
I took an embassy car one time out on the coast road from Santo Domingo to see the spot where Trujillo was gunned down. Lovely spot, really.
JFK had multiple plans to take down Fidel. The schemes sound fanciful these days- poisoned toothpaste and cigars- but they had roots in the chemical experiments of MK-Ultra which had been going on since the 1950s, and vestiges of which lingered until the end of the Cold War.
It was not just the Agency, of course. Standing watch in the Korean winter at USF-K, I had a Army Security Agency Sergeant First Class named Volsko who told me what the Army had been up to. Apparently those numb-nuts in the Weather Underground had threatened an unspecified West Coast military installation. That was justification enough on a force protection basis for DoD to jump into the ongoing FBI and CIA efforts to conduct domestic surveillance and dirty tricks in the United States.
(San Francisco Demonstration 1967. )
Volsko sucked on a Marlboro and ground it out in the ashtray between us at the watch console. “It was far out,” he said. “We had military jammers deployed at one demonstration, out of sight, and the kids were trying to coordinate the march with Motorola walky-talkies. We amped them up with enough juice that I swear we got an arc of electricity between the radio and the kid’s ear.” He laughed and fished in his pack for another smoke.
The tipping point in the public view of the war happened sometime in 1967; revelations about the Army’s surveillance activities are what started the long slow slide of information about what the government had been up to. An academic named Christopher H. Pyle learned while in the U.S. Army in the 1960s that “Army intelligence had 1,500 plainclothes agents watching every demonstration of 20 people or more throughout the United States.”
He went to Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) with his information and there were hearings. Senator Sam later became a household icon for his country-lawyer approach to chairing the Watergate Hearings on an increasingly embattled and paranoid Nixon Administration. It was actually Pyle as much as the Frank Wills, the security guard at the Watergate office complex who changed the course of history.
Pyle worked as an investigator for Ervin’s judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, and later supported the Church Committee as well. I made a note to ask Mac what he thought about the story that it was actually John Dean who orchestrated the break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices because his then-new-wife Maureen had been a highly compensated escort at the Columbia Plaza service on the DNC Rolodex.
That was the contention of a fellow named Colodny in his book “Silent Coup,” and Dean vigorously denied it and managed to get a settlement out of him, though not a victory in court.
A new book by James Rosen reinvigorated the claim against Dean in his new book about Attorney General John Mitchell.
According to Rosen, “Dean’s unique knowledge of all the players and their complex interconnections documented exhaustively in the civil litigation he initiated to try to suppress the ‘call-girl theory’ of Watergate, makes him the only logical answer in the three-decades-old mystery of who ordered the Watergate operation, who among the president’s men pressured Jeb Magruder to send Liddy and his team back into the DNC.”
I thought he was a weasel then and I do now, too.
DCI Helms did not survive the Watergate crisis, and the attendant disintegration of Richard Nixon, but he did start to clean house as he saw things start to slide out of his control. He directed the destruction of tens of thousands of documents, including those pertaining to MK-Ultra, and the files of the MERRIMACK and RESISTANCE programs, domestic surveillance operations conducted under the overall CHAOS program.
I often wonder if Sheriff Doug Harvey of Washtenaw County was part of Merrimack. The burly buzz-cut law man certainly had a hard-on about campus radicals at the University of Michigan, and both Hoover’s FBI and Helm’s CIA (along with Army) had active programs to disrupt and disorganize student demonstrations at the University of Michigan, along with dozens of other schools.
Mac served Director Helms on the Intelligence Community Staff as things were unraveling for President Nixon. The break-in itself happened on just at this time of year, approaching the summer solstice, when Washington is still at its sultry best.
I remember the agonizingly painful disintegration: Woodward and Bernstein became journalistic rock stars based on the information fed them by “Deep Throat” Deputy Director Mark Felt. It is possible that Woodward made the whole garage thing up- he had been a Naval officer who served in intelligence billets in the Pentagon and knew Alexander Haig. He may just have invented a cover for a composite of sources to make a better story.
But the story goes that it was Felt who linked E. Howard Hunt to the burglary and a much wider web of crimes. The underground garage where they met is over in Rosslyn, at 1401 Wilson Boulevard.
I don’t have to describe the process by which campaign contributions to the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) were linked to the burglars, and the suspicions about the CIA connection, and the Cubans, and the dramatic disclosure of the existence of the Oval Office taping system.
I have often thought that if Dick Nixon had as much forethought as Dick Helms did, and destroyed the tapes, things might have been a lot different.
They say that 85% of Americans who had televisions watched Senator Sam’s hearings. It was a grand show, and I was quite enamored of the blonde ice-queen who sat prominently behind her husband John Dean at the witness table.
Dick Nixon became the first man to resign the office of the presidency on my Dad’s birthday in August, 1974.
The new Ford Administration had several messes to deal with. Jim Schlesinger had compiled the Crown Jewels documents about what the Agency had been up to in his six months as Director, and he had fired 6% of the staff of the Directorate for Operations. His successor, William Colby, was cautiously continuing along the same path.
The question of what we knew, and when we knew it, to paraphrase the famous line from the Watergate hearings, came from Seymour Hersh in the pages of the New York Times, and that is what was going to change the way all of us Spooks did our business. The day he published was going to be a very long day indeed.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com