(1)
Deborah
Davis, Katharine the Great
(1979)
Nineteen
fifty-six. Ben Bradlee, recently remarried, is a European correspondent
for Newsweek. He left the embassy for Newsweek in 1953, a year before
CIA director Allen Duller authorized one of his most skilled and
fanatical agents, former OSS operative James Angleton, to set up
a counterintelligence staff. As chief of counterintelligence, Angleton
has become the liaison for all Allied intelligence and has been
given authority over the sensitive Israeli desk, through which the
CIA is receiving 80 percent of its information on the KGB. Bradlee
is in a position to help Angleton with the Israelis in Paris, and
they are connected in other ways as well: Bradlee's wife, Tony Pinchot,
Vassar '44, and her sister Mary Pinchot Meyer, Vassar '42, are close
friends with Cicely d'Autremont, Vassar '44, who married James Angleton
when she was a junior, the year he graduated from Harvard Law School
and was recruited into the OSS by one of his former professors at
Yale.
Also at
Harvard in 1943, as undergraduates, were Bradlee and a man named
Richard Ober, who will become Angleton's chief counterintelligence
deputy and will work with him in Europe and Washington throughout
the fifties, sixties, and early seventies. Both Bradlee and Ober
were members of the class of '44 but finished early to serve in
the war; both received degrees with the class of '43. Ober went
into the OSS and became a liaison with the antifascist underground
in Nazi-occupied countries; Bradlee joined naval intelligence, was
made a combat communications officer, and handled classified and
coded cables on a destroyer in the South Pacific. He then worked
for six months as a clerk in the New York office of the American
Civil Liberties Union, an organization that promotes various progressive
causes, including conscientious objection to war. This job, so out
of character for the young patriot, may or may not have been an
intelligence assignment...
Angleton
and Ober are counterintelligence, and run agents from Washington
and Paris who do exactly the opposite: they prevent spies from penetrating
American embassies, the State Department, the CIA itself.
(2)
Angus Mackenzie, CIA
Censors Books (1997)
In March 1972, a typescript
of an article and a related book proposal were purloined by a CIA
agent from a New York publisher and forwarded to Langley. For Richard
Ober, the manuscript was right out of a bad dream. A former senior
CIA official, Victor Marchetti, was planning to write a book exposing
CIA deceptions. Marchetti had been the executive assistant to the
deputy director of Central Intelligence and had attended regular
planning and intelligence meetings attended by Richard Helms. He
had also been a courier for the Agency group that approves covert
operations. The most carefully guarded CIA information was called
Sensitive Compartmented Information, or SCI, and was distributed
to officials strictly on a need-to-know basis. But his position
had allowed Marchetti an overview of the Agency purposely denied
to most CIA officers.
Over time,
Marchetti had become troubled by the Agency's role in the overthrow
of democracies on behalf of dictators and by CIA manipulation of
other nations' internal policies. He saw evidence of corruption
in overseas operations. Marchetti's intellectual honesty was also
offended by intrigue inside CIA headquarters that disrupted the
accuracy of intelligence estimates. Furthermore, the Vietnam War
had disillusioned Marchetti, whose sons would soon reach draft age.
And when Eagle Scouts from a troop he served as scoutmaster began
dodging the draft, Marchetti began to feel his CIA job was isolating
him.
Upon quitting
the Agency at age thirty-nine, after a highly successful fourteen-year
career, Marchetti wrote a novel called The Rope Dancer. Prior to
its publication by Grosset and Dunlap in 1971, a CIA officer read
a version of the manuscript at Marchetti's home, in keeping with
the rules set out in the CIA secrecy contract Marchetti had signed.
The CIA officer found no security breaches, and publication went
forward.
What troubled
Ober and Ober's immediate supervisor, Thomas Karamessines, was one
particular line in the novel. Marchetti's central character is speaking
with jaundiced anger about the fictional CIA: "Somebody should
publicize the Agency's mistakes." Suppose Marchetti got it
in his head to write about MHCHAOS? Concerned, Helms himself ordered
Marchetti placed under surveillance beginning on March 23, I972.
Within days,
an article written by Marchetti appeared in the April 3 Nation under
the headline "CIA: The President's Loyal Tool." Marchetti
wrote that the CIA was using the news media to create myths about
the Agency and was fooling such influential publications as the
New York Times and Newsweek. Additionally, he claimed, the CIA had
continued to control youth, labor, and cultural organizations in
the United States, notwithstanding the scandals triggered by the
report in Ramparts. Marchetti also castigated Helms for spending
too little time engaged with the intricacies of intelligence analysis,
satirically calling him a "master spy" who conducted his
most important weekly meetings in less than twenty minutes. Marchetti
concluded: "Secrecy, like power, tends to corrupt, and it will
not be easy to persuade those who rule in the United States to change
their ways."
Even while
MHCHAOS was surviving the Marchetti scare, the CIA inspector general,
an internal cop, was the focal point of a second emergency. Worried
that the inspector general might discover MHCHAOS and expose it,
Helms called in Colby, Ober, and Karamessines for a meeting on December
5, I972. Helms emphasized the importance of running a cleaner, less
dubious-looking operation. There was a need to proceed cautiously,
he said, to avoid a showdown with "some CIA personnel."
Nonetheless, Helms was adamant that MHCHAOS not be abandoned. It
will not be "stopped simply because some members of the organization
do not like this activity," he insisted.
Helms cautioned
Ober against attending meetings of the Justice Department Intelligence
Evaluation Committee, because security was lax and its role in domestic
politics might lead investigative reporters to MHCHAOS. Helms had
come up with a solution to the problem of CIA officers who doubted
the legality of MHCHAOS. Henceforth, it would be described within
the Agency as an operation against international terrorism. "To
a (sic) maximum extent possible, Ober should become identified with
the subject of terrorism inside the Agency as well as in the Intelligence
Community," Helms ordered. Afterward, Colby sent Karamessines
a summary of the meeting: "A clear priority is to be given
in this general field to the subject of terrorism. This should bring
about a reduction in the intensity of attention to political dissidents
in the United States not apt to be involved in terrorism."
The change in label was evidently intended to improve the Agency's
image and cover, on the assumption that "terrorists" were
more believable as a genuine threat than "dissidents."
But there
was in fact to be little change in targets. MHCHAOS continued to
hold radicals in its sights, specifically radical youths, Blacks,
women, and antiwar militants. The label "international terrorist"
was designed to replace "political dissident" as the ongoing
justification for illegal domestic operations. And in the final
move to clean up Ober's act, in December Helms put an end to the
operation of the five-year-old MHCHAOS by formally transforming
it into the International Terrorism Group-with Ober still in charge.
(3)
Daniel Brandt, All
the Publisher's Men, The National Reporter (1987)
According
to his Who's Who entry, Alfred Friendly was a Post reporter while
also serving in Air Force intelligence during World War II and as
director of overseas information for the Economic Cooperation Administration
from 1948-49. Joseph B. Smith (Portrait of a Cold Warrior) reports
that the ECA routinely provided cover for the CIA. Radio Free Europe
and Radio Liberty were set up by the CIA and John S. Hayes was their
chairman by 1974. Years earlier when Hayes was vice-president for
radio and television at the Post, he was appointed by Kennedy to
a secret CIA propaganda task force. Friendly left the Post soon
after Bradlee came on board, and Hayes left when Johnson appointed
him ambassador to Switzerland in 1966.
But poor
Bradlee claims he didn't know that Cord Meyer was a globetrotting
CIA destabilizer in the fifties, just as he knew nothing about CIA
links when he took time off from the Post to work as a propagandist
for the U.S. embassy in Paris from 1951-53. Deborah Davis includes
in her book a memo released under the FOIA that shows Bradlee responding
to a request from the CIA station chief in Paris, Robert Thayer.
His assignment was to place stories in the European press to discredit
the Rosenbergs, who had been sentenced to death, and Bradlee followed
orders.
Benjamin
Bradlee: from Post reporter to embassy propagandist, then on to
Newsweek and back to the Post as executive editor, without breaking
stride. The point of Davis' book is that this pattern is repeated
again and again in Post history; she calls it "mediapolitics"
-- the use of information media for political purposes. Robert Thayer's
status as CIA station chief in Paris is confirmed in Richard Harris
Smith's book OSS. While in Paris, Bradlee already knew Thayer, having
attended the preparatory school Thayer ran while Robert Jr. was
his classmate. Bradlee categorically denies any CIA connection,
but it's a toss-up as to which is more disturbing: Bradlee in bed
with the CIA and lying about it, or Bradlee led around by the CIA
and not knowing it.
Unlike Bradlee,
Katharine does not seem as sophisticated or conniving; she was apparently
completely sucked in by such charmers as Lyndon Johnson, Robert
McNamara, and even Henry Kissinger, who took her to the movies.
She supported Nixon in 1968 and 1972, changed her mind about him
later, but has yet to waver from the anti-Communism that kept the
Post from criticizing US policy in Vietnam. Her idea of an awkward
situation is asking Nixon for National Guard protection during anti-Vietnam
demonstrations in Washington; Lyndon never made her ask. The demonstrators
had to be duped -- after all, she had taken the time to get her
facts straight with a trip to Vietnam in 1965, where she shopped
for blue and white china, and had access to all the assorted power
brokers and opinion makers who showed up at the 1966 masked ball
that Truman Capote gave for her. Between Bradlee and Katharine,
with journalism such as this it's a wonder that the Vietnamese people
survived.
The elitist
conservatism and intelligence connections of the Post are as important
today as they ever were; Katharine and Bradlee are still in control.
Davis could have remarked on the current New Right editorial line
in the Post, or added the fact that former editorial page editor
(1968-79) Philip Geyelin joined the CIA for a year in 1950, while
on leave from the Wall Street Journal, but found the work boring
and went back to the Journal. And she also doesn't mention that
Walter Pincus, a Post reporter who still covers intelligence issues,
took two CIA-financed trips overseas to international student conferences
in 1960, and waited to write about them until 1967 when reporters
everywhere were exposing CIA conduits. Informed readers of Geyelin
(who stills does a column) and Pincus can learn much from they way
these writers filter history. This may qualify them as good journalists
among their colleagues, but for the unwitting masses it simply amounts
to more disinformation.
The CIA
connections that Davis does mention are dynamite. The issue is relevant
today because frequently the D.C. reader has to pick up the Washington
Times to get information on the CIA the Post refuses to print. For
example, while almost every major newspaper in the country, as well
as CBS News and ABC News, use the real name of former CIA Costa
Rican station chief "Tomas Castillo," the Post, as of
late June, continues to gloat over their use of the pseudonym only.
This is probably Bradlee's decision, not Katharine's, because Newsweek
let former Associated Press reporter Robert Parry use Castillo's
real name (Joseph F. Fernandez, age 50) when Parry joined the magazine
earlier this year. According to Davis, Katharine doesn't make editorial
decisions these days unless they threaten the health of the company.
The question,
then, becomes one of myth-management, and attempting to discern
why the Post enjoys such a liberal reputation in spite of its record.
Once you redefine liberalism as something slightly closer to the
center than the New Right, it means that "genuine" liberalism
(if such a thing was ever important) is stranded and soon becomes
extinct. Add to this the fact that US liberalism since World War
II, whether "genuine" or contemporary, has a record on
foreign policy that would make Teddy Roosevelt proud. That leaves
two media events to explain the Post puzzle: the Pentagon Papers
and Watergate. Forget the first event, because the Post was merely
trying to keep up with the New York Times so as not to lose face.
Besides, they didn't make a movie about it.
Watergate
and the Post, the stuff of great drama. Much has been written already
about the probability that Nixon was set up. McCord as a double
agent has been covered neatly in Carl Oglesby's Yankee and Cowboy
War, Bob Woodward's previous employment with a Pentagon intelligence
unit was mentioned in Jim Hougan's Secret Agenda, and the motive
-- that Nixon was losing perspective and becoming a threat to those
who were still able to see their long-range interests clearly --
is evident after reading Seymour Hersh's The Politics of Power.
If you put
it all together and summarize it in the context of Deep Throat and
the Post, along with Bradlee's CIA sympathies, you must agree with
Davis that Nixon wasn't the only one set up; Deep Throat led the
Post by the nose. Whether they knew it or not, whether they cared
or not assuming that they knew, and whether or not a noble end can
justify shabby means -- all this pales next to Davis' main point.
That point is this: the Post, whose history of journalism by manipulation
helped create the conditions that led to Vietnam, the demonstrations,
and the psychosis of Nixon, ended up using or responding to these
same manipulative methods to avoid political obsolescence, and somehow
it worked.
Davis identifies
Deep Throat as Richard Ober, the chief of the CIA's domestic spying
program called Operation CHAOS. The evidence is circumstantial and
her sources remain anonymous. According to Davis, Kissinger moved
Angleton into the White House and set him up with his own Israeli
intelligence desk in 1969. This sounds like vintage Kissinger as
he acts swiftly to capture the foreign policy apparatus, but it's
the first I've heard that Angleton, who thought the Sino-Soviet
split was a ruse designed to catch the West napping, was on any
sort of terms with the China-hopping, detente-talking Kissinger.
Davis writes
that Angleton's deputy Ober was also given a White House office,
and after the Pentagon Papers were published Ober had privileged
access to Nixon and was able to observe his deterioration. Again,
this is news to me. If Davis is correct, it means Angleton and Ober
were running Operation CHAOS out of the White House, Nixon knew
about it while Kissinger didn't, but both Kissinger and Nixon were
deeply suspicious of the CIA and felt it necessary to start up the
Huston Plan to cover the CIA's shortcomings in domestic intelligence.
At least the book includes a photograph of Ober -- the first one
I've seen. Davis makes more sense than some of the Watergate theories
that have kicked around in past years, but this is still the most
speculative portion of her book.
Part of
the Post success story has to do with sheer wealth. As one of the
world's richest women, Graham has the empire backed up with many
millions, which guarantees continued access to privilege and power.
Another part is an ability to play dirty. Katharine Graham, who
became one of Washington's most notorious union-busters in the name
of a free press, used her "soft cop" with Bradlee's "hard
cop" to insure that William Jovanovich, who published the first
edition of this book in 1979, was bullied into recalling 20,000
copies because of minor inaccuracies alleged by Bradlee. Jovanovich
made no effort to check Bradlee's allegations. Deborah Davis filed
a breach-of- contract and damage-to-reputation suit against Jovanovich,
who settled out of court with her in 1983.
The entire
saga of Katharine the Great is a sobering antidote to the intoxication
I felt when All the President's Men first played. A myth has been
more than punctured; Davis bludgeons it mercilessly -- yet in a
manner that shows far more journalistic integrity than one can expect
from the Post or from Jovanovich. This bludgeoning was overdue for
eight years, delayed by exactly the sort of Washington hardball
that Davis exposes. Indeed, there can be no more eloquent testimony
to the substantive nature of Davis' material than the sound that
those 20,000 copies must have made as they, at the behest of Post
power, went through a shredding machine.
(4)
Deborah
Davis, Katharine the Great
(1979)
The minor
deception in the book is that only Woodward knew who Deep Throat
was. Bradlee knew him, had known him far longer than Woodward. There
is a possibility that Woodward had met him while working as an intelligence
liaison between the Pentagon and the White House, where Deep Throat
spent a lot of time, and that he considered Woodward trustworthy,
or useful, and began talking to him when the time was right. It
is equally likely, though, that Bradlee, who had given Woodward
other sources on other stories, put them in touch after Woodward's
first day on the story, when Watergate burglar James McCord said
at his arraignment hearing that he had once worked for the CIA.
Whether or not Bradlee provided the source, he recognized McCord's
statement to the court as highly unusual: CIA employees, when caught
in an illegal act, do not admit that they work for the CIA, unless
that is part of the plan. McCord had no good reasons to mention
the CIA at all, except, apparently, to direct wide attention to
the burglary, because he had been asked to state only his present
occupation, and he had not worked for the CIA for several years.
What matters
is not how the connection with Deep Throat was made, but why. Why
did Bradlee allow Woodward to rely so heavily upon it, and ultimately,
why did the leaders of the intelligence community, for whom Deep
Throat spoke, want the president of the United States to fall?
What we
have seen so far has been Nixon's attempt, after the Pentagon Papers,
to bludgeon CIA director Helms and FBI director Hoover into cooperating
with his campaign to use the papers against the Democrats. Actually,
Watergate goes back to the early days of the Nixon administration,
when Henry Kissinger, the head of the National Security Council,
issued NSSM (National Security Study Memorandum) 1 (ironically,
Daniel Ellsberg had helped him draft it), which required different
intelligence agencies and departments to provide him with independent
answers to comprehensive sets of questions about the Vietnam war.
The purpose of NSSM 1 was not only to be able to run the war better,
for Kissinger was running the war the way he wanted to in Vietnam
and Cambodia anyway, but to play the agencies off against each other,
with the power, in the confusion, going to Kissinger. He was, of
course, understood to be operating for Nixon.
NSSM 1 came
out on February 1, 1969, about a week after Nixon took office; in
February 1970 Kissinger then formed the infamous 40 Committee, to
which the CIA was to submit all plans for covert actions. In December
1970 Kissinger assigned James Schlesinger, assistant director of
the budget, the task of analyzing the intelligence budget with an
eye to cutting back the department of Thomas Karamessines, Helms's
deputy and the director of plans.
(5)
Katharine
Graham, Personal History
(1997)
We always did our best
to be careful and responsible, especially when we were carrying
the burden of the Watergate reporting. From the outset, the editors
had resolved to handle the story with more than the usual scrupulous
attention to fairness and detail. They laid down certain rules,
which were followed by everyone. First, every bit of information
attributed to an unnamed source had to be supported by at least
one other, independent source. Particularly at the start of Watergate,
we had to rely heavily on confidential sources, but at every step
we double-checked every bit of material before printing it; where
possible, we had three or even more sources for each story. Second,
we ran nothing that was reported by any other newspaper, television,
radio station, or other media outlet unless it was independently
verified and confirmed by our own reporters. Third, every word of
every story was read by at least one of the senior editors before
it went into print, with a top editor vetting each story before
it ran. As any journalist knows, these are rigorous tests.
Yet, despite
the care I knew everyone was taking, I was still worried. No matter
how careful we were, there was always the nagging possibility that
we were wrong, being set up, being misled. Ben would repeatedly
reassure me - possibly to a greater extent than he may have actually
felt-by saying that some of our sources were Republicans, Sloan
especially, and that having the story almost exclusively gave us
the luxury of not having to rush into print, so that we could be
obsessive about checking everything. There were many times when
we delayed publishing something until the "tests" had
been met. There were times when something just didn't seem to hold
up and, accordingly, was not published, and there were a number
of instances where we withheld something not sufficiently confirmable
that turned out later to be true.
At the time,
I took comfort in our "two-sources" policy. Ben further
assured me that Woodward had a secret source he would go to when
he wasn't sure about something-a source that had never misled us.
That was the first I heard of Deep Throat, even before he was so
named by Howard Simons, after the pornographic movie that was popular
in certain circles at the time. It's why I remain convinced that
there was such a person and that he - and it had to be a he - was
neither made up nor an amalgam or a composite of a number of people,
as has often been hypothesized. The identity of Deep Throat is the
only secret I'm aware of that Ben has kept, and, of course, Bob
and Carl have, too. I never asked to be let in on the secret, except
once, facetiously, and I still don't know who he is.
(6)
Deborah
Davis, Katharine the Great
(1979)
Three months
later he authorized John Mitchell to provide Justice Department
cover for an Intelligence Evaluation Committee (IEC, for which Hoover
refused to provide FBI staff), which monitored civil disturbances
and coordinated and evaluated domestic intelligence. The president
also began to rely heavily upon the counsel of Richard Ober, Angleton's
deputy, the man in the CIA most concerned with domestic counterintelligence,
and one of the few whom Nixon trusted. Ober was given a small office
inside the White House, where he was known only to Nixon, Haldeman,
Ehrlichman, and possibly Kissinger. He had unlimited access to the
president, could pass Haldeman at any time without permission and
without going on the record (his name was never recorded in White
House logs), and was present at many of the meetings that took place
after the publication of the Pentagon Papers, when Nixon's obsession
with his enemies pushed him to the limits to rational thought. The
president, in his confusion, began to equate the Democrats with
both the war (the Kennedy Democrats) and the antiwar movement (the
McGovern Democrats); decided that a McGovern victory in the approaching
presidential election would be a victory for the movement's Communists;
and became more firmly convinced than he had always been that his
reelection was synonymous with the best interests of the nation.
He also knew, and must have complained to his personal intelligence
consultant, Ober, that neither the CIA nor the FBI would help ensure
that he would win.
Nixon's
confidence in Ober did not come automatically; a man like Nixon
must have proof of loyalty. He would have had to see, from Ober,
the evidence that he did not care for bureaucratic battles, that
he put the president's interests above those of the CIA. The most
effective way for Ober to have proven himself was to have acted
as consultant when Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic affairs adviser,
was ordered to establish (without experience in such matters) the
president's personal intelligence unit, the Plumbers, in the summer
of 1971. Ober would have found Ehrlichman the right men for the
job (men like former CIA operative James McCord); he would have
provided equipment, given detailed instructions, helped Ehrlichman
to analyze their results. He would have shown Nixon that he was
willing to risk his career for him by doing what the CIA would not
have done-for example, overseeing the burglary of the office of
Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist-which more than anything else would
have demonstrated Ober's correct state of mind and persuaded Nixon
that he could finally trust him.
The essential
rule of counterintelligence is to use an enemy's weaknesses against
himself, to one's own advantage. Haldeman and Ehrlichman held the
authority in the Nixon White House for political intelligence and
sabotage, but Nixon, by his nature, needed to keep secrets even
from them; he needed to think that certain plans were too sensitive
to share with anybody except Ober. This operative, who was next
to Angleton the most skilled counterintelligence man in the nation,
understood Nixon's fear of the Democrats and did not tell him that
with his thirty-point lead in the polls the fear was illogical.
Instead, he played upon it; he either persuaded Nixon or agreed
with him that the Plumbers ought to stop working on the fringes
of the campaign, that they should be sent directly into Democratic
National Committee headquarters to plant telephone bugs and steal
documents, which they did for the first time on May 1, 1972, the
day, coincidentally, before J. Edgar Hoover died.
