A Brief History of the Spy

Other Dissidents in Nixon Years’, appeared on the front page of the New York Times on December 22, 1974, and revealed the existence of a set of internal CIA documents called the Family Jewels. According to the compiler, future CIA DCI William Colby, these consisted of ‘693 pages of possible violations of, or at least questionable activities in regard to, the C.I.A.’s legislative charter’; that among the contents were ‘bizarre and tragic cases wherein the Agency experimented with mind-control drugs’; and that accompanying them was ‘a separate and even more secret annex’ that ‘summarized a 1967 survey of [the] C.I.A.’s involvement in assassination attempts or plans against Castro, Lumumba and [Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Leonidas] Trujillo [who was in fact killed by his officers of his own army]’. Certainly that material is in there, but the majority of the documents chronicle times where the CIA may have been acting outside their remit domestically — for example, in assisting a suburban Washington police department. The device they supplied may have helped prevent a policeman’s death, but they shouldn’t have been involved.

The article was yet another attack on the Agency, and prompted the formation of both a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities — chaired by Senator Frank Church, and known as the Church Committee. The headings of the latter’s final report give an indication of the concerns it threw up: ‘(A) Violating and Ignoring the Law (B) Over-breadth of Domestic Intelligence Activity (C) Excessive Use of Intrusive Techniques (D) Using Covert Action to Disrupt and Discredit Domestic Groups (E) Political Abuse of Intelligence Information (F) Inadequate Controls on Dissemination and Retention (G) Deficiencies in Control and Accountability.’

While there were concerns that Senator Church was using the Committee to further his own political ends, it undeniably threw light on the CIA — as well as the FBI and the NSA — which the Agency didn’t want. For example, at the first televised hearing, Church displayed a CIA poison-dart gun as a way of illustrating the committee’s discovery that the CIA had directly violated a presidential order by maintaining stocks of shellfish toxin. Over the months it took evidence, many previously hidden CIA operations came to light — from the drug experiments of MKULTRA to the assassination plans against Castro and Patrice Lumumba; from the financial assistance for political parties in foreign countries to the support of indigenous populations during time of war.

Helms had been replaced as DCI by James Schlesinger, but Nixon soon tapped him to serve as Secretary of Defence. The attitude of his successor William Colby, was to reveal what needed to be revealed and create a working relationship with those who had been set up to monitor and investigate them. Unfortunately, there were those on all the various committees set up — as well as the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee, there was also the Pike Committee set up by the House of Representatives — who were determined to bring the various agencies to heel, and the hearings became power plays between the committee members, the CIA and even, at times, the White House.

Chairman Otis Pike did come out of the hearings with an improved respect for the CIA:

We did find evidence, upon evidence, upon evidence where the CIA said: ‘No, don’t do it.’ The State Department or the White House said, ‘We’re going to do it.’ The CIA was much more professional and had a far deeper reading on the down-the-road implications of some immediately popular act than the executive branch or administration officials. One thing I really disagreed with Church on was his characterization of the CIA as a ‘rogue elephant.’ The CIA never did anything the White House didn’t want. Sometimes they didn’t want to do what they did.

Colby was certain about the effect that the work of the various committees was having on the CIA: ‘These last two months have placed American intelligence in danger,’ he said in May 1975. ‘The almost hysterical excitement surrounding any news story mentioning CIA or referring even to a perfectly legitimate activity of CIA has raised a question whether secret intelligence operations can be conducted by the United States.’

The end result of the various committees was that the CIA came under increased government scrutiny, not just operationally but also in terms of its budget. Its days of plausible deniability and acting at one remove from the president were gone. Thirty years after its creation, with a new DCI, future US President George H.W. Bush, the CIA was forced into a new role.

In addition to the openness being imposed on it by demands from the oversight committees, the CIA also had to deal with information being revealed publicly by one of their own former officers. Philip Agee, who had left the Agency in 1969, published Inside the Company: CIA Diary, an expose of CIA practices, in Britain in January 1975. Supported by the KGB, it named 200 officers worldwide, and accused the CIA of corrupt practices: ‘In the CIA we justified our penetration, disruption and sabotage of the left in Latin America — around the world for that matter — because we felt morality changed on crossing national frontiers,’ Agee wrote. He added to his revelations in the extreme left-wing magazine Counterspy — and as a direct result, Richard S. Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, was murdered in December 1975.

Agee willingly passed information to the KGB, who in return gave him more material: his books Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe and Dirty Work: The CIA in Africa, blowing the cover of a further 2,000 agents, were supplemented by the Covert Action Information Bulletin, which was able to publish secret CIA documents.

In 1980 the US Senate Intelligence Committee, set up in the wake of the Church and Pike committees, revealed how damaging Agee had been to the CIA. This led to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (known as the ‘anti-Agee’ bill), which made it a federal crime to intentionally reveal the identity of a covert intelligence agent. (One of those who voted against the act was Barack Obama’s vice-president, Joe Biden.) This curtailed Agee’s activities considerably.

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The general dismay within the Western intelligence world was not alleviated by the discovery of Gunther Guillaume at the heart of the West German government. The self-described ‘partisan for peace’ had become one of chancellor Willy Brandt’s most trusted aides following the 1972 election. Even though Guillaume came briefly under suspicion the following year, the charges weren’t taken seriously, particularly by Brandt, who later admitted he had overestimated his knowledge of human nature. Guillaume was able to pass over material sent to Brandt by President Nixon, as well as the many pieces of confidential NATO documentation that passed through the office. However, the West German counter-intelligence department was still suspicious, and in April 1974 Guillaume and his wife were arrested and admitted their guilt. Willy Brandt resigned the following month, something that the Stasi didn’t really expect, or want, according to its former chief Markus Wolf. It was ‘equivalent to kicking a football into our own goal’ — a simile that could have applied to many other agencies’ activities during that period.

9 REBUILDING

The late seventies would see both sides in the Cold War try to regain the ground that had been lost in the earlier part of the decade. New ideas were tried out, new agents recruited — although the KGB noted that it was much harder to gain ideological recruits during this time. The majority of agents were motivated by money.

One of the more unusual Soviet plans sought to gain intelligence on American military capabilities, but was derailed by the CIA’s Operation Silicon Valley. Unlike the KGB scheme to ruin the area as seen in the 1985 James Bond movie, A View to a Kill (in which Soviet agent Max Zorin attempted to flood Silicon Valley), this was espionage by stealth.

Described by the CIA later as ‘part of… a broad Soviet effort to acquire Western technology for military and commercial purposes’, the Soviet plan, developed in 1973, was to buy banks that were financing developments in Silicon Valley, the heartland of American technological progress, and thereby gain access to their secrets. Three banks were targeted to be approached by their intermediary, apparently wealthy Hong Kong businessman Amos Dawe: the Peninsula National Bank in Burlingame, the First National Bank of Fresno, and the Tahoe National Bank in South Lake Tahoe. At the same time, Dawe’s associate Y.T. Chou was trying to gain a half-interest in the Camino California bank in San Francisco.

The manager of the Singapore branch of the Moscow Narodny bank offered to finance Dawe’s future plans if he would travel to the States to make the purchases. The KGB hoped to eventually gain control of twenty separate