21. "I THOUGHT IT
WAS A CONSPIRACY"

On Tuesday, November 19, 1963, Richard Helms carried a Belgian submachine gun concealed in an airline travel bag into the White House.

The weapon was a war trophy; the CIA had seized a three-ton arms cache that Fidel Castro had tried to smuggle into Venezuela. Helms had taken the gun to the Justice Department to show it off to Bobby Kennedy, who thought they should bring it to his brother. They went to the Oval Office, and they talked with the president about how to fight Fidel. The late autumn light was fading as the president arose from his rocking chair and stared out the window at the Rose Garden.

Helms slipped the weapon back into his bag and said: "I'm sure glad the Secret Service didn't catch us bringing this gun in here." The president, lost in thought, turned from the window and shook hands with Helms. "Yes," he said with a grin, "it gives me a feeling of confidence."

The following Friday, McCone and Helms were at headquarters, sharing a lunch of sandwiches in the director's suite. The tall wide windows on the seventh floor looked out over an unbroken field of treetops to the horizon. Then the terrible news broke.

The president had been shot. McCone clapped on his fedora and went to Bobby Kennedy's house, a minute away by car. Helms went down to his office and tried to draft a book message, a cable to be sent to every CIA station in the world. His thoughts at that moment were very close to Lyndon Johnson's.

"What raced through my mind," Johnson remembered, "was that, if they had shot our president...who would they shoot next? And what was going on in Washington? And when would the missiles be comin'? And I thought it was a conspiracy, and I raised that question. And nearly everybody that was with me raised it."

Over the next year, in the name of national security, the agency hid much of what it knew from the new president and the commission he created to investigate the killing. Its own internal investigation of the assassination collapsed in confusion and suspicion, casting shadows of doubt that still linger. This account is based on CIA records and the sworn testimony of CIA officers, all declassified between 1998 and 2004.

"THE EFFECT WAS ELECTRIC"

"Tragic death of President Kennedy requires all of us to look sharp for any unusual intelligence developments," Helms wrote in his worldwide message to CIA stations on November 22. At headquarters, Charlotte Bustos spotted one immediately. She managed the Mexico files of the clandestine service, and two minutes after the radio announced that the Dallas police had arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, she ran through the pastel corridors clutching Oswald's dossier, searching for her boss, John Whitten, the man in charge of the CIA's covert operations in Mexico and Central America. Whitten read quickly through the file.

"The effect was electric," he remembered.

The file said that at 10:45 a.m. on October 1, 1963, a man identifying himself as Lee Oswald had telephoned the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, asking what was happening with his standing request for a visa to travel to the Soviet Union. With the invaluable help of the Mexican secret police, the Mexico City station had wiretapped the Soviet and Cuban embassies in an operation code-named Envoy. The CIA had Oswald's call.

"Mexico had the biggest and most active telephone intercept operations in the whole world," Whitten said. "J. Edgar Hoover used to glow every time that he thought of the Mexico station" more than a few American soldiers based in the southwestern United States had been caught trying to sell military secrets or defect to the Russians in Mexico City. The CIA also had photographic surveillance of the Soviet embassy and opened every piece of mail coming in and out of it.

But the eavesdropping operations were so big that they inundated the station, drowning it in useless information. It took eight days before the station listened to the October 1 tape, reported Oswald's visit, and asked CIA headquarters: Who is Lee Oswald? The CIA knew he was an American marine who had publicly defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959. It had in its files a collection of FBI and State Department reports detailing Oswald's attempts to renounce his American citizenship, his threats to tell the Soviets about secret American military installations in the Pacific, his marriage to a Russian woman, and his repatriation in June 1962.

During Oswald's stay in the Soviet Union, "CIA had no sources in a position to report on his activities or what the KGB might be doing with him," Whitten wrote in an internal report. But "it was suspected that Oswald and all other similar defectors were in the hands of the KGB. We were sure that all such defectors would be interrogated by the KGB, surrounded by KGB informants wherever they were resettled in the Soviet Union, and even possibly recruited by the KGB for a mission abroad later on."

Whitten realized that the man who had shot the president could be a communist agent. He picked up the telephone and asked Helms to order an immediate review of all the Envoy tapes and transcripts in Mexico City. The CIA chief of station, Win Scott, quickly called the president of Mexico, whose secret police worked all night with the CIA's eavesdroppers to listen for traces of Oswald's voice.

Word of the Oswald file spread as McCone returned to CIA headquarters. Six hours of hectic conferences ensued, the last one convening at 11:30 p.m. When McCone learned that the CIA had known beforehand of Oswald's trip to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, he was enraged, ripping into his aides, furious at the way the agency was run.

The CIA's internal investigation took shape on Saturday morning, November 23. Helms met with the agency's barons, including James Angleton, chief of counterintelligence since 1954. Angleton fully expected to be handed the Oswald case. To his outrage, Helms put John Whitten in charge.

Whitten was a man who knew how to unravel a conspiracy. A skilled prisoner-of-war interrogator in World War II, he had joined the CIA in 1947. He was the first to employ the polygraph at the agency. In the early 1950s, he used the lie detector in hundreds of investigations of double agents, false defectors, and intelligence fabricators in Germany. He had uncovered some of the biggest hoaxes perpetrated on the agency, including the work of a con artist who sold the Vienna station a fake Soviet communications codebook. Another of the cases he cracked involved an agent Angleton had been running in Italy, a man whom Angleton launched against five different foreign intelligence services. The agent proved to be a fraud and a pathological liar; he had blithely disclosed to all five foreign services that he worked for the CIA, and he had been promptly doubled back to penetrate the agency by all five. This was not the only Angleton operation Whitten had exposed. In each case, Helms told Whitten to go into Angleton's dark and smoky office and confront him.

"I used to go in fingering my insurance policy, notifying my next of kin," Whitten said. The confrontations created "bitter feelings, the most bitter feelings" between the two men. From the moment Whitten was assigned the Oswald case, Angleton set out to sabotage him.

By midmorning on November 23, CIA headquarters knew that Oswald had visited both the Cuban and the Soviet embassies repeatedly in late September and October, trying to travel as quickly as possible to Cuba and stay there until his Soviet visa came through. "His having been to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City obviously was a very important part of the initial impressions one had," Helms said. Shortly after noon, McCone rushed back downtown and broke the news of the Cuban connection to President Johnson, interrupting a long talk between LBJ and Dwight Eisenhower, who was warning him about the power that Robert Kennedy wielded over covert operations.

At 1:35 p.m., President Johnson called an old friend, a Wall Street power broker named Edwin Weisl, and confided: "This thing on the...this assassin...may have a lot more complications than you know about...it may lay deeper than you think." That afternoon, the U.S. ambassador in Mexico, Tom Mann, a Texan and a close LBJ confidant, relayed his own suspicion that Castro was behind the assassination.

On Sunday morning, November 24, McCone returned to the White House, where the funeral cortege that would take John Kennedy's casket to lie in state at the Capitol was assembling. McCone informed Lyndon Johnson more fully about some of the CIA's operations to overthrow the government of Cuba. But Johnson still had no idea that the United States had been trying to kill Castro for the better part of three years. Very few people knew. One was Allen Dulles. Another was Richard Helms. A third was Bobby Kennedy. A fourth was very likely Fidel Castro.

That same day, the CIA station in Mexico City determined without question that Oswald had made his pleas for a visa to Soviet intelligence officers on September 28. He had talked face-to-face with a man named Valery Kostikov, who was thought to be a member of Department 13 of the KGB--the department responsible for assassination.

The station sent headquarters a list of all the foreigners it suspected had made contact with Soviet intelligence officers in Mexico City. One of them was Rolando Cubela, the CIA's Cuban agent in the final plot to kill Castro. Only two days before, at the hour of President Kennedy's death, Cubela's CIA case officer, Nestor Sanchez, had given the Cuban a pen rigged as a hypodermic syringe, filled with poison. The report from the Mexico City station raised a harrowing question: was Cubela a double agent for Fidel?

The cortege to the Capitol was about to leave the White House when Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered on live television in the Dallas police station. The president ordered the CIA to give him everything it had on Oswald, immediately. Whitten pulled together a summary and gave it to Helms, who handed it over to the president a few hours later. The report itself has been lost or destroyed. Its gist, Whitten said, was that the CIA had no hard evidence that Oswald was an agent of Moscow or Havana--but he might be.

"WE WERE TREADING VERY LIGHTLY"

John McCone delivered a formal intelligence briefing to the new president of the United States on Tuesday, November 26. "The President noted with some considerable contempt the fact that certain people in the Department of Justice had suggested to him on Saturday that an independent investigation of the President's assassination should be conducted," McCone wrote in his daily memo for the record. "President Johnson rejected this idea."

Seventy-two hours later, against his instincts, Johnson reversed himself. On November 29, the day after Thanksgiving, he cajoled the reluctant chief justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, to lead the investigation. He corralled the rest of the members of the Warren Commission in a furious five-hour round of telephone calls. Taking Bobby Kennedy's recommendation, the president rang an astonished and befuddled Allen Dulles at home. "You've considered the effect of my previous work and my previous job?" Dulles asked. LBJ hastily assured him he had, and hung up. Dulles immediately called James Angleton.

It was already dark outside, and the president was rushing to assemble the commission before the evening's newspaper deadlines. He ran down the list of the chosen. Discretion was the key, the president said: "We can't just have House and Senate and FBI and other people going around testifyin' that Khrushchev killed Kennedy, or Castro killed him." He impressed upon Representative Gerald R. Ford that he wanted men who knew how the CIA worked. His most important call came just before 9 p.m. Johnson's beloved mentor, the man who most closely watched the CIA in Congress, Senator Richard Russell, was on the line from Winder, Georgia. Though LBJ already had given his name to the wire services as a member of the Warren Commission, Russell tried to turn the president down.

"You're goddamned sure gonna serve, I'll tell you that," the president yelled. "You're gonna lend your name to this thing because you're head of the CIA committee." Johnson repeated that there could be no loose talk about Khrushchev's killing Kennedy.

"Well, I don't think he did directly," Senator Russell said, but "I wouldn't be surprised if Castro had something to do with it."

The creation of the Warren Commission posed a crushing moral dilemma for Richard Helms. "Helms realized that disclosing the assassination plots would reflect very poorly on the Agency and reflect very poorly on him, and that it might indeed turn out that the Cubans had undertaken this assassination in retaliation for our operations to assassinate Castro. This would have a disastrous effect on him and the Agency," John Whitten testified.

Helms knew it all too well. "We were treading very lightly," he said in top secret testimony fifteen years later. "We were very concerned at the time as to what we might come up with.... Accusing a foreign government of having been responsible for this act is tearing the veil about as nastily as one can."

The question of disclosure of the plots against Castro also created an impossible burden for Bobby Kennedy. He kept his silence.

The president had ordered the FBI to investigate the killing of the president, commanded the CIA to cooperate fully, and told them to report their findings to the Warren Commission, which depended on them for the facts in the case. But their malfeasance was profound.

By early 1962, the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service all had files on Oswald. In August 1963, in New Orleans, Oswald had a series of confrontations with members of the Cuban Student Directorate, a CIA-financed anti-Castro group, whose members reported to their case officer that they suspected Oswald was trying to infiltrate their ranks. By October 1963, the FBI knew him as a possibly deranged Marxist who supported the Cuban revolution, who was capable of violence, and who had been in recent contact with Soviet intelligence officers. On October 30, the bureau learned he was working at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.

In short, an angry defector who admired Castro, whom the CIA had reason to believe might be a recruited communist agent, who was urgently seeking to return to Moscow via Havana, was staking out the route of the president's motorcade in Dallas.

The CIA and the FBI never compared notes. The FBI never came close to tracking him down. This was a prelude to their performance in the weeks before September 11, 2001. It was "gross incompetency," J. Edgar Hoover declared in a December 10, 1963, memo that stayed secret until the turn of the century.

Cartha DeLoach, the assistant FBI director, urged Hoover not to discipline his agents for dereliction, for fear it would be seen as "a direct admission that we are responsible for negligence which might have resulted in the assassination of the President." Hoover nonetheless punished seventeen of his men. "We failed in carrying through some of the salient aspects of the Oswald investigation," Hoover wrote in October 1964. "It ought to be a lesson to us all, but I doubt if some even realize it now."

The members of the Warren Commission knew none of this. As John Whitten soon learned, the CIA also concealed much of what it knew to be true from the commission.

Whitten had a terrible time sorting out the facts from an avalanche of falsehoods cascading in from the CIA's overseas stations. "Dozens of people were claiming that they had seen Oswald here, there, and everywhere in all kinds of conspiratorial circumstances, from the North Pole to the Congo," he remembered. Thousands of false leads propelled the CIA into a labyrinth. To sort out the facts of the case, Whitten had to depend on the FBI to share information with him. It took two weeks before he was allowed to read the FBI's preliminary investigative report on Oswald in December 1963. "For the first time," he testified years later, "I learned a myriad of vital facts about Oswald's background which apparently the FBI had known throughout the investigation and had not communicated to me."

The FBI routinely failed to share information with the CIA. But the president had ordered them to cooperate. The one man responsible for the CIA's liaison with the FBI was Jim Angleton, and "Angleton never told me of his talks with the FBI or of FBI information he gained in those meetings," Whitten said. Unable to influence the initial course of the investigation, Angleton had sandbagged Whitten, denounced his work, and doomed his efforts to uncover the facts of the case.

Helms and Angleton agreed to tell the Warren Commission and the CIA's own investigators nothing about the plots to kill Castro. That was "a morally reprehensible act," Whitten testified fifteen years later. "Helms withheld the information because it would have cost him his job." The knowledge would have been "an absolutely vital factor in analyzing the events surrounding the Kennedy assassination," Whitten said. Had he known, "our investigation of the Kennedy assassination would have looked much different than it did."

Angleton's clandestine conversations with Allen Dulles controlled the flow of information from the CIA. The decisions he and Helms made may have shaped the Warren Commission's conclusions. But Angleton testified that the commission could never have interpreted the significance of the Soviet and the Cuban connections the way that he and his small staff did.

"We would have seen it more sharply," he said. "We were more intensely engaged.... We had more experience in terms of Department 13 and the whole history of 30 years of Soviet sabotage and assassinations. We knew of cases and we knew of the modus operandi." He said there was no point in giving away secrets best kept in his hands.

His conduct was an obstruction of justice. He had only one defense. Angleton believed that Moscow had dispatched a double agent to cover up its role in the killing of John Kennedy.

"THE IMPLICATIONS...WOULD HAVE BEEN
CATACLYSMIC"

His suspect was Yuri Nosenko, who had come to the United States as a KGB defector in February 1964, just as Angleton took over the CIA's investigation. Nosenko was a spoiled child of the Soviet elite: his father was the minister of shipbuilding, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, buried in the Kremlin wall after he died. Yuri joined the KGB in 1953, at age twenty-five. In 1958, he worked in the KGB section that focused on American and British travelers in the Soviet Union. He transferred to the American department, spying on the U.S. embassy in 1961 and 1962, and then he became deputy chief of the tourist department.

His father's status protected him against his many stumbles, all created by his thirst for vodka, until he traveled to Geneva in June 1962 as the security officer for a Soviet delegation at an eighteen-nation conference on disarmament. He got very drunk on his first night, and he awoke to discover that a prostitute had robbed him of $900 worth of Swiss francs. The KGB's strictures on mishandling funds were severe.

Nosenko had identified--or, rather, misidentified--a member of the American diplomatic delegation named David Mark as a CIA officer, and Yuri went looking for him. Mark had arrived in Moscow five years before as the political and economic counselor at the American embassy. Though he was never a spy, he had done small favors for the CIA, and he was publicly declared persona non grata by the Soviets. It did not hurt his career; he later became an ambassador and the number-two man at the State Department's intelligence branch.

At the end of an afternoon meeting on the nuclear test ban treaty, Mark remembered, Nosenko walked up to him and said, in Russian, "I'd like to talk to you.... But I don't want to talk here. I want to have lunch with you." It was an obvious pitch. Mark thought of a restaurant on the outskirts of town and made a date for the next day. "Of course, I told the CIA people about this right away, and they said, 'God, why did you pick that restaurant? That's where all the spies go.'" The American and the Russian broke bread, closely watched by two CIA officers.

Nosenko told Mark about the prostitute and the missing money. "I've got to make it up," Mark recalled him saying. "So I can give you some information that will be very interesting to the CIA, and all I want is my money." Mark warned him: "Now, look, you're going to commit treason." But the Russian was ready. So they arranged another meeting for the following day in Geneva. Two CIA officers rushed to the Swiss capital to lead the interrogation. One was Tennent Bagley, a Soviet division officer based in Bern, who spoke little Russian. The second was George Kisevalter, the CIA's premier Russian spy handler, who flew in from headquarters.

Nosenko arrived drunk for their first meeting. "Very drunk," he said many years later. The CIA taped him at great length, but the tape recorder malfunctioned. The record was patched together by Bagley, based on Kisevalter's memory. Much was lost in translation.

Bagley cabled headquarters on June 11, 1962, saying that Nosenko had "completely proven his bona fides," had "provided information of importance," and was completely cooperative. But over the next eighteen months, Angleton convinced Bagley that he had been duped; once Nosenko's staunchest supporter, Bagley became his angriest antagonist.

Nosenko had agreed to spy for the CIA in Moscow. He returned to Geneva with the Soviet disarmament delegation and met his CIA handlers at the end of January 1964. On February 3, the day the Warren Commission heard its first witness, he told the Americans that he wanted to defect immediately. Nosenko said he had handled the KGB's Oswald file, and nothing in it implicated the Soviet Union in the Kennedy assassination.

Angleton was certain that he was lying. This judgment had catastrophic consequences.

Nosenko produced a flood of secrets. But Angleton had already determined that he was part of a Soviet master plot. He believed that the KGB long ago had penetrated the CIA at a very high level. What else could explain the long litany of blown operations in Albania and Ukraine, Poland and Korea, Cuba and Vietnam? Perhaps all of the CIA's operations against the Soviets were known to Moscow. Perhaps they were controlled by Moscow. Perhaps Nosenko had been sent to protect the mole inside the CIA. The one and only defector Angleton ever embraced--Anatoly Golitsin, certified by CIA psychiatrists as clinically paranoid--confirmed and strengthened Angleton's deepest fears.

Angleton's highest duty as chief of counterintelligence was to protect the CIA and its agents against its enemies. But a great deal had gone wrong on his watch. In 1959, Major Pyotr Popov, the CIA's first spy of any note inside the Soviet Union, had been arrested and executed by the KGB. George Blake, the British spy for Moscow who blew the Berlin Tunnel before it was dug, had been exposed in the spring of 1961, forcing the CIA to consider that the tunnel had been used for Soviet disinformation. Six months later, Heinz Felfe, Angleton's West German counterpart, was exposed as a Soviet spy after inflicting deep damage on the CIA's operations in Germany and Eastern Europe. A year after that, the Soviets arrested Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, secret hero of the Cuban missile crisis. They executed him in the spring of 1962.

Then there was Kim Philby. In January 1963, Angleton's prime tutor in counterintelligence, his old confidant, his drinking partner, fled to Moscow. He was revealed at last as a Soviet spy who had served at the highest levels of British intelligence. Philby had been a suspect for twelve years. Back when he first fell under suspicion, Walter Bedell Smith had demanded reports from everyone having had contact with the man. Bill Harvey stated categorically that Philby was a Soviet agent. Jim Angleton stated categorically that he was not.

In the spring of 1964, after years of crushing failures, Angleton sought redemption. He believed that if the CIA could break Nosenko, the master plot might be revealed--and the Kennedy assassination solved.

Helms framed the problem in congressional testimony declassified in 1998:

MR. HELMS: If the information that Nosenko had provided about Oswald was true, then it led to a certain conclusion about Oswald and his relationship to the Soviet authorities. If it was incorrect, if he was feeding this to the United States government under instructions from the Soviet service, then it would have led one to an entirely different conclusion.... If it were established beyond any doubt that he had been lying and, by implication, therefore, Oswald was an agent of the KGB, I would have thought that the implications of that--not for the CIA or for the FBI, but for the President of the United States and the Congress of the United States would have been cataclysmic.

QUESTION : Can you be more specific?

MR. HELMS : Yes, I can be specific. In other words, the Soviet government ordered President Kennedy assassinated.

Those were the stakes. In April 1964, with the approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the CIA threw Nosenko into solitary confinement, first in a CIA safe house, and then at Camp Peary, the CIA's training site outside Williamsburg, Virginia. In the custody of the Soviet division, Nosenko received the treatment his fellow Russians received in the gulag. There were scanty meals of weak tea and gruel, a single bare light burning twenty-four hours a day, no human companionship. "I did not have enough to eat and was hungry all the time," Nosenko said in a statement declassified in 2001. "I had no contact with anyone to talk. I could not read. I could not smoke. I even could not have fresh air."

His testimony was remarkably similar to that of prisoners taken by the CIA after September 2001: "I was taken by guards, blindfolded and handcuffed in a car and delivered to an airport and put on a plane," he said. "I was taken to another location where I was put into a concrete room with bars on the door. In the room there was a single steel bed with a mattress." Nosenko was subjected to psychological intimidation and physical hardship for three more years. An audiotape of a hostile interrogation conducted by Tennent Bagley in the CIA's prison cell was preserved in the agency's files. Nosenko's low basso pleads in Russian: "From my soul...from my soul...I beg you to believe me." Bagley's high-pitched voice screams back in English, "That's bullshit! That's bullshit! That's bullshit!" For his work, Bagley was promoted to deputy chief of the Soviet division and awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal by Richard Helms.

In the late summer of 1964, the task of telling the Warren Commission about Yuri Nosenko fell to Helms. It was an excruciatingly delicate matter. Days before the commission concluded its work, Helms told the chief justice that the CIA could not accept Moscow's protestations of innocence in the assassination of the president. Earl Warren was not pleased by this last-minute development. The commission's final report never mentioned Nosenko's existence.

Helms himself came to fear the consequences of Nosenko's incarceration. "I recognized we couldn't keep him in durance vile, as we had, against the laws of the United States," he said. "Lord knows what would happen if we had a comparable situation today, because the laws haven't been changed, and I don't know what you do with people like Nosenko. We sought guidance from the Justice Department at the time. It was clear that we were holding him in violation of the law, but what were we to do with him? Were we going to release him and then a year later have it said, 'Well, you fellows should have had more sense than to do that. He was the whole key to who killed President Kennedy.'"

The CIA sent another team of interrogators to question Nosenko. They determined that he had been telling the truth. He was finally freed five years after his defection, paid $80,000, given a new identity, and placed on the CIA's payroll.

But Angleton and his circle never closed the case. Their search for the traitor within the CIA ripped the Soviet division apart. The mole hunt began by pursuing officers with Slavic surnames. It went up the chain of command to the Soviet division chief. It paralyzed the CIA's Russian operations for a decade, into the 1970s.

For twenty-five years after Nosenko's defection, the CIA struggled to write the last chapter of his story. In all, it conducted seven major studies of the case. Nosenko was convicted, exonerated, and re-indicted until a last judgment was levied by the CIA's Rich Heuer at the end of the cold war. Heuer had started out as a firm believer in the master plot. But then he weighed the value of what Nosenko had given the United States. The Russian spy had identified, or produced investigative leads on, some 200 foreigners and 238 Americans in whom the KGB had displayed interest. He had fingered some 300 Soviet intelligence agents and overseas contacts, and roughly 2,000 KGB officers. He had pinpointed fifty-two hidden microphones that the Soviets had placed in the American embassy in Moscow. He had expanded the CIA's knowledge of how the Soviets sought to blackmail foreign diplomats and journalists. To believe in the master plot, it was necessary to take four things on faith: First, that Moscow would trade all that information to protect one mole. Second, that all communist defectors were agents of deception. Third, that the immense Soviet intelligence apparatus existed solely to mislead the United States. And last, that an impenetrable communist conspiracy lay behind the Kennedy assassination.

For Richard Helms, the case remained an open book. Until the day that the Soviet and Cuban intelligence services turned over their files, he said, it would never be laid to rest. Either the killing of John Kennedy was the work of a deranged drifter with a cheap rifle and a seven-dollar scope, or the truth was more terrible. As Lyndon Johnson said toward the end of his presidency: "Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first."

22. "AN OMINOUS
DRIFT"

The covert operations of the Kennedys haunted Lyndon Johnson all his life. He said over and over that Dallas was divine retribution for Diem. "We all got together and got a goddamn bunch of thugs and we went in and assassinated him," he lamented. In his first year in office, coup after coup wracked Saigon, a shadowy insurgency started killing Americans in Vietnam, and his fear that the CIA was an instrument of political murder festered and grew.

He now understood that Bobby Kennedy wielded great authority over covert operations. He saw him as a sworn rival for the presidency. At an Oval Office meeting with John McCone on December 13, 1963, Johnson asked bluntly if and when Kennedy would leave the government. McCone said that "the Attorney General intended to stay on as Attorney General, but it was not clear to what extent the President wished him to become involved [with] intelligence work, NSC problems, counterinsurgency matters." The answer soon became clear: Bobby's days as the whip hand of the clandestine service were over. He departed seven months later.

On December 28, McCone flew down to the LBJ Ranch in Texas for breakfast and a briefing after a trip to Saigon. "The President immediately brought up his desire to 'change the image of the CIA' from a cloak and dagger role," McCone recorded. The director could not have agreed more. The agency's only legal role was to gather, analyze, and report intelligence, McCone said, not to mount conspiracies to overthrow foreign states. Johnson said "he was tired of a situation that had been built up that every time my name or CIA's name was mentioned, it was associated with a dirty trick."

But Lyndon Johnson lay awake at night, trying to decide whether to go all-out in Vietnam or get out. Without American support, Saigon would fall. He did not want to plunge in with thousands of American troops. He could not be seen to pull out. The only path between war and diplomacy was covert action.

"NOBODY CAN RUN THE INTELLIGENCE BUSINESS"

In early 1964, McCone and his new Saigon station chief, Peer de Silva, had nothing but bad news for the president. McCone was "extremely worried about the situation." He thought that the intelligence data "on which we gauged the trend of the war were grossly in error." He warned the White House and the Congress that "the Viet Cong are receiving substantial support from North Vietnam and possibly elsewhere, and this support can be increased. Stopping this by sealing the borders, the extensive waterways, and the long coastline is difficult, if not impossible. The VC appeal to the people of South Vietnam on political grounds has been effective, gained recruits for their armed forces, and neutralized resistance."

Project Tiger, the Saigon station's two-year paramilitary program against North Vietnam, had ended in death and betrayal. Now the Pentagon proposed to begin again, in concert with the CIA. Its Operations Plan 34A was a yearlong series of covert raids intended to convince Hanoi to give up its insurgency in South Vietnam and Laos. The centerpiece was another set of airborne operations to drop intelligence and commando teams into North Vietnam, along with maritime assaults along the coast. The raiders would be South Vietnamese special-forces soldiers, supplemented by Nationalist Chinese and South Korean commandos, all of them trained by the CIA. McCone had no confidence that the attacks would change Ho Chi Minh's mind. "The President should be informed that this is not the greatest thing since peanut butter," he advised.

Under orders, the agency turned its network of Asian paramilitaries over to the Pentagon's Special Operations Group in Vietnam. Helms warned against "an ominous drift" that was pulling the CIA away from espionage and toward a role as a conventional military support staff. The agency's executive director, Lyman Kirkpatrick, foresaw "the fragmentation and destruction of CIA, with the clandestine service being gobbled up by the Joint Chiefs of Staff." These were prophetic fears.

In March 1964, the president sent McCone and McNamara back to Saigon. The director returned to tell the president that the war was not going well. "Mr. McNamara gave a very optimistic view that things were pretty good," McCone said in an oral history for the LBJ presidential library. "I had to take the position that as long as the Ho Chi Minh Trail was open and supplies and convoys of people could come in there without interruption, that we couldn't say things were so good."

That was the beginning of the end of John McCone's career as director of central intelligence. Lyndon Johnson closed the door to the Oval Office. Communication between the CIA and the president was limited to a twice-weekly written report on world events. The president read it at his leisure, if and when he wanted. On April 22, McCone told Bundy that he was "highly dissatisfied over the fact that President Johnson did not get direct intelligence briefings from me as was the custom with President Kennedy and had been the Eisenhower custom." A week later, McCone told LBJ that "I was not seeing very much of him, and this disturbed me." So Johnson and McCone played eight holes of golf together at the Burning Tree country club in May. But they did not have a substantial conversation until October. The president had been in office for eleven months before he asked McCone how big the CIA was, what it cost, and precisely how it could serve him. The director's advice was rarely heard and rarely heeded. Without the president's ear, he had no power, and without that power, the CIA began to drift into the dangerous middle passage of the 1960s.

McCone's split with McNamara over Vietnam revealed a deeper political fissure. Under law, the director of central intelligence was the chairman of the board of all American intelligence agencies. But the Pentagon had fought for two decades to make the director play second fiddle in the discordant band that people were now calling "the intelligence community." For six years, the president's board of intelligence advisers had suggested that the director should run the community and let a chief operating officer try to manage the CIA. Allen Dulles had adamantly resisted the idea and refused to pay attention to anything but covert action. McCone kept saying he wanted to get out of the cloak-and-dagger business. But in 1964, the CIA's clandestine service was consuming close to two-thirds of the agency's budget and 90 percent of McCone's time. He wanted to assert his statutory power over American intelligence. He needed authority commensurate with his responsibility. He never received it. The Pentagon undermined him at every turn.

Three major branches of American intelligence had grown up over the past decade. All three were under the director's titular leadership. That power existed only on paper. The director was supposed to oversee the National Security Agency, the increasingly gigantic global electronic-eavesdropping arm of American intelligence. The NSA had been created by Truman in 1952 at the urging of Walter Bedell Smith after the crushing surprises of the Korean War. But the secretary of defense was in charge of its money and power. McNamara also controlled the new Defense Intelligence Agency, which he had created after the Bay of Pigs with the intent of coordinating the jumble of information produced by the army, the navy, the air force, and the marines. Then there was the National Reconnaissance Office, born in 1962 to build spy satellites. In the spring of 1964, air force generals tried to seize control of the billion-dollar-a-year program from the CIA. The power grab fractured the fragile reconnaissance office.

"I am just about ready to tell the Secretary of Defense and the President they can take NRO and shove it," McCone thundered. "I think the thing I should do is call up the President and tell him to get a new Director of Central Intelligence.... The bureaucrats in the Pentagon are trying to screw things up so that nobody can run the intelligence business."

McCone tried to resign that summer, but Lyndon Johnson ordered him to remain at his post until at least election day. The war in Vietnam was now on in full, and the appearance of loyalty was utmost.

"SHOOTING AT FLYING FISH"

The war was authorized by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, rammed through Congress after what the president and the Pentagon proclaimed was an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam on American ships in international waters on August 4. The National Security Agency, which compiled and controlled the intelligence on the attack, insisted the evidence was ironclad. Robert McNamara swore to it. The navy's official history of the Vietnam War calls it conclusive.

It was not an honest mistake. The war in Vietnam began with political lies based on fake intelligence. Had the CIA been working as its charter intended, if McCone had fulfilled his duties under law as he saw them, the false reports might not have survived for more than a few hours. But the full truth did not come out until November 2005, in a highly detailed confession released by the National Security Agency.

In July 1964, the Pentagon and the CIA determined that the OPLAN 34A overland attacks begun six months before had been a series of pointless pinpricks, just as McCone had warned. The United States stepped up commando raids at sea, under the leadership of the CIA's Tucker Gougelmann, a battle-scarred marine who many years later became the last American to die in the war in Vietnam. To bolster his forces, Washington increased its surveillance on the North. The navy had started a program of eavesdropping on encoded enemy communications--the technical term is signals intelligence, or SIGINT--under an operation code-named Desoto. Those missions began inside a black box, the size of a cargo container, lashed to the deck of a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. Inside each one were antennas and monitors operated by at least a dozen officers of the Naval Security Group. They listened in on North Vietnamese military chatter, and the data they collected was decrypted and translated by the National Security Agency.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff sent the USS Maddox, under the command of Captain John Herrick, on a Desoto mission with orders to "stimulate and record" North Vietnam's reactions to the commando raids. The Maddox had orders to stay eight nautical miles off the mainland and four knots off the coastal islands of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. The United States did not recognize the international twelve-mile limit in Vietnam. On the last night of July and the first night of August 1964, the Maddox monitored an OPLAN 34A attack on Hon Me Island, off the central coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. It tracked the North's counterattack, watching Soviet-made patrol boats armed with torpedoes and machines guns gathering off the island.

On the afternoon of August 2, the Maddox detected three of the boats approaching. Captain Herrick sent a flash message to fellow commanders of the Seventh Fleet: he would fire on them if necessary. He requested help from the destroyer Turner Joy and the fighter jets of the carrier Ticonderoga. Shortly after 3 p.m., the Maddox fired three times at the North Vietnamese patrol boats. The shots were never reported or acknowledged by the Pentagon or the White House; they maintained that the communists shot first. The Maddox was still firing when four navy F-8E jets blasted the patrol boats, killing four sailors, heavily damaging two of the ships, and winging the third. Their communist captains fled and hid in coastal inlets, awaiting orders from Haiphong. The Maddox had sustained one bullet hole from a machine gun.

On August 3, President Johnson proclaimed that American patrols would continue in the Gulf of Tonkin, and the State Department announced that it had sent its first-ever diplomatic note to Hanoi, warning of the "grave consequences" of "further unprovoked military action." At that hour, another provocative OPLAN 34A maritime mission was dispatched to sabotage a radar station off the North Vietnamese coast, on the island of Hon Matt.

Then, on the stormy night of August 4, the American captains of the destroyers, the commanders of the Seventh Fleet, and their leaders in the Pentagon all received an urgent alert from onshore SIGINT operators: the three North Vietnamese patrol boats encountered off Hon Me Island on August 2 were returning. In Washington, Robert McNamara called the president. At 10 p.m. in the Gulf of Tonkin, 10 a.m. in Washington, the American destroyers sent a flash message that they were under attack.

The radar and sonar operators aboard the Maddox and the Turner Joy reported seeing ghostly blotches in the night. Their captains opened fire. The NSA report declassified in 2005 described how "the two destroyers gyrated wildly in the dark waters of the Gulf of Tonkin, the Turner Joy firing over 300 rounds madly," both ships taking furious evasive maneuvers. "It was this high-speed gyrating by the American warships through the waters that created all the additional sonar reports of more torpedoes." They had been firing at their own shadows.

The president immediately ordered an air strike against North Vietnamese naval bases to begin that night.

Within an hour, Captain Herrick reported: "ENTIRE ACTION LEAVES MANY DOUBTS." Ninety minutes later, those doubts vanished in Washington. The NSA told the secretary of defense and the president of the United States that it had intercepted a North Vietnamese naval communique reading: "SACRIFICED TWO SHIPS AND ALL THE REST ARE OKAY."

But after the American air strikes against North Vietnam had begun, the NSA reviewed the day's communications intercepts. There was nothing. Every SIGINT eavesdropper in South Vietnam and the Philippines looked again. Nothing. The NSA reexamined the intercept it had handed to the president, double-checking the translation and the time stamp on the original message.

Upon review, the message actually read: "WE SACRIFICED TWO COMRADES BUT ALL ARE BRAVE." The message had been composed either immediately before or at the moment when the Maddox and the Turner Joy opened fire on August 4. It was not about what had happened that night. It was about the first clash, two nights earlier, on August 2.

The NSA buried this salient fact. It told no one. Its analysts and linguists looked a third time, and a fourth time, at the time stamp. Everyone--everyone, even the doubters--decided to stay silent. The NSA's leadership put together five separate after-action reports and summaries between August 5 and August 7. Then it composed a formal chronology, the official version of the truth, the last word on what happened out in the Gulf of Tonkin, the history to be preserved for future generations of intelligence analysts and military commanders.

In the process, someone at the NSA destroyed the smoking gun--the intercept that McNamara had shown to the president. "McNamara had taken over raw SIGINT and shown the president what they thought was evidence of a second attack," said Ray Cline, then the CIA's deputy director of intelligence. "And it was just what Johnson was looking for." In a rational world, it would have been the CIA's task to take a hard look at the SIGINT from the Gulf of Tonkin and issue an independent interpretation of its meaning. It was no longer a rational world. "It was too late to make any difference," Cline said. "The planes had been launched."

As the NSA's November 2005 confession says: "The overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack had happened. So a conscious effort ensued to demonstrate that the attack occurred...an active effort to make the SIGINT fit the claim of what happened during the evening of 4 August in the Gulf of Tonkin." The intelligence, the report concluded, "was deliberately skewed to support the notion that there had been an attack." American intelligence officers "rationalized the contradictory evidence away."

Lyndon Johnson had been ready to bomb North Vietnam for two months. On his orders, in June 1964, Bill Bundy, the assistant secretary of state for the Far East, brother of the national security adviser, and a veteran CIA analyst, had drawn up a war resolution to be sent to Congress when the moment was ripe.

The fake intelligence fit perfectly into the preconceived policy. On August 7, Congress authorized the war in Vietnam. The House voted 416-0. The Senate voted 88-2. It was a "Greek tragedy," Cline said, an act of political theater reprised four decades later when false intelligence on the Iraqi arsenal upheld another president's rationale for war.

It remained to Lyndon Johnson to sum up what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, which he did four years after the fact. "Hell," said the president, "those damn stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish."

23. "MORE COURAGE
THAN WISDOM"

"Vietnam was my nightmare for a good ten years," Richard Helms wrote. As he rose from chief of the clandestine service to become the director of central intelligence, the war was always with him. "Like an incubus, it involved efforts which were never to seem successful, and demands which could never be met but which were repeated, doubled, intensified, and redoubled.

"We tried every operational approach in the book, and committed our most experienced field operatives to the effort to get inside the government in Hanoi," Helms recounted. "Within the Agency, our failure to penetrate the North Vietnamese government was the single most frustrating aspect of those years. We could not determine what was going on at the highest levels of Ho's government, nor could we learn how policy was made or who was making it." At the root of this failure of intelligence was "our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language," he said.

We did not choose to know, so we did not know how much we did not know.

"The great sadness," Helms said in an oral history recorded for the LBJ Library, "was our ignorance--or innocence, if you like--which led us to mis-assess, not comprehend, and make a lot of wrong decisions."

Lyndon Johnson also had a recurring dream about Vietnam. If he ever wavered on the war, if he faltered, if he lost, "there would be Robert Kennedy out in front leading the fight against me, telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy's commitment to South Vietnam. That I was a coward. An unmanly man. A man without a spine. Oh, I could see it coming, all right. Every night when I fell asleep I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long, open space. In the distance I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting and running toward me: 'Coward! Traitor! Weakling!'"

"Mc CONE'S WAR"

The strength of the Vietcong, the communist guerrillas in the south, continued to grow. A new ambassador, General Maxwell Taylor, late of the Special Group (Counterinsurgency), and Bill Colby, the CIA's Far East division chief, searched for a new strategy against the shadowy terrorists. "Counterinsurgency became an almost ridiculous battle cry," said Robert Amory, who had stepped down after nine years as the CIA's deputy director of intelligence to become the White House budget officer for classified programs. "It meant so many things to so many different people." But Bobby Kennedy knew its meaning, and he boiled it down to its essence. "What we needed," he said, "were people who could shoot guns."

On November 16, 1964, an explosive work by Peer de Silva, the CIA's station chief in Saigon, landed on John McCone's desk at headquarters. It was titled "Our Counterinsurgency Experiment and Its Implications." Helms and Colby had read it and approved it. It was a bold idea with one great risk: the potential "to turn 'McNamara's War' into 'McCone's War,'" as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Marshall Carter bluntly warned his boss that day.

De Silva had been trying to extend the CIA's power in South Vietnam by creating paramilitary patrols in the provinces to hunt down the Vietcong. Working with the interior minister and the chief of the national police, de Silva bought an estate in the northeast corner of South Vietnam from a crooked labor-union kingpin and began offering a crash course in counterinsurgency for civilians. In the first week of November 1964, as Americans were electing President Johnson to a full term, de Silva had flown up to inspect his fledgling project. His officers had trained three teams of forty Vietnamese recruits who had reported killing 167 Vietcong while losing only 6 of their own. Now de Silva wanted to fly five thousand South Vietnamese citizens up to the estate from all over the country for a three-month education in military and political tactics taught by CIA officers and American military advisers. They would return home, in de Silva's words, as "counter-terror teams," and they would kill the Vietcong.

John McCone had a lot of faith in Peer de Silva, and he gave his approval. But he felt it was a losing battle. The day after de Silva's memo arrived, McCone walked into the White House and for the second time tendered his resignation to President Johnson. He offered a choice of qualified successors and begged to take his leave. Once again, not for the last time, the president ignored the director of central intelligence.

McCone stayed on while the crises confronting him piled up. He believed, as did the presidents he served, in the domino theory. He told the future president, Representative Gerald R. Ford, that "if South Vietnam fell to the communists, Laos and Cambodia would certainly go, followed by Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and eventually the Philippines," which would have "a vast effect" on the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. He did not think the CIA was equipped to fight insurgents and terrorists, and he feared that "the VC may be the wave of the future." He was quite certain that the CIA was incapable of combating the Vietcong.

De Silva later mourned the agency's "blindness" to the enemy and its strategy. In the villages, "the Vietcong use of terror was purposeful, precise, and frightful to behold," he wrote. The peasants "would feed them, recruit for them, conceal them, and provide them with all the intelligence the Vietcong needed." Then, at the end of 1964, the VC took the war to the capital. "The Vietcong use of terror within the city of Saigon was frequent, sometimes random, and sometimes carefully planned and executed," de Silva wrote. Secretary of Defense McNamara just missed being hit by a roadside bomb planted on the highway to the city from the airport. A car bomb destroyed the bachelor officers' quarters in Saigon on Christmas Eve 1964. Slowly the losses mounted as suicide bombers and sappers struck at will. At 2 a.m. on February 7, 1965, the Vietcong attacked an American base in Pleiku, the central highlands of Vietnam. Eight Americans died. When the firefight was over, the Americans searched the body of one of the Vietcong attackers and found a very precise map of the base in his pack.

We had more weapons, and bigger ones, but they had more spies, and better ones. It was a decisive difference.

Four days later, Lyndon Johnson lashed out. Dumb bombs, cluster bombs, and napalm bombs fell on Vietnam. The White House sent an urgent message to Saigon seeking the CIA's best estimate of the situation. George W. Allen, the most experienced Vietnam intelligence analyst at the Saigon station, said the enemy would not be deterred by bombs. It was growing stronger. Its will was unbroken. But Ambassador Maxwell Taylor went over the report line by line, methodically deleting each pessimistic paragraph before sending it on to the president. The CIA's men in Saigon took note that bad news was not welcome. The corruption of intelligence at the hands of political generals, civilian commanders, and the agency itself continued. There would not be a truly influential report from the CIA to the president on the subject of the war for three more years.

On March 8, the marines landed in Da Nang in full battle dress. Beautiful girls met them with garlands. In Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh prepared his own reception.

On March 30, Peer de Silva was in his second-floor office in the CIA station in Saigon, catercorner to the embassy, talking on the telephone with one of his officers and staring out the window at a man pushing an old gray Peugeot sedan up the street. De Silva looked down at the driver's seat and saw a detonator burning.

"My world turned to glue and slow motion as my mind told me this car was a bomb," de Silva remembered. "With the phone still in my hand and without conscious thought, I began falling away from the window and turned as I fell, but I was only halfway to the floor when the car exploded." Flying glass and shards of metal slashed de Silva's eyes and ears and throat. The blast killed at least twenty people in the street and de Silva's twenty-two-year-old secretary. Two CIA officers inside the station were permanently blinded. Sixty other CIA and embassy personnel were injured. George Allen suffered multiple contusions, cuts, and a concussion. De Silva lost the vision in his left eye. Doctors pumped him full of painkillers, swaddled his head in gauze, and told him he might go completely blind if he stayed on in Saigon.

The president wondered how to fight an enemy he could not see. "There must be somebody out there that's got enough brains to figure out some way that we can find some special targets to hit on," Johnson demanded as night fell in Saigon. He decided to pour thousands more troops into battle and ratchet up the bombing campaign. He never once consulted the director of central intelligence.

"A MILITARY EFFORT THAT WE CANNOT WIN"

On April 2, 1965, John McCone quit for the last time, effective as soon as Lyndon Johnson selected a successor. He delivered a fateful prediction for the president: "With the passage of each day and each week, we can expect increasing pressure to stop the bombing," he said. "This will come from various elements of the American public, from the press, the United Nations and world opinion. Therefore time will run against us in this operation and I think the North Vietnamese are counting on this." One of his best analysts, Harold Ford, told him: "We are becoming progressively divorced from reality in Vietnam" and "proceeding with far more courage than wisdom." McCone now understood that. He told McNamara that the nation was about to "drift into a combat situation where victory would be dubious." His final warning to the President was blunt as it could be: "We will find ourselves mired down in combat in the jungle in a military effort that we cannot win, and from which we will have extreme difficulty extracting ourselves."

Lyndon Johnson had stopped listening to John McCone long ago. The director left office knowing he had had no impact whatsoever on the thinking of the president of the United States. Like almost all who followed him, LBJ liked the agency's work only if it fit his thinking. When it did not, it went into the wastebasket. "Let me tell you about these intelligence guys," he said. "When I was growing up in Texas, we had a cow named Bessie. I'd go out early and milk her. I'd get her in the stanchion, seat myself, and squeeze out a pail of fresh milk. One day I'd worked hard and gotten a full pail of milk, but I wasn't paying attention, and old Bessie swung her shit-smeared tail through that bucket of milk. Now, you know, that's what these intelligence guys do. You work hard and get a good program or policy going, and they swing a shit-smeared tail through it."

24. "THE BEGINNING
OF A LONG SLIDE
DOWNWARDS"

The president went looking for "a great man" to serve as the new director of central intelligence--"one that can light the fuse if it's just got to be done to save his country."

Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Marshall Carter warned against choosing an outsider. He said it would be "a grave error" to select a military yes-man and "a disaster" to choose a political crony; if the White House thought the CIA had no one from within who was worthy, "they had better close up the place and give it to the Indians." Richard Helms was the near-unanimous choice among the president's national-security team--McCone, McNamara, Rusk, and Bundy.

Johnson heeded none of them. On the afternoon of April 6, 1965, he placed a call to a fifty-nine-year-old retired admiral named Red Raborn, a native son of Decatur, Texas. Raborn had political credentials: he had won LBJ's affection by appearing in a paid television announcement during the 1964 campaign, calling the Republican candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, too dumb to be president. His claim to fame was managing the development of the Polaris nuclear missile for the navy's submarines, an effort that won him friends in Congress. He was a nice man with a nice job in the aerospace industry and a nice spread in Palm Springs overlooking the eleventh fairway of his favorite golf course.

Red Raborn stood at attention at the sound of his commander in chief's voice. "Now, I need you," Lyndon Johnson said, "and need you awful bad awful quick." They were quite a ways into their conversation before Raborn realized that LBJ wanted him to run the CIA. The president promised that Richard Helms, as the new deputy director, would do the heavy lifting. "You could take you a nap every day after lunch," he said. "We won't overwork you." Appealing to Raborn's patriotism, laying on the down-home charm, Johnson said: "I know what the old warhorse does when he hear the bell ring."

The admiral came aboard on April 28, 1965. The president put on a big show for his swearing-in at the White House, saying he had searched the nation far and wide and found only one man who could do the job. Tears of gratitude ran down Raborn's face. It was his last happy moment as director of central intelligence.

The Dominican Republic exploded that same day. The United States had tried and failed to make the nation the showplace of the Caribbean after the American-supported assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961. Now armed rebels were fighting in the streets of the capital. Johnson decided to send in four hundred U.S. Marines, along with the FBI and reinforcements for the CIA station. It was the first large-scale landing of American forces in Latin America since 1928, and the first armed adventure of its kind in the Caribbean since the Bay of Pigs.

At a full-dress White House meeting that night, Raborn reported--without evidence, and without qualification--that the rebels were controlled by Cuba. "In my opinion this is a real struggle mounted by Mr. Castro," Raborn said the next morning in a phone conversation with the president. "There is no question in my mind that this is the start of Castro's expansion."

The president asked: "How many Castro terrorists are there?"

Raborn replied: "Well, we have positively identified 8 of them. And I sent a list over to the White House about 6 o'clock--it should be in the Situation Room--who they are, what they are doing and what their training has been." The list of the eight "Castro terrorists" appeared in a CIA memorandum, which read: "There is no evidence that the Castro regime is directly involved in the current insurrection."

The president hung up the phone and decided to send a thousand more marines to the Dominican Republic.

Had there been any warning of the crisis from the CIA? the president asked his national security adviser that morning. "There was nothing," Bundy replied.

"Our CIA says this is a completely led...Castro operation," the president told his personal lawyer, Abe Fortas, as 2,500 army paratroopers landed in the Dominican Republic on April 30. "They say it is! Their people on the inside tell us!...There ain't no doubt about this being Castro now.... They are moving other places in the hemisphere. It may be part of a whole Communistic pattern tied in with Vietnam.... The worst domestic political disaster we could suffer would be for Castro to take over." The president prepared to send 6,500 more American soldiers to Santo Domingo.

But McNamara mistrusted what Raborn was telling the president. "You don't think CIA can document it?" Johnson asked the secretary of defense. "I don't think so, Mr. President," McNamara replied. "You don't know that Castro is trying to do anything. You would have a hard time proving to any group that Castro has done more than train these people, and we have trained a lot of people."

That gave the president pause. "Well, now, don't you think that's something that you and Raborn and I ought to talk about?" the president said. "CIA told me that there were two Castro leaders involved. And a little later, they told me eight, and a little later, they told me fifty-eight...."

"I just don't believe the story," MacNamara said flatly.

The president nonetheless insisted in a speech to the American people that he would not allow "Communist conspirators" in the Dominican Republic to establish "another Communist government in the Western Hemisphere."

Raborn's reporting on the crisis did for LBJ what the U-2 had done for Eisenhower and the Bay of Pigs for Kennedy. It led directly to the first assertion by the American press that Lyndon Johnson had a "credibility gap." The phrase was first published on May 23, 1965. It stung, and it stuck.

The president took no further counsel from his new director of central intelligence.

Morale plunged at headquarters under Raborn's unsteady command. "It was tragic," said Ray Cline, the deputy director of intelligence, "the beginning of a long slide downwards." The bitter joke was that Dulles had run a happy ship, McCone a tight ship, and Raborn a sinking ship. "Poor old Raborn," said Red White, his third-in-command as executive director. "He came out there every morning at 6:30 and had breakfast thinking the President would call him someday." Johnson never did. It was painfully clear that Raborn was "not qualified to run the CIA," White said. The hapless admiral was "completely out in left field. If you talked about foreign countries, he wouldn't know if you were talking about a country in Africa or South America." The new director made a fool of himself while testifying in secret to Congress, Senator Richard Russell warned LBJ: "Raborn has got one failing that's going to get him in trouble. He won't ever admit he don't know.... If you ever decide to get rid of him, you just put that fellow Helms in there. He got more sense than any of them."

Richard Helms ran the CIA while Raborn fumbled and flailed. He had three major covert-action campaigns to fight that year. Each one had been started by President Eisenhower, then strengthened by President Kennedy, and now was central to LBJ's quest to win the war in Southeast Asia. In Laos, the CIA fought to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In Thailand, it set out to fix the elections. In Indonesia, it provided secret support for leaders who massacred countless communists. All three nations were dominoes to the presidents who ordered the CIA to keep them in line, fearing that if one fell, Vietnam would fall.

On July 2, LBJ called Eisenhower for advice on escalating the war. The American death toll in Vietnam stood at 446. The ninth junta since the assassination of President Diem had just seized power, led by Nguyen Cao Ky, a pilot who had dropped paramilitary agents to their death on CIA missions, and by Nguyen Van Thieu, a general who later assumed the presidency. Ky was vicious, Thieu corrupt. Together they were the public face of democracy in South Vietnam. "You think that we can really beat the Vietcong out there?" the president asked. Victory depended entirely on good intelligence, Eisenhower replied, and "this is the hardest thing."

"A SACRED WAR"

Laos started out as an intelligence war. Under accords signed by the superpowers and their allies, all foreign fighters were supposed to leave the country. The newly arrived American ambassador, William Sullivan, had helped negotiate the accords himself. But Hanoi kept thousands of troops in the north, bolstering the communist forces, the Pathet Lao, and the CIA had its spies and shadow soldiers everywhere else in Laos. Station chiefs and their officers had orders to fight a war in secret, defying diplomatic niceties and the military facts on the ground.

In the summer of 1965, as Lyndon Johnson sent tens of thousands of American troops to Vietnam, the war in Laos was being run by about thirty CIA officers. Backed by military supplies flown in by agency pilots, they armed the Hmong tribesmen who served as guerrilla fighters, traveled to the edges of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and oversaw Thai commandos trained by the CIA's Bill Lair.

Lair ran the war in Laos from a secret compound inside a base at Udorn, built by the CIA and the Pentagon, just across the Mekong River in Thailand. He was forty, and he had been working for the CIA in Southeast Asia for fourteen years. His forebears had lived in Texas since the Alamo, but he was married to a Thai woman, ate sticky rice with hot peppers, and drank Hmong firewater. When things went wrong in Laos, he locked the facts in his safe. When his fellow CIA officers died in battle, he kept their fates classified. The war was supposed to be "as invisible as possible," Lair said. "The idea then was to keep that secret because at the time we went in there, we didn't have no idea in the long range what the U.S. was going to do.... Once they got started on this tactic of keeping it secret, it's pretty hard to change it."

The CIA officer who fought hardest in Laos was Anthony Poshepny, known to all as Tony Poe. In 1965, he, too, was forty years old. Wounded in battle as a teenage marine at Iwo Jima, a veteran of the CIA's paramilitary missions in the Korean War, he was one of the five CIA officers who fled the island of Sumatra by submarine in 1958 as the coup in Indonesia collapsed. Poe lived at the CIA's base in the Long Tieng valley of central Laos, close to a hundred miles north of the capital. With a bottle of Scotch or Hmong rice whisky his constant companion, Tony Poe was the field commander of the secret war, walking point on the highland trails and valley paths with his Hmong and Thai troops. He had gone completely native and more than a little crazy.

"He did all these damn bizarre things," Lair said. "I knew if you shipped Tony home he wouldn't last five minutes in the hallways back there. He'd be out of the Agency. But, within the Agency you had a lot of those guys who admired him because they never were close to it, see, and he had done some good things. The big wheels at the Agency all knew exactly what was happening, too, and they didn't say a damn word."

Poe told his grunts to cut off the ears of the men they killed as proof of their victories in battle. He collected them in a green cellophane bag and, in the summer of 1965, he brought them to the CIA station in Vientiane and dumped them on the deputy chief's desk. Jim Lilley was the unfortunate recipient. If Tony Poe wanted to shock the new Ivy League big shot, he succeeded.

Lilley had signed up with the CIA fresh out of Yale in 1951. He joined the Far East division and spent the Korean War dropping agents into China and being swindled by Chinese Nationalists. He would go on to serve in Beijing, first as the station chief, then as the American ambassador.

In May 1965, Lilley landed in Laos as deputy chief of station, and when his boss burned out, he became the acting chief. He focused on political warfare in the capital. The CIA's cash flowed in "as part of our 'nation building' effort," he said, and "we pumped a relatively large amount of money to politicians who would listen to our advice." The results of the next election for the National Assembly in Laos would show fifty-four out of fifty-seven seats controlled by the CIA's chosen leaders. But Vientiane was a hard post.

"We saw some of our young guys killed in helicopter crashes," Lilley remembered. "We had coups d'etat, floods, and all kinds of things to deal with. We saw some of our people crack up who could no longer take it."

The normal problems of red-blooded Americans posted in a tropical war zone--sex, alcohol, madness--multiplied in Vientiane, most often at a nightclub called the White Rose. Lilley recalled the day that "one of our senior CIA officers briefed a visiting congressional delegation on the secret war up-country. That evening the delegation was taken to the White Rose for exposure to nightlife in Vientiane. Members of the delegation saw a large American man stark naked on the floor of the bar yelling, 'I want it now!' A hostess lifted up her skirt and sat on his face. It was the same officer who had briefed the delegation earlier in the day."

The CIA station fought to identify communist targets in Laos, to pinpoint the footpaths that wove together into the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and to hunt the enemy. "We tried to set up tribal teams," Lilley said. "They would report very high statistics of North Vietnamese killed, which I think were in part fabricated." They also spotted targets for American bombing missions. Four times in 1965, the Americans destroyed innocent civilian targets in Laos, once bombing a friendly village that Ambassador Sullivan had blessed with a goodwill visit the day before. The bombing run had been called in by Bill Lair, who was trying to rescue a CIA pilot who had touched down in a hot landing zone and was captured by the Pathet Lao. The bombs fell twenty miles from their intended target; the pilot, Ernie Brace, spent eight years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton.

In June 1965, one of Vang Pao's best officers was killed by ground fire while standing in the open door of a helicopter trying to find a downed American pilot forty miles inside North Vietnam. In August, an Air America helicopter crashed into the Mekong River outside Vientiane, killing Lewis Ojibway, the CIA's base chief in northwest Laos, and a Lao army colonel who worked with him. The agency brass carved a star honoring Ojibway into the marble entryway at CIA headquarters. In October, another chopper went down in the jungle near the Cambodian border, killing Mike Deuel and Mike Maloney, two young sons of prominent CIA officers. Two more stars were hewn.

The CIA's war in Laos had started small, with "a great effervescence, a sense that we had finally found people who would fight the communists and occasionally defeat them in guerrilla warfare," Lilley said. "It was a sacred war. A good war."

Then the CIA outpost at Long Tieng started to sprawl: new roads, warehouses, barracks, trucks, jeeps, bulldozers; a bigger airstrip, more flights, more firepower, more air support. The Hmong stopped farming when rice started falling out of the sky from CIA planes. "We increased our personnel, doubling or tripling it," Lilley said. The newly arriving CIA officers "really looked at Laos as a paramilitary problem. They really had no grounding in the overall situation.... It became a little more like Vietnam. And that's when the situation began to slip away from us."

That moment came in October 1965, when Bill Colby came to Laos and flew up to Long Tieng on an inspection tour. The war in Vietnam was now on full tilt; 184,000 troops were deployed by year's end. The key to defeating the North still lay on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, where the communists were moving men and materiel into battle faster than the United States could destroy them. Colby was disheartened: the enemy controlled strategic outposts throughout Laos, even on the outskirts of Vientiane.

He wanted a new station chief, a cold-blooded hard-charging commander. The man for the job was Ted Shackley.

"AN EXEMPLARY SUCCESS STORY"

When the call came, Shackley had been the CIA chief in Berlin for less than six months, following a long tour trying to overthrow Castro from Miami. His career had been focused on the Soviets, the Cubans, and the East Germans. He had never been anywhere near Asia. He flew to the Udorn base in Thailand, where American bulldozers were carving up the red-clay earth and camouflaged American jets were revving up for air strikes in Vietnam. Shackley remembered seeing the loaded bomb racks and thinking: "No one was talking theory here."

He wanted to take the war to the enemy, and he wanted instant results. He started building an empire in the jungle, with Jim Lilley as his deputy chief. They became close friends. Lilley's portrait of the man--"ambitious, tough-minded, and ruthless"--is telling. "What he was determined to do was to build up the station in Laos and play a critical role in the Vietnam War by hitting the Ho Chi Minh Trail," Lilley said. "He brought in the paramilitary assets that he had to bear on this key target. He didn't just sit around. He wanted to win wars."

Shackley brought in men he trusted from the Miami station and the Berlin base and told them to go out into the provinces, form village militias, and send them out to fight. The militias started out by spying on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and wound up in combat. He opened up new CIA bases all over Laos. The number of CIA officers working for him grew more than sevenfold, from 30 to 250. The Lao paramilitary forces under his command doubled to forty thousand men. He used them as forward air controllers to bring American air power raining down on Laos. By April 1966, twenty-nine CIA roadwatch teams in Southeast Laos were calling in enemy movements on the trail to the CIA base in Udorn, which dispatched American bombers to destroy them.

The U.S. Air Force started pounding the jungles of Laos into wasteland. B-52 bombers went to North Vietnam to destroy the villages and hamlets at the head of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The army and the navy sent commandos to try to break the spine of the trail as it curved back into the South.

Shackley tallied the damage and the body counts. He concluded that his marriage of mountain tribesmen and American military technology had "revolutionized irregular warfare" and "put an essentially new weapon into the hands of American policy makers." Back in Washington, the president's men read Shackley's reports--so many thousands of Lao commandos recruited, so many communists killed per month, so many missions accomplished--and deemed his work "an exemplary success story." They approved tens of millions of dollars more for the CIA's war in Laos. Shackley thought he was winning the war. But the communists kept coming down the trail.

"AN ANCHOR LAND IN SOUTHEAST ASIA"

In Thailand, a more tricky political problem confronted the CIA: creating the illusion of democracy.

In 1953, Walter Bedell Smith and the Dulles brothers had sent an extraordinary American ambassador to Bangkok: Wild Bill Donovan. He was seventy years old, but he still had one fight left in him. "Ambassador Donovan recommended to President Eisenhower that they make a stand in Thailand, try to move from there back into some of these countries and to stop this onrush of communism" said Bill Thomas, the ambassador's chief information officer in Bangkok. "Money was no object."

Donovan set off a great surge in the CIA's covert operations throughout Southeast Asia after the Korean War. He was helped by the forty-thousand-strong Thai national police force, whose commander, underwritten by the CIA and Donovan's embassy, was an opium king. The agency and a rapidly expanding American military assistance group armed and trained the Thai military, whose commander controlled Bangkok's whorehouses, pork slaughterhouses, and liquor warehouses. Donovan publicly endorsed the Thai generals as defenders of democracy. The agency used its inroads with them to build its base near Udorn. Once a nerve center for covert operations throughout Southeast Asia, after 9/11 it served as a secret prison for the detention and interrogation of Islamic radicals.

Thailand remained under military dictatorship more than a decade after Donovan's departure. In 1965, under prodding from Washington, the generals proposed to hold elections someday. But they feared the left would rise at the ballot boxes. So the CIA set out to create and control the democratic process.

On September 28, 1965, Helms, covert-ops chief Desmond FitzGerald, and the Far East baron Bill Colby presented the White House with a proposal for "financing of a political party, electoral support for this party, and support for selected candidates for parliament from the party." Their plans were strongly endorsed by the wily and ambitious American ambassador in Thailand, Graham Martin, who considered the CIA his personal cashbox and constabulary. The problem was a delicate one, they reported. "Thailand today is still under martial law which does not permit political parties" the Thai generals had "done little or nothing to develop and organize politically in preparation for the forthcoming elections." But under the firm hand of the ambassador and the CIA, they had agreed to join forces and form a new party. In return the CIA would provide millions to create the new political machine.

The goal was to continue "the leadership and control of the present ruling group" and "to ensure that the party created is successful in winning a comfortable and commanding majority in elections." The agency said it could begin "literally building a democratic electoral process from the ground up," so that the United States could depend on "a stable pro-Western regime in an anchor land in Southeast Asia." President Johnson personally approved the plan. The stability of Thailand was essential for an American victory in Vietnam.

"WE ONLY RODE THE WAVES ASHORE"

The CIA had warned the White House that a loss of American influence in Indonesia would make victory in Vietnam meaningless. The agency was working hard to find a new leader for the world's most populous Muslim nation.

Then, on the night of October 1, 1965, a political earthquake struck. Seven years after the CIA tried to overthrow him, President Sukarno of Indonesia secretly launched what appeared to be a coup against his own government. After two decades in power, Sukarno, his health and his judgment failing, had sought to shore up his rule by allying himself with the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI. The party had grown in strength, winning recruits with ceaseless reminders of the CIA's assaults on the nation's sovereignty. It was now the world's largest communist organization outside Russia and China, with 3.5 million nominal members.

Sukarno's lurch to the left proved a fatal mistake. At least five generals were assassinated that night, including the army chief of staff. The state-run radio announced that a revolutionary council had taken over to protect the president and the nation from the CIA.

The station in Jakarta had few friends within the army or the government. It had precisely one well-situated agent: Adam Malik, a forty-eight-year-old disillusioned ex-Marxist who had served as Sukarno's ambassador to Moscow and his minister of trade.

After a permanent falling-out with his president in 1964, Malik had met up with the CIA's Clyde McAvoy at a Jakarta safe house. McAvoy was the covert operator who a decade before had helped recruit the future prime minister of Japan, and he had come to Indonesia with orders to penetrate the PKI and the Sukarno government.

"I recruited and ran Adam Malik," McAvoy said in an interview in 2005. "He was the highest-ranking Indonesian we ever recruited." A mutual friend had introduced them, vouching for McAvoy; the go-between was a Japanese businessman in Jakarta and a former member of Japan's communist party. After Malik's recruitment, the CIA won approval for a stepped-up program of covert action to drive a political wedge between the left and the right in Indonesia.

Then, in a few terrifying weeks in October 1965, the Indonesian state split in two.

The CIA worked to consolidate a shadow government, a troika composed of Adam Malik, the ruling sultan of central Java, and an army major general named Suharto. Malik used his relationship with the CIA to set up a series of secret meetings with the new American ambassador in Indonesia, Marshall Green. The ambassador said he met Adam Malik "in a clandestine setting" and obtained "a very clear idea of what Suharto thought and what Malik thought and what they were proposing to do" to rid Indonesia of communism through the new political movement they led, the Kap-Gestapu.

"I ordered that all 14 of the walkie-talkies we had in the Embassy for emergency communications be handed over to Suharto," Ambassador Green said. "This provided additional internal security for him and his own top officers"--and a way for the CIA to monitor what they were doing. "I reported this to Washington and received a most gratifying telegram back from Bill Bundy," the assistant secretary of state for the Far East, and Green's good friend of thirty years from their days together at Groton.

In mid-October 1965, Malik sent an aide to the home of the American embassy's senior political officer, Bob Martens, who had served in Moscow while Malik was the Indonesian envoy. Martens gave the emissary an unclassified list of sixty-seven PKI leaders, a roster he had compiled out of communist press clippings. "It was certainly not a death list," Martens said. "It was a means for the non-communists that were basically fighting for their lives--remember, the outcome of a life-and-death struggle between the communists and non-communists was still in doubt--to know the organization of the other side." Two weeks later, Ambassador Green and the CIA station chief in Jakarta, Hugh Tovar, began receiving secondhand reports of killings and atrocities in eastern and central Java, where thousands of people were being slaughtered by civilian shock troops with the blessings of General Suharto.

McGeorge Bundy and his brother Bill resolved that Suharto and the Kap-Gestapu deserved American support. Ambassador Green warned them that the aid could not come through the Pentagon or the State Department. It could not be successfully concealed; the political risks were too great. The three old Grotonians--the ambassador, the national security adviser, and the assistant secretary of state for the Far East--agreed that the money had to be handled by the CIA.

They agreed to support the Indonesian army in the form of $500,000 of medical supplies to be shipped through the CIA, with the understanding that the army would sell the goods for cash, and provisionally approved a shipment of sophisticated communications equipment to Indonesian army leaders. Ambassador Green, after conferring with the CIA's Hugh Tovar, sent a cable to Bill Bundy recommending a substantial payment for Adam Malik:

This is to confirm my earlier concurrence that we provide Malik with fifty million rupiahs [roughly $10,000] for the activities of the Kap-Gestapu movement. This army-inspired but civilian-staffed action group is still carrying burden of current repressive efforts.... Our willingness to assist him in this manner will, I think, represent in Malik's mind our endorsement of his present role in the army's anti-PKI efforts, and will promote good cooperating relations between him and the army. The chances of detection or subsequent revelation of our support in this instance are as minimal as any black bag operation can be.

A great wave of violence began rising in Indonesia. General Suharto and the Kap-Gestapu massacred a multitude. Ambassador Green later told Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, in a conversation at the vice president's office in the U.S. Capitol, that "300,000 to 400,000 people were slain" in "a blood bath." The vice president mentioned that he had known Adam Malik for many years, and the ambassador praised him as "one of the cleverest men he had ever met." Malik was installed as foreign minister, and he was invited to spend twenty minutes with the president of the United States in the Oval Office. They spent most of their time talking about Vietnam. At the end of their discussion, Lyndon Johnson said he was watching developments in Indonesia with the greatest interest, and he extended his best wishes to Malik and Suharto. With the backing of the United States, Malik later served as the president of the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Ambassador Green revised his guess of the death toll in Indonesia in a secret session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "I think we would up that estimate to perhaps close to 500,000 people," he said in testimony declassified in March 2007. "Of course, nobody knows. We merely judge it by whole villages that have been depopulated."

The chairman, Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, put the next question simply and directly.

"We were involved in the coup?" he asked.

"No, sir," said Ambassador Green.

"Were we involved in the previous attempt at a coup?" said the senator.

"No," said the ambassador. "I don't think so."

"CIA played no part in it?" asked Fulbright.

"You mean 1958?" said Green. The agency had run that coup, of course, from the bungled beginning to the bitter end. "I am afraid I cannot answer," the ambassador said. "I don't know for sure what happened."

A perilous moment, veering close to the edge of a disastrous operation and its deadly consequences--but the senator let it pass. "You don't know whether CIA was involved or not," Fulbright said. "And we were not involved in this coup."

"No sir," said the ambassador. "Definitely not."

More than one million political prisoners were jailed by the new regime. Some stayed in prison for decades. Some died there. Indonesia remained a military dictatorship for the rest of the cold war. The consequences of the repression resound to this day.

The United States has denied for forty years that it had anything to do with the slaughter carried out in the name of anticommunism in Indonesia. "We didn't create the waves," said Marshall Green. "We only rode the waves ashore."

"GENUINELY AND DEEPLY TROUBLED"

Twenty years earlier, Frank Wisner and Richard Helms had left Berlin together and flown to Washington, wondering if there would ever be a Central Intelligence Agency. Both had risen to lead the clandestine service. Now one was about to attain the pinnacle of power. The other had fallen into the abyss.

For months on end, Frank Wisner had been brooding in his lovely house in Georgetown, drinking from cut-glass tumblers filled with whisky, in a dark despair. Among the CIA's more closely held secrets was that one of its founding fathers had been in and out of the madhouse for years. Wisner had been removed as chief of station in London and forced to retire after his mental illness overtook him once again in 1962. He had been raving about Adolf Hitler, seeing things, hearing voices. He knew he would never be well. On October 29, 1965, Wisner had a date to go hunting at his estate on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with an old CIA friend, Joe Bryan. That afternoon, Wisner went up to his country house, took down a shotgun, and blew off his head. He was fifty-six years old. His funeral at the National Cathedral was magnificent. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, and his gravestone said: "Lieutenant, United States Navy."

The cold-war esprit de corps was starting to erode. Only a few weeks after Wisner was laid to rest, Ray Cline, the deputy director of intelligence, went to Clark Clifford, the chairman of the president's intelligence advisory board, and cut Red Raborn's throat.

Cline warned that the director was a danger to the nation. On January 25, 1966, Clifford told McGeorge Bundy, who was ready to quit after five exhausting years as national security adviser, that the intelligence board was "genuinely and deeply troubled about the leadership problem in CIA." A few days later a well-placed leak to the Washington Star let Raborn know he was on his way out. The admiral fought back. He sent a long list of his accomplishments to the president's aide Bill Moyers: the agency had weeded out stale and unproductive covert actions, installed a twenty-four-hour operations center to feed news and information to the president, doubled the strength of the counterterror teams in Vietnam, and tripled its overall effort in Saigon. He assured the White House that morale was great at headquarters and abroad. On the morning of February 22, 1966, President Johnson read Admiral Raborn's glowing self-assessment, picked up the phone, and called McGeorge Bundy.

Raborn was "totally oblivious to the fact that he is not highly regarded and he is not doing a good job," the president said. "He thinks that he's made a great improvement and he's a great success. And I'm afraid Helms lets him think that."

LBJ placed no one in charge of the covert-action review board, known as the 303 Committee, after Bundy resigned that week. Operations that needed White House attention hung in abeyance, including a plan to fix the elections in the Dominican Republic in favor of an exiled former president living in New York, and a fresh infusion of cash and weapons for the dictator of the Congo. Johnson left the chair empty through March and April 1966. At first he wanted Bill Moyers--later in life the most lucid leftist voice of public television--to take charge of the 303 Committee. Moyers attended one meeting on May 5, 1966, shuddered, and declined the honor. The president settled instead on his most loyal yea-sayer, Walt Whitman Rostow, as the new national security adviser and 303 chairman. The committee got back to work in May. Despite the lull, it approved fifty-four major CIA covert operations that year, most of them in support of the war in Southeast Asia.

Finally, on the third Saturday of June 1966, the White House operator placed a call from the president to the home of Richard Helms.

Fifty-three, graying, trim from tennis, wound up like a Swiss watch, Helms drove his old black Cadillac to headquarters each morning at six-thirty, Saturdays included; this was a rare day off. What began for him as a wartime romance with secret intelligence had become an all-consuming passion. His marriage of twenty-seven years to Julia Shields, a sculptor six years older, was dying from inattention. Their son was off at college. His life was entirely devoted to the agency. When he answered the ringing phone, he heard his greatest wish fulfilled.

His swearing-in took place at the White House on June 30. The president brought in the Marine Band to perform. Helms now commanded close to twenty thousand people, more than a third of them spying overseas, and a budget of about a billion dollars. He was perceived as one of the most powerful men in Washington.

25. "WE KNEW THEN
THAT WE COULD NOT WIN
THE WAR"

A quarter of a million American soldiers were at war when Richard Helms took control at the CIA. One thousand covert operators in Southeast Asia and three thousand intelligence analysts at home were consumed by the growing disaster.

A battle was building at headquarters. The job of the analysts was to judge whether the war could be won. The job of the clandestine service was to help win it. Most analysts were pessimists; most operators were gung-ho. They worked in different worlds; armed guards stood between the directorates at headquarters. Helms felt he was "a circus rider standing astride two horses, each for the best of reasons going its own way."

One of the hundreds of new CIA recruits who arrived for work the summer that Helms took power was a twenty-three-year-old who had signed up on a lark, looking for a free trip to Washington during his senior year at Indiana University. Bob Gates, the future director of central intelligence and secretary of defense, rode an agency bus from downtown Washington into a driveway surrounded by a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. He entered a forbidding seven-story concrete slab topped with antennas.

"The inside of the building was deceptively bland," he remembered. "Long, undecorated hallways. Tiny cubicles to work in. Linoleum floors. Metal, government-issue furniture. It was like a giant insurance company. But, then again, it wasn't." The CIA made Gates a ninety-day wonder, an instant second lieutenant, and sent him off to Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to learn the science of nuclear targeting. From there the fledgling CIA analyst caught a chilling glimpse of the course of the war in Vietnam: the United States was running out of pilots, and white-haired colonels were being sent off to bomb the communists.

"We knew then," Gates remembered, "that we could not win the war."

"CIRCLE NOW SQUARED"

Helms and his Far East chief, Bill Colby, were career covert operators, and their reports to the president reflected the can-do spirit of the old clandestine service. Helms told LBJ, "This Agency is going flat out in its effort to contribute to the success of the total U.S. program in Vietnam." Colby sent the White House a glowing assessment of the CIA's Saigon station. While "the war is by no means over," he reported, "my Soviet or Chinese counterpart's report must exhibit great concern over the Viet Cong's mounting problems and the steady improvement in the ability of both the South Vietnamese and the Americans to fight a people's war." George Carver, whom Helms had chosen as his special assistant for Vietnamese affairs, was also a constant bearer of glad tidings for the White House.

Yet the CIA's best analysts had concluded in a book-length study, The Vietnamese Communists' Will to Persist, sent to the president and perhaps a dozen top aides, that nothing the United States was doing could defeat the enemy. When Secretary of Defense McNamara read that report on August 26, 1966, he immediately called Helms and asked to see the CIA's ranking expert on Vietnam. As it happened, Carver was on vacation that week. So his deputy, George Allen, was summoned to the inner sanctum of the Pentagon for his first and only one-on-one talk with the secretary of defense. He was scheduled for a half hour at 10:30 a.m. The conversation turned out to be the only true meeting of the minds of the CIA and the Pentagon during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

McNamara was fascinated to learn that Allen had spent seventeen years working on Vietnam. He did not know there was anyone who had devoted himself to the struggle for so long. Well, he said, you must have some ideas about what to do. "He wanted to know what I would do if I were sitting in his place," Allen remembered. "I decided to respond candidly."

"Stop the buildup of American forces," he said. "Halt the bombing of the North, and negotiate a cease-fire with Hanoi." McNamara called his secretary and told her to cancel the rest of his appointments until after lunch.

Why, the secretary of defense asked, would the United States choose to let the dominoes of Asia fall? Allen replied that the risk was no greater at the peace table than in the theater of war. If the United States stopped the bombing and started negotiating with China and the Soviet Union, as well as its Asian allies and enemies, there might be peace with honor.

After ninety minutes of this riveting heresy, McNamara made three fateful decisions. He asked the CIA to compile an order of battle, an estimate of the enemy forces arrayed against the United States. He told his aides to begin to compile a top secret history of the war since 1954--the Pentagon Papers. And he questioned what he was doing in Vietnam. On September 19, McNamara telephoned the president: "I myself am more and more convinced that we ought definitely to plan on termination of bombing in the North," he said. "I think also we ought to be planning, as I mentioned before, on a ceiling on our force levels. I don't think we ought to just look ahead to the future and say we're going to go higher and higher and higher and higher--six hundred thousand, seven hundred thousand, whatever it takes." The president's only response was an unintelligible grunt.

McNamara came to understand, too late, that the United States had dramatically underestimated the strength of the insurgents killing American soldiers in Vietnam, a fatal mistake that would be repeated many years later in Iraq. The order of battle study he commissioned set off a great struggle between the military commanders in Saigon and the CIA analysts at headquarters. Did the United States face a total of fewer than 300,000 communist fighters in Vietnam, as the military maintained, or more than 500,000, as most of the analysts believed?

The difference lay in the number of guerrillas, irregulars, militiamen--soldiers without uniforms. If the enemy stood half a million strong after two years of relentless bombings by American planes and intense attacks by American troops, it would be a sign that the war really could not be won. The lowball figure was an article of faith for General William West-moreland, the American military commander in South Vietnam, and his aide, Robert Komer. Known as "Blowtorch Bob," Komer was a charter member of the CIA who ran Westmoreland's new and rapidly expanding counterinsurgency campaign, code-named Phoenix. He consistently sent eyes-only memos to LBJ saying victory was at hand. The real question, he asserted, was not whether we were winning, but how fast we wanted to win.

The argument went back and forth for months. Finally, Helms sent Carver out to Saigon to deal with Westmoreland and Komer. Their talks did not go well. The military was stonewalling. On September 11, 1967, the argument came to a head.

"You guys simply have to back off," Komer told Carver in an hour-long monologue over dinner. The truth would "create a public disaster and undo everything we've been trying to accomplish out here." Carver sent a cable to Helms saying the military would not be swayed. They had to prove that they were winning. They had underscored "their frustrating inability to convince the press (hence the public) of the great progress being made, and the paramount importance of saying nothing that would detract from the image of progress," Carver reported to the director. Quantifying the number of Vietcong irregulars in South Vietnam "would produce a politically unacceptable total of over 400,000." Since the military had "a pre-determined total, fixed on public-relations grounds, we can go no further (unless you instruct otherwise)."

Helms felt a crushing pressure to get on the team--and to trim the CIA's reporting to fit the president's policy. He caved in. He said the number "didn't mean a damn." The agency officially accepted the falsified figure of 299,000 enemy forces or fewer. "Circle now squared," Carver cabled back to the director.

The suppression and falsification of reporting on Vietnam had a long history. In the spring of 1963, John McCone had come under enormous pressure from the Pentagon to scuttle a pessimistic estimate that cited "very great weaknesses" in the government of South Vietnam--including poor morale among the troops, terrible intelligence, and communist penetration of the military. The CIA rewrote that estimate to read: "We believe that Communist progress has been blunted and that the situation is improving." The CIA did not believe that. A few weeks later came the riots in Hue, followed by the burning Buddhists, and the plotting to do away with Diem.

The pressure never stopped; the president's new national security adviser, Walt Rostow, constantly ordered the CIA to produce good news about the war for the White House. Whose side are you on, anyway? Rostow growled. But on the same day that Helms squared the circle, he also sent a brutally honest CIA study to the president. "The attached paper is sensitive, particularly if its existence were to leak," Helms's letter to the president began. "It has not been given, and will not be given, to any other official of the Government." The very title of the report--"Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam"--was explosive. "The compelling proposition," it said, was that "the U.S., acting within the constraints imposed by its traditions and public attitudes, cannot crush a revolutionary movement which is sufficiently large, dedicated, competent, and well-supported.... The structure of U.S. military power is ill-suited to cope with guerrilla warfare waged by a determined, resourceful, and politically astute opponent. This is not a novel discovery."

In Saigon, the CIA's best officers were making their own discovery. The more intelligence they gathered, the more they realized how little they knew.

But by now it hardly mattered what the CIA reported to Washington. Never had there been a war where more intelligence was placed in the hands of commanders: captured enemy documents, brutal interrogations of prisoners of war, electronic intercepts, overhead reconnaissance, field reports brought home to the Saigon station through the blood and mud of the front lines, careful analyses, statistical studies, quarterly syntheses of everything the CIA and American military commanders knew. Today an old torpedo factory not far from the Pentagon houses eight miles of microfilm, a small part of the archive of American intelligence from the war.

Never had so much intelligence meant so little. The conduct of the war had been set by a series of lies that the leaders of the United States told one another and the American people. The White House and the Pentagon kept trying to convince the people that the war was going well. In time, the facts on the ground would prevail.

26. "A POLITICAL
H-BOMB"

On February 13, 1967, Richard Helms was in Albuquerque, at the end of a long day touring the American nuclear-weapons labs, when a highly agitated CIA communications officer met him at his hotel room with a message from the White House: Return to Washington immediately.

A little leftist monthly called Ramparts was about to publish a story saying that the National Student Association, a well-respected worldwide group of American collegians, had for years received a generous stipend from the agency. CIA headquarters had just warned the White House that there would be a firestorm "over CIA involvement with private voluntary organizations and foundations. The CIA will probably be accused of improperly interfering in domestic affairs, and of manipulating and endangering innocent young people. The Administration will probably come under attack."

When the story broke, President Johnson immediately announced that Nick Katzenbach, the number-two man at the State Department, would lead a top-down review of the relationships the CIA had forged with private voluntary organizations in the United States. Since Helms was the only one who knew precisely what had gone on, "LBJ left me the responsibility of pulling the Agency's scorched chestnuts out of the fire."

James Reston of The New York Times knowingly observed that the CIA's links to certain unnamed radio stations, publications, and labor unions were now also in jeopardy. In short order, two decades of secret work by the CIA was laid bare.

Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom were revealed as the agency's creations. All the influential little magazines that had flourished under the banner of the anticommunist liberal left, all the eminently respectable groups that had served as conduits for the CIA's money and people, such as the Ford Foundation and the Asia Foundation--all were interwoven in a paper trail of dummy corporations and front organizations linked to the CIA. When one was blown, they all blew.

The radios were arguably the most influential political-warfare operations in the agency's history. The CIA had spent close to $400 million subsidizing them, and it had reason to believe that millions of listeners behind the iron curtain appreciated every word they broadcast. But their legitimacy was undercut when they were revealed as the CIA's frequencies.

The agency had built a house of cards, and Helms knew it. The CIA's support for the radios and the foundations were some of the biggest covert-action programs the agency had run. But there was nothing truly clandestine about them. Ten years before, Helms had talked to Wisner about phasing out the secret subsidies and letting the State Department handle the radios. They had agreed to try to convince President Eisenhower, but they never followed through. Since 1961, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had been warning that the millions of dollars flowing from the CIA to student groups and private foundations was "the subject of common gossip, or knowledge, both here and abroad." For a year, Ramparts had been on the agency's radar; Helms had sent a memo to Bill Moyers at the White House detailing the political and personal behavior of its editors and reporters.

But the CIA was not the only party guilty of negligence when it came to the control of covert action. For years, the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department had failed to keep an eye on the agency. More than three hundred major covert operations had been launched since the inauguration of President Kennedy--and, except for Helms, no one then in power knew about most of them. "We lack adequate detail on how certain programs are to be carried out and we lack continuing review of major ongoing programs," a State Department intelligence officer reported on February 15, 1967.

The mechanisms created to watch over the CIA and to invest its clandestine service with presidential authority were not working. They never had worked. There was a growing sense at the White House, the State Department, the Justice Department, and Congress that the agency had gone slightly out of control.

"WHAT THEY HAVE SPECIFICALLY IN MIND IS KILLING HIM"

On February 20, 1967, the president telephoned the acting attorney general of the United States, Ramsey Clark.

Five weeks before, LBJ and the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson had had an hour-long off-the-record conversation in the White House. Not for nothing was Pearson's column called Washington Merry-Go-Round. He had set the president's head spinning with a story about the Mafia's John Rosselli, the loyal friend of the CIA's Bill Harvey, who was the sworn enemy of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

"This story going around about the CIA...sendin' in the folks to get Castro," LBJ said to Ramsey Clark. "It's incredible." He told the tale as he had heard it: "They have a man that was involved, that was brought in to the CIA, with a number of others, and instructed by the CIA and the Attorney General to assassinate Castro after the Bay of Pigs.... They had these pills." Every word of that was true. But the story went on. It took Johnson to a terrifying if unfounded conclusion: Castro had captured the plotters and "he tortured 'em. And they told him all about it.... So he said, 'Okay. We'll just take care of that.' So then he called Oswald and a group in, and told them to...get the job done." The job was the assassination of the president of the United States.

Johnson told Ramsey Clark to find out what the FBI knew about the connections among the CIA, and the Mafia, and Bobby Kennedy.

On March 3, Pearson's column reported that "President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb--an unconfirmed report that Senator Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot which then backfired against his late brother." The item badly frightened Bobby Kennedy. He and Helms had lunch the next day, and the director brought the sole copy of the only CIA memo tying Kennedy to the Mafia plot against Castro.

Two days later, the FBI completed a report for the president with the pungent title "Central Intelligence Agency's Intentions to Send Hoodlums to Cuba to Assassinate Castro." It was clear and concise: the CIA had tried to kill Castro. The agency had hired members of the Mafia to do it. Robert Kennedy as attorney general knew about the CIA plot as it unfolded, and he knew the mob was involved.

President Johnson mulled the matter over for two weeks before he ordered Helms to undertake an official CIA investigation of the plots against Castro, Trujillo, and Diem. Helms had no choice. He told the CIA's inspector general, John Earman, to go to work. One by one, Earman called the handful of men who knew what had happened to his office; one by one, he pulled together the CIA's files, slowly assembling a detailed account.

Secretary of State Rusk ordered the chief of the State Department's intelligence bureau, Tom Hughes, to conduct his own independent review of the CIA's covert operations. On May 5, Hughes sat down with Rusk and Katzenbach in the secretary of state's chandeliered office. The three men weighed whether the president should sharply curtail the clandestine service. Hughes had come to believe that buying foreign politicians, supporting foreign coups, and running guns to foreign rebels could corrode American values. He proposed that the United States should cut covert action "to an irreducible minimum." They should go forward only when "the prospective results are essential to national security or national interests; are of such value as significantly to outweigh the risks; and cannot be effectively obtained in any other way." Rusk conveyed these thoughts to Richard Helms, who did not strongly disagree.

That same week, Helms read very carefully through the 133-page draft report of the CIA's inspector general. It said the killers of Diem and Trujillo had been "encouraged but not controlled by the U.S. government." But it dissected in grim detail the mechanics of the plots against Castro. "We cannot overemphasize the extent to which responsible Agency officers felt themselves subject to the Kennedy administration's severe pressures to do something about Castro," it said. "We find people speaking vaguely of 'doing something about Castro' when it is clear that what they have specifically in mind is killing him." Though the pressure had come from the highest levels of the government, the report was silent on the question of presidential authorization. The only man who could provide a definitive answer, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was busy at that moment co-sponsoring a bill raising federal penalties for the desecration of the American flag.

The report implicated every living CIA officer who had served as chief of the clandestine service--Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, and Desmond FitzGerald--in conspiracies to commit murder. It placed a particularly heavy burden on FitzGerald. It said he had personally promised high-powered rifles with telescopic scopes to the Cuban agent Rolando Cubela, who had vowed to kill Castro, the week President Kennedy was assassinated. FitzGerald fervently denied it, but the chances that he was lying were high.

On May 10, Helms put his handwritten notes on the inspector general's report in his briefcase and went to see the president. No record of what they said is known to exist. On May 23, Helms testified before Senator Richard Russell's CIA subcommittee. Russell knew more than any outsider about the agency's affairs. He was closer to President Johnson than any man in Washington. He put a very pointed question to Helms in the context of political assassination. He asked about the CIA's "ability to keep former employees quiet."

Helms went back to headquarters that day and made sure that every piece of paper created by the inspector general's investigation was destroyed. He kept the sole copy of the report securely locked in his safe, where it sat untouched for the next six years.

Helms was well aware that the CIA officer who knew the most damning facts about the Castro conspiracy was the dangerously unstable Bill Harvey, who had been dismissed as station chief in Rome for chronic drunkenness but remained on the payroll, lurching around the corridors at headquarters. "Bill would show up at some meeting just crocked," said Red White, the CIA's executive director. "He'd drink those bathtub Martinis." White recalled meeting in Helms's office with Des FitzGerald and Jim Angleton in the last week of May 1967. The subject was what to do with Harvey. They eased him out of the agency with the greatest care and tried to make sure that he had a quiet retirement. The CIA's security director, Howard Osborn, took the washed-up officer out to lunch and recorded "his extreme bitterness toward the Agency and the Director," and his willingness to blackmail both if backed into a corner. Harvey would return to haunt the CIA before his death.

"A MAN OBSESSED"

It was a time of great professional peril for Helms. Throughout the spring of 1967, he faced another crisis at headquarters as grave as the ticking time bomb of the assassination plots. Some of his best officers had started an internal rebellion against the conspiracy theories of Jim Angleton.

For more than a decade, ever since Angleton had obtained, with Israel's help, a copy of Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin, he had enjoyed an exalted status at the CIA. He still controlled the Israeli account and liaison with the FBI along with his crucial role as chief of counterintelligence, the man who guarded the agency against penetration from communist spies. But his vision of a "master plot" run by Moscow had started to poison the agency. A secret CIA history of Richard Helms as director of central intelligence, declassified in February 2007, reveals in detail the precise tone and tenor of Angleton's work at headquarters:

Angleton by the mid-1960s had come to hold a set of views that, if accurate, portended grave consequences for the United States. Angleton believed that the Soviet Union, guided by as skillful a group of leaders as ever served one government, was implacable in its hostility toward the West. International Communism remained monolithic, and reports of a rift between Moscow and Peking were only part of an elaborate "disinformation campaign." An "integrated and purposeful Socialist Bloc," Angleton wrote in 1966, sought to foster false stories of "splits, evolution, power struggles, economic disasters, [and] good and bad Communism" to present "a wilderness of mirrors" to the confused West. Once this program of strategic deception had succeeded in splintering Western solidarity, Moscow would find it an easy matter to pick off the Free World nations one by one. Only the Western intelligence services, in Angleton's view, could counter this challenge and stave off disaster. And because the Soviets had penetrated every one of these services, the fate of Western civilization rested, to a large extent, in the hands of the counterintelligence experts.

Angleton was unsound--"a man of loose and disjointed thinking whose theories, when applied to matters of public record, were patently unworthy of serious consideration," as an official CIA assessment later concluded. The consequences of believing in him were grave. In the spring of 1967, they included the continuing incarceration of Yuri Nosenko, the Soviet defector who was in his third year of illegal imprisonment under subhuman conditions in a CIA stockade; a cascade of false accusations against senior Soviet division officers wrongly suspected of spying for Moscow; and a refusal to accept the word of any and all Soviet defectors and recruited agents. "Loyal Agency employees had come under suspicion of treachery solely on the basis of coincidence and flimsy circumstantial evidence," says the secret CIA history of the Helms years. "Ongoing operations against Soviet targets had been shut down, new ones stifled, by the conviction that the Kremlin, tipped off by a mole within CIA, had doubled most Agency assets. Valuable information supplied by defectors and longtime sources was being ignored, for fear that it was somehow tainted."