Paul Simpson - A Brief History of the Spy

Suspicions about the CIA’s activities domestically had been circulating even before Hersh’s warning. Howard H. Baker Jr., the vice chairman of the Senate Watergate committee investigating the break-ins at the Watergate building in Washington DC in 1972, said at the time that the role of the CIA in the scandal was like ‘animals crashing around in the forest — you can hear them but you can’t see them’. On 2 August 1973 the committee was told by former DCI Richard Helms categorically that ‘The CIA had no involvement in the break-in. No involvement whatever.’ The fact that five of the seven burglars had previously worked for the CIA; that four of them had been involved with the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961; and that the two ringleaders, James W. McCord Jr. and E. Howard Hunt, had been career CIA officers prior to their involvement with the White House would seem to suggest that the committee’s questions weren’t unjustified.

If the committee had been aware of all the facts, then they might well have questioned Helms further. Although it was the letter sent by James McCord to Judge Sirica in March 1973 that would eventually expose the whole operation to public scrutiny, McCord had previously written to the CIA requesting assistance and was on the verge of exposing the operation, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, whose articles were instrumental in the cover-up’s failure. However, this letter, written in August 1972, was not passed over to the FBI investigation, on DCI Helms’ instructions. Nor did Helms see fit to share Howard Hunt’s request a couple of months before the Watergate burglaries to the External Employment Assistance Branch to see if a ‘retiree or resignee who was accomplished at picking locks’ might be available for some work on behalf of the White House. Writing in 2007, Bob Woodward referred to the CIA’s role in the Watergate scandal as ‘one of the murkiest parts of the story’.

The committee’s final report in June 1974 suggested that Congress ‘should more closely supervise the operations of the law enforcement ‘‘community’’’, pointing out that it had produced evidence that the White House had ‘sought and achieved CIA aid’ for the burglars, and ‘unsuccessfully sought to involve the CIA in the Watergate cover-up’.

By 1974, questions were also being asked about the CIA’s involvement in Chile. Richard Helms had been forced to step down from the CIA in late 1972 by President Nixon (partly because he refused to let the CIA be involved in an active cover-up of the Watergate scandal), but that didn’t mean that he stopped being loyal to the office that he had sworn to serve or protective of the men and women who had been under his care. As well as making his categorical statements regarding Watergate, he also perjured himself when called to give evidence in public before a Congressional committee over the CIA’s involvement in Chile. ‘Did you try in the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the government in Chile?’ Senator Symington asked Helms. Unhesitatingly, the former DCI replied, ‘No, sir.’

This was completely untrue. In 1970, the Marxist leader Salvador Allende Gossens finally won the presidency of Chile, on his fourth attempt, despite the CIA passing funds to opposition parties, and advising global company International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) how to finance the opposition. According to its own internal review in 2000, the Agency had been active in Chile since 1962, initially supporting the Christian Democratic Party, and then providing assistance to anti-Marxist groups, both financially and with propaganda. On 15 September 1970, President Nixon informed Helms that an Allende regime in Chile would not be acceptable to the United States. Authorizing a budget of $10million, Nixon instructed the CIA ‘to prevent Allende from coming to power or unseat him… without advising the Departments of State or Defence or the US Ambassador in Chile’. The Agency tried to start a coup to oust Allende, working with three separate groups of plotters, before the Chilean Congress reaffirmed his victory. One group had ‘extremist tendencies’ so were dropped; military hardware was supplied to the second; the third, led by retired General Roberto Viaux tried to kidnap Army Commander in Chief René Schneider, but mortally wounded him. The CIA had already withdrawn their support by this stage and didn’t proceed further following the strong reaction to Schneider’s death.

On his departure from the CIA, Helms was appointed Ambassador to Iran, and underwent Congressional nomination hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In both 1973 and 1975 he point blank denied that the CIA were involved in Chile. ‘If the Agency had really gotten behind the other candidates and spent a lot of money and so forth, the election might have come out differently,’ he said at the earlier hearing, although in 1975 he admitted that he might have made a mistake but pointed out that Allende was still in power at the time ‘and we did not need any more diplomatic incidents or any more difficulties’.

Only a few months later, Allende would be gone, the victim of a coup by General Pinochet that took place in September 1973. Unlike similar operations in other countries, this wasn’t orchestrated by the CIA, although even the Agency admits that ‘because [the] CIA did not discourage the takeover and had sought to instigate a coup in 1970 [it] probably appeared to condone it’. Rather than accept an offer of safe passage, Allende stood his ground in the presidential palace, and, as a forensic report in 2011 showed, he committed suicide with an AK-47 given him by Fidel Castro.

When it became clear that Helms had lied to Congress, it seemed as if he was part of yet another cover-up by an associate of disgraced President Nixon. However, as far as Helms was concerned, ‘I found myself in a position of conflict,’ he told a court in November 1977, when pleading guilty to a charge of perjury. ‘I had sworn my oath to protect certain secrets. I didn’t want to lie. I didn’t want to mislead the Senate. I was simply trying to find my way through a very difficult situation in which I found myself.’ Passing sentence, Judge Barrington D. Parker said, ‘If public officials embark deliberately on a course to disobey and ignore the laws of our land because of some misguided and ill-conceived notion and belief that there are earlier commitments and considerations which they must observe, the future of our country is in jeopardy… You stand before this court in disgrace and shame.’ As far as Helms was concerned, ‘I don’t feel disgraced at all. I think if I had done anything else I would have been disgraced.’ His $2,000 fine was paid by CIA officers.

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