CIA Operations and Analysis in Vietnam

built-in tension inside the program you have Nadine's iums personal and political flaws that are crippling ultimately to the program I think Tom makes some excellent observations here about the the pitfalls of dealing with museum regime he writes heads iam been able to articulate a constructive political program and been able to build the administrative machinery to implement it he might have succeeded in the long term but his reliance on family and personal loyalties to project his authority together with the arbitrary quality of his governing style reduced almost to nil the prospects of American sponsored institution building and political reform but the problem here is that he's the only game in town and there's a sense here of a binary situation it's either the Communists or ZM we must side with ZM because the alternative is even worse and when this tendency to fail to view any alternatives or to really understand the dynamics by which GM's rule is perceived as illegitimate and why the Communists have an appeal in the countryside you have the whole edifice of intelligence activities there the nation building and the pacification programs falling apart there's also the issue of success induced optimism the agency was on a roll in the early 50s we had had success in the Philippines and putting down the hooks and getting Magsaysay in power we had success and the British had done pretty good in Malaysia in a not quite similar circumstance we had our own successes in Iran and 53 in Guatemala and 54 so this is high times for the agency and the idea that you could pick up a successful operational method and move it to another part of the world was a an obvious lesson to us in retrospect but something that people were not thinking about terribly much there that period of time there are also problems on a sort of the intelligence tactical level after we leave these broad issues here one is we don't have a lot of good intelligence sources inside North Vietnam and the Vietcong infrastructure in fact we have precious few there are occasional defectors but a lot of that was engaged in disinformation we don't have good signals intercepts we're really not very smart about what's going on up in the north and even so in the south where the the Viet Minh were so how are we to accurately gauge what we need to do and whether anything we're doing is actually having any effect we're relying on liaison information which is always dubious there are agendas there are security issues there are problems of vetting the sources and we don't really have a good fix we're relying oftentimes on a cadre of CIA case officers who are inexperienced they're doing one in two year tours out in the field they come from other operational millou's and experiences they don't know the place terribly well and they're trying to import the institutional knowledge to this very alien environment and not having terrific success at it and lastly if we move beyond ZM and start talking about the generals who succeeded in this is big men here who took over in 64 the basic problem here is that lacking an overall cohesive strategy about how to do these things we are in effect on the fly all the time we're improvising we're making it up as we go along now this was one of the things that the agency was pretty good at was putting out fires and coming up with quick fixes it was it was one of our skills that we developed and brought to us from the old OSS days but out in the field it meant things were happy as 'red uncoordinated local successes could not be expanded much further and even if they were they were usually co-opted or corrupted by the the central government and a third problem here is changing missions you can't have a long-term covert action program if your mission is constantly changing because that means your targets your methods and the whole purposes for which you're doing these things are variable but listen to this sequence of events that starts beginning after the generals take over first covert action is there to stabilize the hunter stop the revolving door well okay that kind of took care of itself after a while then you were now in place to legitimize the to regime to support his so-called election to power and then to prettify the regime after that then after we start moving towards some kind of truce or peace settlement the agency is heavily involved in trying to push him to support the settlement that we're trying to negotiate and impose on him and lastly after the settlement is reached the agency's main focus is tidying things up putting things in boxes and getting them out of the country as quickly as we can in effect an organized demobilization of the agency there so when all of these things are changing constantly you can't have a systematic and cohesive covert action and intelligence regime over there no surprise that there were disconnects that there were problems one thing we can definitively put to rest though if anybody still thinks that there was anything to this canard is that the CIA was behind the November coup that led to the death of ZM the idea this is demonstrated in Tom's book on on the sium relationship there's absolutely no classified formally classified documentation to support any allegation whatsoever the problem arises here and we saw this happening again in 1973 with the coup in Chile is when you're in a situation for intelligence collection purposes that is you want to know what the regime dissidents are doing the fact that you don't stop them from doing the thing that ultimately HAP suggest that you're lending it a tacit approval this was not the case from the period of August to November 63 certainly before then as you well know there were prominent people in the Kennedy administration who wanted Z em out the agency was not one of them we had people there knowing what was going on but we were not pushing it we were simply helping that people understand the dynamic we had absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with the events that occurred between August and November 63 that led to the death of ZM now when we turn to the pacification programs we want to understand again an important fact that when the overall dynamic of pacification changes periodically and tom has identified six periods of pacification by pacification again we're talking about this kind of hearts and minds idea you go out into the countryside you win the loyalty of the peasantry through civic action through good works through protection from the Vietcong you do it in a variety of ways economic benefits and providing security but as you can see from this sequence of events here the target the mission the focus is changing over time and when you compound that with the rotation of case officers in and out changing cues from the top you can see that it's no wonder covert action pacification in Vietnam is one of the most confusing stories to try to tell and get to as we mentioned what the nation-building is founded on some basic misconceptions one of them perhaps the most fundamental one is the persistent idea that there was no legitimate reason why the rural peasantry would not support the z-m regime the fact that we thought the Vietcong were in there through terror through violence through coercion and once we establish secure that's not going to happen anymore and then when you start throwing in the great American economic benefits the handouts the material goods the healthcare the schools the tractors etc combine that all with the overt aid that is going out to the peasantry through USAID and organizations like that how could they not love us how could they not support us the problem is we need to persuade them that there's a reason to fight on behalf of the central government of the z.m government and so we'll do that by winning their loyalties through these kinds of benefits and security and then they'll forsake their bigger loyalties as we now know to family and village and there won't be any reason why the VC can make any inroads there whatsoever tying this in occasionally with the government's programs like strategic Hamlet's and such so it becomes a kind of a pastiche of different programs and different benefits we did have some localized successes the civilian irregular defense groups were highly successful when run on a small scale by the agency they later on became militarized and were scattered around the country and consequently there was no connection between the village defence force and defending the village instead they're just out there fighting the war on behalf of the government they don't like needless to say this program kind of fell apart people at People's Action Teams a similar kind of notion local militia security again once it becomes nationalized and the people are detached from the point of it all protect the village and they're moved elsewhere in the country the loyalty is lost the effort to gain the loyalty is lost so the the sad thing about pacification and it might have may have been a built in dynamic in the whole program is the more successful they got the more likely they were to fail because the localized success could not be kept localized the oil slick idea as you spread out your areas of control that attracted the attention of the central government and it also made for more and easier targets for the VC so is a bizarre paradox in here as the quotation from one of our case officers early on suggests it might have all been hopeless but something had to be done there was no other way to get around it the problem as we've described a bit is that built into this overall architecture of covert action are some very very difficult obstacles to success a lack of agreement between what the whole point of it was we're out there to legitimize a government that is doing things that undermine its legitimacy we're trying to get the government to change its whole notion of social justice through efforts at land reform through efforts at winning the peasants loyalty and they're simply not interested in doing that and it's no better of course under the generals regime after 64 so that paradox of nation-building a reactionary status quo government that won't change but the only way to promote peasant loyalty is to get it to change and our programs are often working at cross-purposes some of the other points up there are pretty self-evident but this is a key I think here as well the metrical ization of the war the body counts the numbers of equipments killed the amount of acreage under control as we get into a more quantified basis for results determination the same thing happens with pacification it's no longer measuring hearts and minds which were always tough to measure anyway it's how many villages can you claim and what's the metric to control as you can see we weren't making a whole lot of progress here between 63 and 67 the red areas designate communists control the blue represent government control if anything control is somewhat evaporating more from the government then from the Communists there is a battle for loyalty in the countryside and we are making occasionally isolated progress but it's by no means a definite trend and in some ways it's working in just the opposite also not being coordinated with military operations one of the problems that beset agency activities over there is bureaucratic rivalries among the military the agency the State Department and some internal infighting within the agency itself between field officers headquarters personnel analysts trying to explain it all covert action operators versus counterintelligence officers there's a lot of you know elbowing inside the CIA itself and that became crippling in certain circumstances and over the long run this is as Tom makes this rather dismal conclusion here by the end of the war all we're trying to do is stop losing as quickly as we were in the countryside in short according to official agency history the whole pacification program had probably an inbuilt design for failure it would have been very tough looking back on this to see any potentials for success because of the regime that we were dealing with now that said I have heard scholars who've read Tom's book complained that he's too critical of the South Vietnamese government and he lets the agency off the hook a little bit too much those those are reasonable criticisms I think to be made but overall I do accept his general perspective on things we talked already a little bit about the infiltration operations taking either singleton or team groups of agents and dropping them behind enemy lines by air by sea by land we did this 36 times between 61 and 63 when this programme began by the time we turned it over to the military we could at best with hopes and prayers recommend maybe four or five of these agent teams or individuals is having possible active utility we often lost communication with these people as soon as they hit the ground we had evidence that they were being doubled oftentimes we just never heard from them again the military's response was well let's just beef it up keep trying hard or send in more teams overall a few hundred South Vietnamese agents were lost in the course of this program and why did it happen why was this so persistent it goes back to a long record of conducting these kinds of black operations from World War two where they were relatively successful around the margins but we were dealing with a benign operating environment existing resistance groups we could connect with people who wanted to help us we're not finding that anywhere in the north to speak of which is why these teams were just dropped in effect into black holes a very very costly and tragic kind of operation a quick bit about analysis before we move into the sea and Oakville controversy there are a handful of general analytic issues that the agency was straight-up about they told the truth to power as the cliche likes to say it they went against the grain they went to the white house and said in effect you're losing the war the way you're prosecuting it you need to do something different that's the bottom line of our analysis we're not prescribing the policy that's not our job and that's where our analysis is telling the Johnson White House including even the whole philosophical foundation of we're not finding Serkis 6566 evidence that the domino theory even pertains needless to say the White House isn't listening and one of the problems is that our record truth be told was relatively mixed on analysis as well there was some serious blown calls and missed calls on important analytic issues things like the Tet Offensive that you're quite familiar with some that perhaps are less well known in the literature and the one I'd like to focus on a little bit because it provides a very good case study for how to think about these issues is the C&O grill controversy where are the South Vietnamese communists getting most of their weapons now they coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail as we were insisting or were they coming through the port of Sienna Phil in Cambodia as the military was arguing neither side had definitive evidence and they became wedded and entrenched in their positions part of this was bureaucracy part of this was just dang stubbornness but looking at it from the agency's standpoint in Tom's very good book on the on the question we find some serious issues here identified on the slide and analysts at the agency learn from these kinds of studies all the time we use books like Tom's in our training classes for analysts just as we use some of these books in training for our field operators the idea that lacking solid evidence you come up with models or interpretations or you look at things in the rational actor mode well if I were them I'd do it this way so it must be happening right you look for sketchy evidence and build architecture around that and pretty soon the whole thing collapses like a house of cards because we don't have the definitive evidence until the late 60s when we start getting better sources inside Cambodia we're telling us really what's going on and the key source doesn't come out until 1970 we get a warehouse man in Sandoval who in effect gives us the record books and there it is proof positive we were wrong CIA was wrong on this call the military was right do we get any credit in the Nixon White House for fessing up and saying sorry mister I can't stand the CIA president we were wrong but here's the proof and go with it this became a political disaster for the CIA because we got no credit for finally getting that good source inside Cambodia instead what about Siena Phil was a quote it was a question that Nixon regularly posed in NSC meetings when we would come there with analysis that went against what he was thinking he'd say why should I believe you what about Siena trip and political implications this is when our relationship with the White House really started to go down the tubes Nixon came in with all sorts of print elections against CIA social snobbery crypto liberalism soft on the commies all of this that's what he thought about us when he came in he used to think that we had helped him lose the election in 1960 by secretly giving information at JFK that he could use in the debates and Nixon couldn't respond to it properly well that never happened but he took these resentments with him into the White House and this was just another nail in the agency's coffin as far as he was concerned tom is also very good in describing the analytic techniques that were used now I will say when you look at this book you will find it I'm sorry to say heavily redacted in a lot of areas just blank page after blank page I was quite upset about this when I saw what our people had done to it they I think misinterpreted the idea of protecting sources and methods to taking out anything having to do with the way analysts do their work they'll leave the conclusions in they'll talk about the evidence but you know the black box inside the skull they decided they didn't want to talk about I regret that but there's enough of the story left that I think you can learn quite a bit from it a not terribly well-known analytic controversy that had major impact for our stature here this is a good story however and maybe that's why Tom just couldn't stop writing about it it's the biggest one of the whole series the covert action in Laos we've heard about it referred to here and there the cork in the bottle the thing that bothered Eisenhower much more when he handed the baton to Kennedy than Vietnam it's a fascinating tale about how to run a successful long-term paramilitary program using a proxy army that you in effect buy and pay for and help supply our biggest covert action program until Afghanistan in 79 to the late 80s and very effective in doing what it was intended to do in Laos which is keep it neutral we are here because the military cannot be after 62 with the Geneva agreement foreign forces will be removed from Laos well the Communists didn't quite hear that and didn't abide by it they stayed what are we going to do we support the among the mayo as a proxy army along with some other tribes here and there depending on where you were in the country this worked we kept the country out of the communist hands and as the Vietnam War ramps up this becomes a kind of a sideshow to interdict supplies on the trail to do road watching operations it becomes an important place to kind of get an angle on what the what the Communists are doing in the south so a very very good program and it bespeaks some of the more positive accomplishments of the agency here unlike Vietnam we had a better fix on the local cultural terrain we understood the people we had won their loyalties and we kept it it was an effectively administered program good tradecraft a good case study and how to do it do it right and one of the most interesting tales about it already known courtesy of William O'Leary but a little bit extra comes out through the recent declassification is the role of Air America in Laos and we'll turn to that for a little bit for those of you who aren't familiar with air America this was the CIA's aviation proprietary company a secret company a front company if you want to call it that that we assumed control of it was originally called air transport which was a spinoff from the retirees from Claire Chanel's Flying Tigers who decided to stay over there and set up their own aviation activity that started in 49 Civil Air Transport does some very important things for intelligence purposes including helping drop relief supplies into DN bien phu during the six weeks before DN bien phu fell Civil Air Transport flew almost 700 supply missions air dropping material as is shown in this painting here the pilot of this aircraft James McGovern nicknamed earthquake mcgoon was shot down during this particular mission this is a painting that appears in CIA headquarters overall Civil Air Transport was an indispensable to the prosecution of the Laotian covert action and you should know that in the course of civil air transports existence it ceased in 1975 240 Air America pilots and crewmen were killed now we have a wall of Honor at CIA headquarters which now contains 90 stars one star per killed in action in an intelligence mission but these are staffers and overt that is known contractors proprietary employees don't get a star on the wall these individuals are honored at the University of Texas at Dallas where the Air America archives and a museum and a library are located but they didn't have any overt connection to us until most recently when with this declassification effort described in this co-published book that we did identify specific individuals as working for Air America and acknowledge their individual connection with CIA another thing that we can now acknowledge is the involvement in Air America with search and rescue missions in South Vietnam and Laos oftentimes pilots would ditch in Laos and they had to be rescued more often they of course ditched in in hostile territory in Vietnam the military didn't have initially search-and-rescue capability Air America did this in effect voluntarily we they were not ordered to do it they signed on to do it it was what's referred to as the Airman's bond the community of aviators helping out one another and during this one year period almost two dozen of those missions are flown after that nobody's keeping track of them we all we know is that dozens and dozens of down u.s. aviators were rescued through Air America flying either kilos or short takeoff and landing aircraft and you saw a couple of those in the previous slide we can also now talk about Air America's involvement in some heroics at Lima site 85 which was a forward air navigation post way up in northern Laos about 120 miles away from Hanoi this was used for forward air traffic control for bombing missions into the north there were 16 US Air Force technicians stationed there undercover as Lockheed Aircraft Corporation employees they were the ones running this little tiny primitive-looking listening post on top of a 5600 foot tall mountain right there and the cusp of enemy territory and they're there doing their business to help the pilots there this is throughout the 1960s and the the activity at Lima 85 or site 85 they would talk about starts in 66 to 68 when the when the North Vietnamese started going after it to try to take it off businesses they're realizing something's going on up there starting in 66 well let's just start the story they begin shelling it shooting at it mortaring it and during one of these very interesting episodes you have as far as I know the only instance in aviation history in which a helicopter shot down a fixed-wing aircraft in fact it did it twice this is an Air America helicopter flying reconnaissance and relief to sight 85 the North Vietnamese are flying these the slowed by wing aircraft to strafe and drop literally just drop artillery shells onto the site the helicopter happens to be there the co-pilot sticks an ak-47 out the window out the door and shoots down both of these slow-moving fixed-wing aircraft it's the only time I wear that this ever happened in aviation history a couple years later in 1968 at site 85 the Communists become determined to close this down and so they not only begin their usual shelling but they also start climbing up the mountain and so Air America is called in to rescue these individuals because it's pretty clear this is going to get closed down so we have helicopters they're picking up some of the Air Force technicians regrettably ten of them are still missing in action to this day we only were able to rescue four at the time one of them was in the helicopter was shot by ground fire and died later so we were only able to pull out three of them two of our paramilitary officers tried to scale up they were they were based over here and they went down because a couple of the technicians were hiding out on the on the mountainside here hoping to avoid what was going on up top because the the Communists were coming in from over here and we're scaling up in various hidden places so they were hiding out over here in the rocks a couple of our p.m. officers go out there and try to rescue them they wind up getting caught under fire and in turn are rescued out by by an Air America helicopter previously we couldn't talk about the agency connection with any of this but it's now officially acknowledged and at the end air America is playing whoops is playing an important role not flying the the a12 but let me get us back here there we go about a thousand rescue missions are being flown by air America during the evacuation of Saigon an estimated 41,000 evacuees are brought out of Saigon and environs through Air America operations during the drawdown in the latter months and in the very last days or so about a thousand valued Vietnamese and others are taken out on the very last day 1,000 are rescued through Air America flying the stos and helicopters out to aircraft carriers offshore and the most famous photograph of the evacuation the the the so called and you'll still see this in books that ought to know better the US military aircraft on the roof of the US Embassy taking people out the famous one that you've seen with people scurrying up the ladder and the individual holding out his hand to pull them on board take that photograph turn it sideways and here's what you see first it's the Pittman apartment building in Saigon which was one of a pre-arranged number of pre-arranged evacuation points so this is not serendipitous this is deliberate second look at the tail of a helicopter it's an Air America helicopter doing this and thirdly you can't see him in this photograph the agency officer well I just blew the line the person reaching out his hand is a CIA paramilitary officer who's cover has just been rolled back so his involvement in all this can now be acknowledged let's switch to something a little more exotic in aircraft terms the a12 the Archangel 12 as it was called better known by his codename oxcart which was chosen deliberately this aircraft flies almost 2200 miles an hour at ninety thousand feet for three and four hours straight with refueling so chosen deliberately ironically the codename oxcart this was designed to be the successor of the u2 and it came into design phase in the late 50s when we were expecting the YouTube program would eventually have to be ended because eventually the Soviets would shoot downward well they did in 1960 but by then we didn't have an aviation replacement for it we have the satellite soon coming online but we were still pursuing the possibility of using such an aircraft for reconnaissance missions by the time its operational in 6566 obviously we're not going to overfly the Soviet Union there's no real good place to use it except in East Asia and most specifically in Southeast Asia so a couple of years ago when I was working on the the book that came out of this particular project we also got a lot of stuff Declassified I'm going to show you a few pages of the thousands that were there this is a mission log of all the flights of the a12 that was flown you'd only have lasted for one year may 67 - 68 a total of 29 missions flown and 26 of them are in Southeast Asia 24 over North Vietnam - in the Tri border region down by the DMZ the other three related to North Korea had to do with the seizure of the Pueblo I want to talk about them this is the recently Declassified mission map for the first time we sent the a12 in and here's how the program worked you were forward deployed at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa that's the place where we set up in order to run these missions huge infrastructure talk about tail to tooth this is a very long tail but a very interesting tooth at the front of it the plane would fly out and I can talk about some of the peculiarities of the aircraft offline it's a fascinating engineering story it flies off gives its tanks topped off swings through North Vietnamese territory takes its pictures swings around gets refueled in Thailand to get back to Kadena Air Base that's how the basic mission went this is the overall mission plot from Okinawa through and this is a more specific picture of where it went on that first mission why was it there there was a lot of concern at this time that the North was deploying surface-to-surface missiles where are they this is a drastic escalation of the war we need to find out how can we get there not with the u2 Soviets Sam's can shoot those down obviously they've done it a couple times already the Chinese had already taken out a few as well satellites won't work unlike Hollywood you can't stop a satellite in mid orbit turn it have it take a picture and then move on just doesn't work that way so what's left the a12 and off it goes typical image lots of these are now Declassified you can see this is taken from 80,000 feet here's the airbase we developed a special photographic processing facility in Japan so we get these things turned around and back to the battlefield within 24 hours they used to have to be taken out of the airplane shipped to Kodak in Rochester which made the film and knew how to do it right then sent down to Washington where the photo interpreters are squints as we used to call them looked at the stuff then their analysis is shipped out via a cable to Vietnam this is very slow intelligence in a war situation so having this place up in Japan was essential for getting this type of information in the hands of the war fighters and the decision makers during the course of the missions 29 of them the aircraft was shot at six by surface-to-air missiles on only one occasion where one of them blew up that a fragment of the missile ever touched the aircraft routinely during the life of the a12 and the sr-71 if they saw an incoming si M they could usually just hit the afterburner and outrun it this thing could this thing could fly amazingly fast and edit is extreme it was going 2300 miles an hour this is faster than I'm the most rifle bullets and he could do it for a few hours at a time and from our standpoint of understanding Vietnam very important intelligence gathered we had we dispensed with the SSM concern and just got a lot of good routine if you will photographic intelligence about places to bomb what happened after they were bombed where are the SAM sites there'd have been a lot more pilots shot down I can guarantee you if we hadn't known as much about the SAM sites as we got from the a12 and other reconnaissance aircraft as well so an extremely valuable program dispensed with after one year because the Air Force took it over you couldn't have bureaucratically budgetarily two parallel programs the covert CIA program and the overt military sr-71 program doing the same thing in the same place something had to go and guess who lost the the bureaucratic battle so the Air Force kept their sr-71s which continued to fly until 1989 when the program was was closed down last subject I'll talk about real quickly because it remains a matter of controversy and of current interest with all the talk about domestic surveillance in the Global War on Terror NSA listening to our cellphone calls hacking into our computers and various sorts of espionage operations going on against US citizens who are suspected of terrorism this all sounds vaguely familiar familiar to agency historians and I'm sure some of you too because we've been here before the M age chaos program sounds just like something out of a Len Deighton thriller doesn't it I'm told this was a random code name choice but I'm a little dubious about that assertion I don't think MH cheese would have flown these these code names are supposedly generated randomly on a list and you just pick the next one that comes up when your operation has to be named I have a feeling somebody jumped the line here to get Kaos attached but what's going on here this became one of the most important criticisms of CIA during the mid-1970s when I as I'll show you this was disclosed this was the reason why we were investigated by the Church Committee this and some other exposures but it was not as is sometimes been Mis portrayed a freelance operation like a bunch of guys sitting out at Langley didn't have anything else to do one day and said hey let's go spy and Samana War protesters but we don't do our business that way we got the order from both the Johnson and the Nixon White House's to do this because they didn't believe such a robust anti-war movement could exist in the u.s. without foreign support and assistance go find it now here's where the important distinction needs to be made spying on Americans by the CIA can be legitimate in certain circumstances if for example you are concerned about an American doing something overseas that is suspect possibly illegal violation and you're asked to find out about it through foreign intelligence sources agents in that country listening in to communications whatever the technique that is a legitimate use of foreign intelligence sources so when we were originally trying to figure out if any of these types of people were getting any support from China Soviet Union North Korea Algeria Soviet bloc countries we used our assets and our capabilities in those countries to see what a mayor because we're doing that's a legitimate use of our capabilities the problem is when we didn't find evidence of foreign support and reported that first Johnson and then continued to report it to Nixon they said be a little more creative and so we take this super-secret program I mean you can imagine the political sensitivity this would have if it were exposed back then let alone a few years later it's put in the most secretive component of the CIA the service within a service the counterintelligence staff run by the notorious but quite misunderstood James Angleton sometimes referred to as James Jesus with emphasis on the middle name for some reason but it wasn't his program he didn't dream it up he didn't have day-to-day dealings with it it was put there specifically for security reasons what did it find it was a very busy program as you can see here lots of collection lots of file building lots of interaction with other organizations most of the material that came out of the chaos program was collected by others as you well know the NSA collects far more voluminous intelligence than the CIA does so much of what we were getting from here was was electronic snooping but here's the concern after that point at which we didn't find the foreign connection through the foreign intelligence approach the president says look harder and here we have one of the most difficult decisions that any director of central intelligence I know of has ever had to make do I violate the CIA's charter or not because doing what he was now being ordered to do is illegal Helms's rationale was if I first I'm not going to go rat to the press I'm not that type of person and I'm probably not going to go tell the congressional oversight committees because it's going to leak out anyway so what is my worst of all a best of all bad all keep it under my control if I resign the president is going to appoint either a zealot who's going to do it even worse and cause more political backlash or it's going to be done incompetently by less sophisticated people than my great counterintelligence staff officers so I'm going to keep it in place keep it quiet keep it under heavy control and that's where it lay until 1973 when Helms's successor James Schlesinger closed the program down but that wasn't the end of the story and we'll end the discussion here we did find some context but we did not find any kind of clear evidence of foreign support manipulation the worst case for the anti-war movement instead it was just kind of political rhetoric and and that kind of support maybe there was a little bit because in counterintelligence you never know whether you've found every possible thing you can't prove the negative in this line of business inside the agency this causes a lot of controversy a lot of people who don't want to touch this it was known by more people and should have known it and there was always the potential for them to leak it to the press so we had to be very careful about keeping it inside and he was probably the big thing that occurred when Seymour Hersh got onto this story through we think congressional leaks of some sort but it's not definitive yet he decided to publicize it director Colby knew he was going to invites him into the White House to set the record straight to get his facts right Hersh still gets a lot of the story wrong and New York Times runs it for maximum impact Sunday banner headline the the biggest kind of issue play you could get in the New York Times and this is what prompts the congressional inquiry of 1975 the Rockefeller Commission out of the White House first then the church and the pike committees in the Senate and the house and all of the huge amount of controversy of oversight of political repercussions for the agency we have not been the same place since and it's one of the ironies of a program that was fashioned to be super super secret known only to a few in order to answer one of the most sensitive questions in American politics at the time and that American democracy in its inimitable way eventually turns it all inside out and we become at the end of this particular day the most unsecret secret organization in the world and it's been that way ever ever since that's all I have to say thanks

Channel: Washington and Lee University

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Length: 47min 37sec (2857 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2009