Thank you, cia.gov!
I’ve become jaded about politically sensitive ‘leaks’ of classified documents. I guess it started with Alfred McCoy’s self-exposing introduction to his 1991 edition of The Politics of Heroin. (McCoy came out with another edition of this book in 2003 which has extra chapters about the Taliban. One career; one book.) For those of you who are reading a.nolen for the first time, in his 1991 introduction McCoy makes it clear that his book was written with CIA help. The Politics of Heroin is managed opposition to a faction of leaders at the CIA and was probably masterminded by William Colby to distract from his personal involvement with the heroin trade in Vietnam.
I’ve written some damning things about Colby’s Family Jewels leaks; John Marks’ work spinning the MK ULTRA releases; but I haven’t yet touched The Pentagon Papers.
Naturally, Colby’s pet literary agent David Obst managed the release of the ‘Pentagon Papers’ for his client Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg is now rocking the Free World alongside US intel agents Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald… regular readers already know what I suspect went on with Ellsberg and his mind-blowing leaks.
The Pentagon Papers are famous because they are supposed to be the Department of Defense’s in-house history of the Vietnam war. These papers are supposed to prove that the Vietnam War was really about ‘containing’ Communist China and its imperial aspirations. Exposing the ‘real’ motivation of the war also exposed lies that ‘the White House’ had made to the American people.
You can access some of the ‘Pentagon Papers’ by following this link. I have not yet read all of these papers, in order to do so it seems that I’ll have to make another trip to The National Archives and see how many ‘Pentagon Papers’ they can still find.
However, readers, I dare say that we don’t have to catch a bus to Maryland in order to get an inkling about what Obst and Ellsberg were up to in 1971, the year The Cheese came back to Langley. We can learn why the Pentagon Papers were released directly from the horse’s mouth, because the editors of Honorable Men, Bill Colby’s autobiography, kindly included ‘Pentagon Papers’ in Colby’s index. Colby mentions ‘Pentagon Papers’ five times; each time in a positive context.
I will now provide all five quotations from Honorable Men, in the order in which they appear. Perhaps by the end of the fifth quote you’ll come to the same conclusion that I have about Ellsberg’s awesome blow to for government accountability.
Honorable Men, p. 143
Diem [Colby, also Catholic, backed South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem] had no mass popular constituency; his Mandarin Catholic background gave him no base among the Buddhist peasant population. His only appeal lay in his nationalism, which had led him to exile rather than accept French colonial rule, and the fact that his non-Communist nationalism seemed a more hopeful prospect than Ho’s Communist version.
Not surprisingly, with so much going against him, hardly anyone gave him much chance of surviving, and virtually no one (including himself) gave him any chance at all of winning the reunification elections against the Communists in 1956. And this included the Americans. A national intelligence estimate, dated August 1954 (and quoted in the Pentagon Papers), stated: “Although it is possible that the French and Vietnamese, even with firm support from the U.S. and other powers, may be able to establish strong regime in South Vietnam, we believe the chances for this development are poor and moreover, that the situation is more likely to continue to deteriorate progressively over the next year.”
And yet, Diem pulled it off, by taking on his enemies one by one.
So, according to Colby, the Pentagon Papers ‘prove’ that Diem– and by extension Colby– did better in Vietnam than anyone could have expected! It gets better…
p.226 Honorable Men
Still, the good sense of the CIA officers in Vietnam, their greater familiarity with the country and its people, because of their longer tours of duty there, and their professional tendency to penetrate behind the façades of the situations they faced, all made them valuable contributors in the Country Team discussions, and they provided a useful counterpoint to the optimism of the proponents of panacea programs. And the Agency’s analysts in Washington served in a similar way, their estimates on events in Vietnam being by far the most realistic, as shown in the Pentagon Papers, although their conclusions were in great part neither welcomed nor adopted by policy makers.
For much of the Vietnam War Colby was in charge of CIA operations in Vietnam. He claims that the Pentagon Papers are evidence proving the war would have worked out better if his great work hadn’t been ignored by stupid D.C. policy makers.
p. 239 Honorable Men
By the fall of 1967, then, it looked as though McGeorge Bundy might have been wrong after all, that the structure of the American government could be adjusted to meet the need to fight a people’s war rather than insisting that war is a matter for soldiers and generals only. And although most of the new activity had so far taken place only in Washington conference rooms and offices, and the work in the field in Vietnam was still largely one of plans and preparations, a sense of momentum grew and replaced the earlier frustrations over the gap between high policy proclamation about the war in the villages and the absence of visible action to carry them out. As the Pentagon Papers concluded its account of the formation of CORDS [Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support], “the Mission was better run and better organized than it ever had been before, and this fact may in time lead to a more efficient and successful effort,” (Vol. II, p. 622), I was convinced that it would, that finally the United States would be fighting the right war in Vietnam, at the village level, and that it would be successful if it carried out the long-term strategy that had so long been absent but now finally had begun.
So, when Dick Helms in late 1967 suggested a new job for me, I did not demur. I had been chief of the Far East Division for almost five years and heavily involved in Vietnam for eight, and my ideal time frame for holding the same job had come to an end.
The CORDS pacification program was Colby’s baby, and it included the highly controversial PHOENIX program, which killed thirty times as many people as My Lai. Colby ran PHOENIX and was deathly afraid of his program being exposed to the American public. (That’s why Lloyd Shearer’s correspondence with Colby was the final ‘Family Jewel’.) Colby’s fear about the consequences for himself if PHOENIX ‘got out’ is why I believe he also fed information about My Lai to Sy Hersh in ’69.
We know that Seymour Hersh isn’t the good guy he pretends to be, but what about Ellsberg? Colby seems to like what the Pentagon Papers say about him and his Vietnam efforts. Could Ellsberg have played a pivotal role in Colby’s politically motivated leaks to KGB-affiliated media pros? Colby says ‘no’ in the next quote:
p. 337 Honorable Men
But it was on my trip to Bangkok in early May of 1973 that I read in a newspaper the story that would radically shake up my life, and that of CIA. It was the story that reported that, during Daniel Ellsberg’s trial for disclosing the Pentagon Papers, it had been revealed that the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, had been broken into by Howard Hunt, using CIA equipment, in search of material that would then be turned over to the CIA and from which CIA would prepare a “psychiatric profile” on Ellsberg for the White House. This was a shocker and I couldn’t understand how I had never heard of it before, when I was supposed to have been in charge of assembling all the CIA material relevant to Watergate. But more disturbingly, I wondered how the news had hit Schlesinger; for I had assured him that I had told him the full story of CIA’s relationship to Watergate on virtually the first day he had arrived at Langley.
I didn’t have to wait long after my return home to find Schlesinger’s reaction. In a most moving vote of confidence in me, Schlesinger said he assumed that the news was as much of a surprise to me as it was to him. But then he went on to say that he would tear the place apart and “fire everyone if necessary,” but we had to find out whether there were any other such questionable or illegal activities hidden in the secret recesses of the clandestine past that we didn’t know about and that might explode at any time under our feet. To do this, Schlesinger said, he wanted to issue a directive to all CIA past and present employees, ordering them to come forward with any matter they knew of where the Agency had engaged in an activity outside its proper charter. With that directive, which he issued on May 9, the CIA “family jewels” were born, and led inexorably to a year of Congressional investigations and a whole new status for American intelligence.
Of course, Colby leaked the ‘family jewels’ to his pets, writer Seymour Hersh and agent David Obst, in 1974 in order to undermine his enemies at the Agency like James Angleton. From Colby’s autobiography, it would seem that he had the inside track on outing “flap potential” projects from day one, AND that Colby was the brains behind Jim Schlesinger’s jittery five-month term as head of the CIA.
I’d like to remind readers that William Colby had suspicious dealings with a known KGB agent in Vietnam (See Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior). Colby met with a French doctor who worked for the KGB in Saigon multiple times and hid these meetings from the rest of the CIA, despite knowing he was required to report the meetings. The doctor was later convicted of espionage in France. Investigations by CIA counterintelligence staff into Colby’s KGB connections were quashed in 1971 when Colby returned from Vietnam to run the Agency. More than one CIA stalwart has questioned why Colby gave out as many secrets as he did… especially when he was leaking them to journos with KGB ties.
The final Colby ‘Pentagon Papers’ quote is the most interesting to me because it sheds some light on Colby’s KGB network and how ‘American’ intelligence really works. From Honorable Men p. 355:
But one problem I could not solve– Kissinger’s penchant for holding key information so tightly that CIA’s analysts continually complained that they could not make proper assessments of foreign problems if they were barred from knowing what was being told to the American government at the top level and what positions the United States was taking in diplomatic negotiations. Kissinger’s direct links to the Soviet hierarchy, his negotiations with the North Vietnamese and, of course, his dazzling dances through the Middle East, all were reported in the most secret of channels, with no copies coming to Langley. But while I sympathized with the analysts in their frustration, I saw little hope of any change in the situation. The proliferation of leaks in Washington, from the Pentagon Papers to Kissinger’s 1971 “tilt” toward Pakistan against India, had raised the question whether any secrets could be kept, and had driven Kissinger into extreme efforts to keep those he thought absolutely necessary for the conducting of coherent negotiations. And I confess that I agreed with his action; after Marchetti and Agee I felt I could no longer say that it was inconceivable that anyone in CIA would be guilty of an information leak, a position we had proudly held in earlier times.
Some may feel Colby’s crocodile tears are hypocritical, seeing as he set the bar for Agency leakage. ‘Kissinger’ refers to that perennial American power-broker, Henry Kissinger.
The excerpt above raises two questions in my mind. First, Colby was comfortable working with the KGB and with keeping his colleagues at the CIA in the dark about Kissinger’s actions. Was Kissinger also a KGB asset? I’m not the first to suspect this and according to one high-ranking Polish defector, Kissinger was recruited by the KGB around 1946. At some time after 1961– the height of the MK ULTRA program– this Polish defector, Colonel Michael Goleniewski, severely damaged his own credibility by claiming to by Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich. Maybe Goleniewski was just crazy, or maybe one of his handlers at the CIA’s Research Department got to him, but his information led the Brits to catch and convict Soviet spies George Blake and Harry Houghton.
My second question involves “Agee”, who is Philip Agee, a “conservative, Catholic” CIA agent-turned-‘whistleblower’, who was ‘hounded’ by the Agency for his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary. Out of all the 1970s ‘whistle-blowers’, why would Colby mention Agee along with Marchetti, especially since Colby praises Marchetti’s book in his biography? Was Philip Agee another of Colby’s ‘pets’? Agee’s book, Inside the Company was published in the U.K. in 1975. Also in 1975, Playboy magazine gave Agee an interview.
You’ll remember that the Playboy empire was caught pooling its money with the CIA’s at Castle Bank in 1973. Bill Colby’s bank for laundering drug-money, the Nugan Hand Bank, was set up to replace Castle after the 1973 IRS scandal made Castle too hot to handle. For *some reason* two years after this awkward IRS discovery, CIA-asset Playboy gave Agee a platform to air his CIA grievances.
The plot thickens, because while Philip Agee was promoting his CIA diary, he was also in contact with the KGB, according to Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin in The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. (See p. 231 of the 2001 printing.)
Colby’s use of the Pentagon Papers to white-wash his own behavior tells me that CIA resources were made available, or the Agency was kept in the dark, depending on the wishes of folks who were *very likely* cooperating with the KGB. I don’t think any of this should be surprising, seeing as the OSS was staffed from day one with Abe Lincoln Brigade kids; and that Bill Donovan spread on another thick layer of Soviet plants; and that the CIA was run by creeps who’d drank “the milk of FDR“.
I guess the joke’s on all those poor CIA middle-mangers who still think they’re fighting the Rooskies. I’ve got a bridge to sell you, enquiries to adotnolen@gmx.
I believe a much more realistic view of the Agency is that it’s a vehicle for coopting military resources for private ends, specifically the ends of well-connected American businessmen. These businessmen have never been shy of working with nasty spooks the world over, and will sell out the American people for a quarter.
There is something exquisite about William Colby, and I mean that in the worst possible way. He was never as talkative as his stooge David Obst, but Colby’s extreme nastiness lead him to over-confidence. That over-confidence has a silver lining, because now we have a good idea about what the Pentagon Papers are, what Daniel Ellsberg is, and what Ellsberg’s buddies at the Freedom of the Press Foundation are too.
