The Secret Team, Part 3

by L. Fletcher Prouty

Chapter 11:The Dulles Era Begins

The old, pastel yellow brick east building on a hill overlooking Foggy Bottom, on what is now the site of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Watergate Buildings, was just the place for the scent of pipe tobacco and the quiet shuffle of worn leather slippers. The high-backed chair and elongated office were also right for its new tenant. Allen Dulles moved into a place that already seemed to bear his trademarks and characteristics. Unpretentious as the East Building was, it seemed right for a daily stream of jet-black, chauffeur-driven limousines to pull up the hill, over the winding narrow driveway, and then down into the garden circle where no more than three or four cars could stop at any one time. Typically, the VIP cars pulled over onto the grass to permit the little old bottle-green buses to shuttle from one hidden CIA building to another. All these buses seemed at some part of their wanderings to find their way past the home of Mr. Dulles, as though anyone who worked for him should be kept aware of the fact that he was sequestered somewhere up there on the dim second floor overlooking the Potomac. The Agency had a good chance of being secret without making much effort. Either by design or by a hand-me-down procedure, the CIA inherited the most motley group of buildings imaginable. Someone in the General Services Administration with a real sense of humor must have made out the CIA allocation in the Greater Washington area. At the north end of the Fourteenth Street (Rochambeau) Bridge and to the north of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where not less than 70 -- 80 percent of all tourists who scramble through Washington each year find their way, there is a red brick building that looks like part of a converted stable. The Agency was in there. Further north on Sixteenth Street, across from the Statler-Hilton Hotel and next door to Washington's own Gaslight Club, is another nondescript building, not too far from the Soviet Embassy. CIA was there. On Connecticut Avenue, in what is now the heart of the business district, there used to be a building that had floors that sagged so much that tenants shuddered each time a big truck went by down below. CIA was in there. CIA was crammed into every one of the fairly well kept, but seriously overcrowded World War II Tempo Buildings along the south side of the Reflecting Pool east of the Lincoln Memorial Across the parkway, near the cherry tree Tidal Basin, in buildings named "Alcott" and "Barton" for their World War II Army WAAC tenants, the CIA was tucked in too. In fact, the CIA was so scattered that there was scarcely a part of Washington that did not have CIA offices hidden away. And of course, it was very simple for anyone who wished to find out where the Agency was to follow the little green buses, which trundled all day long in never-ending circles, some clockwise and some counter-clockwise, from building to building.

Things like this did not bother Allen Dulles. It is entirely possible that he never found out where all of his agency was anyhow. Such details were not for him. As a matter of fact, one of the first things he did when he became the Director was to abolish the office of the Deputy Director of Administration. In a city renowned for its bureaucratic administration and its penchant chant for proving how right C. Northcote Parkinson was, Mr. Dulles' first act was more heretical to most Washingtonians than one of Walter Beedle Smith's first actions -- the one in which he told the McCarthy hearings that he thought there might well be Communists in the Agency Washington -- was not as upset about the Communists as it was to learn that a major agency of the Government had abolished Administration. Mr. Dulles took the view of the intelligence professional, that it was much more dangerous and therefore undesirable to have all kinds of administrators acquiring more information than they should have, than it was to find some way to get along without the administrators.

While the public was mulling over that tidbit from the CIA, the real moves were being made inside the organization, where no one could see what was going on. The Deputy Director of Intelligence, strengthened by the addition of the current Intelligence organization and other such tasks, was to be responsible for everything to do with intelligence, and more importantly, was to be encumbered by nothing that had to do with logistics and administration. This was the theory. In practice, the DD/I has a lot of administrative and support matters to contend with as does any other large office. However, as much of the routine and continuing load as could be was set upon the Deputy Director of Support.

At the same time, the new and growing DD/P (the special operations shop) was similarly stripped of all encumbrances and freed to do the operational work that Dulles saw developing as his task. This left the DD/S (Support) with a major task. He was responsible for the entire support of the Agency, support of all kinds, at all times, and in all places. At the head of this directorate for many, many years has been the most unsung hero of the Agency and perhaps its ablest deputy, L. K. White. He is better known as "Red" White, a former Army colonel and a most able manager and administrator. He has made things work.[1]

The CIA as an intelligence agency offers no unusual elements on most counts. It is pretty much what it seems to be. Special operations has been exposed one way or another so many times that there is not too much guesswork about its role. But researchers have been unable to work their way into what it really is that makes the Agency what it is today. This distinctive characteristic is its superior logistics support. If an agent working in Greece needs some Soviet-built rifles of a certain vintage to equip some agents for a border or cross-border assignment, all he has to do is get his request to the station chief. He will in turn put it on the Agency line direct to Washington, where DD/S will process it. Within hours, one of their men, posing as an Air Force man in "X" country, will leave his office and drive out with an Air Force pickup truck to a small building on the far side of the base. There he will unlock a wire-anchor fence, then step unto a "go-down" storage tunnel until he comes to a row of heavy boxes. There he will look for a special mark that describes the guns he wants.

He will drive, with the nondescript box, across the field to another building, where a normal-looking Air Force supply office is located. In what looks like the usual supply room and storage area, he will find a shop filled with special tools and machinery. In short order, he will have the guns unpacked, removed from the heavy coatings of cosmolene and lead foil, and in an hour or so these guns will have been repackaged and labeled "P-84 Wing Tank" or some such cover name. Then an Air Force transport plane on its way to Naples and Athens will take this boxed "Wing Tank" to the Air Force Military Assistance Advisory Group section at the military airfield outside of Athens. There an Air Force MAAG man will take the box and see that it gets to its destination. That same day a small single engine plane will fly low over a remote, mountainous site and gently airdrop that box onto a set of camouflaged panels that mark the site for the trained pilot.

Nothing is difficult for the DD/S. The above order and action are examples of the routine. What was not routine was the establishment and maintenance of the system that made that possible. Someone had to get those special guns into the hands of the CIA in the first place. Then an elaborate global network of supply and support bases had to be established, not only as functional bases, but also with the double role of looking like one kind of facility and doing the important task of another.

A closed World War II airfield in England, once the home of an American fighter wing, was found to be an ideal site for DD/S operations. The Navy is "Prime" (the U.S. military department assigned the task of working with the British on all matters pertaining to the support and housing of Americans on the British Isles) in England. The Agency asked the Navy to establish some reason for asking the British to permit the limited reopening of this base. The CIA and the Navy agreed on their cover story and then met with the British, who of course were told the real reason for the request, but also were expected to maintain the cover story.

With some small show of normalcy, the British reopened the base. The most obvious evidence that the base had been reopened in that country neighborhood was the appearance of British uniformed guards at the gates on a twenty-four-hour basis. The Navy set up a "supply facility". It had a real U.S. Navy base designation. The base commander arrived in uniform, and his staff and enlisted men followed soon after. The base hired local British people, some as secretaries and others to run the kitchen and other facilities. In actual practice, the base had not a single real Navy man. All of those at the base were CIA men carefully accredited to the Navy and sent overseas as naval personnel.

The base gradually was loaded with "Navy" equipment, and at the proper time it was announced that the Navy was going to maintain some highly classified gear at the base in addition to the regular items and that certain buildings would be off-limits to all unauthorized personnel, British and American. By that time DD/S had a major storage and maintenance site in a most convenient and secure location.

If anyone knew that this site had been created for more than met the eye, he might note that it was not far from the huge operating base of the U.S. Air Force Air Resupply and Communications Wing that was assigned to England. The Agency site would actually be a satellite base to the huge Air Force operation with which it was linked. It is this formula that has made it possible for the CIA, with the appearance of only a little in the way of support and logistics on its own, actually to command boundless equipment, manpower, and facilities, including aircraft from the ever ready and always eager Air Force sister unit. The law and the directives and the other limits that have been put upon the Agency in an attempt to keep it out of major operations seemed to most observers -- and in this business there were few witting observers -- to be working well; but for the knowledgeable, the Agency was fast becoming, by the mid-fifties, a major peacetime power.

It was in 1955 that the then new Senator Mansfield, among others, attempted to get a law through the Congress that would establish a strong watchdog committee to oversee the CIA. One of the principal reasons this law did not pass was that such CIA stalwarts as Senator Russell and Senator Saltonstall affirmed that there was no need for such committees. The Congress, in their words, needed no more committees than it had at that time. They went on to say that they were always informed about everything the Agency was doing and that they could see no reason why the whole Congress should be brought in on such things when there was no need whatsoever for such action.

I have worked closely with Senator Saltonstall, and many others who were on those committees, and except in rare instances, they never knew that the CIA was so huge. They knew how big the CIA was within the bounds of the "real" or intelligence organization; but none of them knew about its tremendous global base capability, and what is much more important, none of them knew the intricacies of the Agency's supporting system that existed in the name of the Army Special Forces and the Air Force Air Supply and Communications Wings. Again there will be some who say, "Oh yes, Senator John Doe visited that base, and he saw this, and he was told that the whole business was highly classified. He said he knew what it was." Such things usually can be said, and such things may have happened; but no one man or no one group of knowledgeable men had ever had the opportunity to see the whole picture. As I have heard Senator Saltonstall say, "Now don't tell me about that classified material. What I don't know about it won't hurt me." That has been a general attitude on Capitol Hill. In discussions I have had with responsible committeemen on the Hill, I have found this to exist as recently as September 1971. This situation has not changed much. There are no Congressmen and no Senators who really know about the Agency and about what the Agency is doing.

As a result of the war planning role of the CIA, it was easy for the CIA planners to enter in the plans of all armed forces, requirements for wartime equipment, vehicles, aircraft, and facilities that had to be earmarked and stockpiled for use by the Agency in the event of war. Once such requirements were listed in the war plans they could be requisitioned along with all the other war-plan material. This meant that the cost of this equipment would be worked into the military budget, and then in due time each item would be purchased and delivered to the advance base site where war plan material was stockpiled. Warehouse after warehouse of "military equipment" is stored in the Far East, in Europe, and throughout the United States for the eventual use of the CIA. The cost of this material and of its storage, care, and conditioning is inestimable.

To handle all of this material the Agency has large bases in Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, Okinawa, Japan, Panama, and the United States. These supplies are kept in good shape, and reconditioned and rotated in stock with those that are used. Thus, whenever a requirement arises, the Agency has what it needs or can get what it needs from other sources.

Some of the war-plan equipment has a brief shelf-life, which requires that it be exchanged, used, or at least rotated with items in service. The Agency does not have sufficient demand for some of these things to permit it to keep up with such practices, so it has worked out rotation schedules with the services to let them have what it has in storage and then to get new replacement equipment when it is available. Also, the Agency has become a stopgap source of supply when something is needed as for a military assistance project or some other such emergency. As the years passed and as the Agency's "military" role became more a matter of custom and generally accepted, Agency military cover units became so deeply covered that their neighboring military units did not know, or forgot, that the unit near them was not a regular military unit. By that time, requisitions from these CIA units were as readily acceptable as any others and the units became easily self-supporting without any Agency funding input.

There are so many CIA cover units in the military that no accounting system can keep up with all of them. The military System also permits easy requisitioning between the services. As a result, an Army unit may requisition from a nearby Navy or Air Force unit and vice versa. A Navy CIA cover unit, for example, will requisition from an army or Air Force unit that will never question the right of that unit to draw the supplies it wants, but will simply make out cross-servicing accounting tickets and file them. The service that gave up the material will gather the supply tickets at its supply centers and then, depending upon how sophisticated its accounting system is and upon the instructions it may have received from its CIA Focal Point Office, it will either turn them in for reimbursement or pay them itself and forget about it. At all staff meetings on the subject, the CIA will protest that it pays all bills that are presented for reimbursement by the DOD and other agencies of the Government. This may be true, but the important thing is that few of the other government offices ever sort out all of these cats and dogs to the point where they are able to tally them up and render meaningful statements. As a result, the CIA gets millions of dollars of equipment each year without any attempt to collect on the part of the losing organization.

After World War II and, more importantly, after the Korean War, the military services had counted millions of dollars worth of surplus equipment in storage. One of the biggest tasks of the military logistics branches was to find some legal way to get rid of this surplus, most of which was new and unused. The laws that governed the disposal of such material required that it be made available first to the other services. Materials not wanted by the other services would then be offered on the basis of a priority list to other government agencies and departments, to state and local governments, colleges and universities, and so on, until any remaining surplus would be put up for public sale or auction.

The CIA found that it could beat this system easily by setting up certain cover units that appeared to be military units. These cover units would requisition copies of the surplus lists, would go over them carefully, and then would claim the items in the quantities desired and take delivery of them at some service base, where they would be prepared for transshipment to a military facility under CIA control. In this manner, or through variations of this method, the CIA was able to stockpile mountains of equipment.

Some of the variations on this system were rather subtle. For example: If a country that had certain elements who were working with a U.S. military unit that was really a CIA organization wanted certain items of military equipment not authorized by the mutual aid program or other such assistance plans, it might in the normal course of business ask the men in the unit what they could do to help. The unit would pass this word on to the CIA station chief, who would contact the DD/S staff to see if the equipment desired could be obtained, perhaps through surplus.

The DD/S would alert one of its cover units, and they would screen the surplus lists to find the items. In most cases, they would find them or they would find that the Army could be persuaded to list the needed number of those items as surplus, as long as they knew that they were going to be cross-requisitioned by the "Air Force", and as long as they had thus been assured that the items would not slip past the surplus lists and reach public sale. Thus the CIA would get what it wanted, free and in the quantity it wanted. They would be delivered to the CIA's own military cover supply depot and from there they would be processed to the overseas unit. All packaging, crating, and shipping would be kept within military channels and would be paid for in most instances by the military, since it would not know that the two units, the gaming one and the shipping one, were both cover units. In due time, the equipment the foreign government wanted would arrive at the "military" unit there, and that government would either have the use of the equipment or would be given the equipment as soon as transfer arrangements could be made.

It takes a lot of study of these processes and a lot of familiarity with the system to clarify how it works and how these things can happen without an exchange of funds. However, it would be incorrect and unwise to attribute to the CIA the idea that the Agency improperly uses the cover system to acquire valuable equipment without properly paying for it. It would be equally incorrect and unwise to create the idea that the military services do not account properly for the equipment they have on their inventory rosters. In normal cases, the military is quite precise about transfer of property, and there is seldom more than an occasional malfunction in the supply system. Also, the CIA has been scrupulous when it has been possible for it to pay for, by reimbursement, any equipment that the military services have furnished and for which it has been billed. The breakdown comes in the application of secrecy.

Few supply people in the huge defense supply organizations know that the CIA has military units, and most of them, if they thought that the CIA was involved with some shipment, would never say a word to anyone about it. Then when the statement drawn upon a cover unit that was unfunded was not paid properly by the transfer of funded sums, the supply agency would simply pay it off from some available account rather than break security. They may be wrong to do this; but they choose this rather than taking a chance on exposing a CIA activity that might be important.

On the other hand, the CIA will state at the time they requisition items of equipment that they will pay all bills rendered. In some cases, they have put money in what amounts to an escrow account so that the DOD may draw against it. However, again the existence of such funds is usually cloaked in security, and it is seldom that the account is drawn upon. I knew of millions of dollars in such accounts that were never used, and they were lost to both organizations as they returned unclaimed to the general treasury. There is a feeling that "it is all for the Uncle anyhow", so why account for such transactions.

This may be all very well and may be a suitable reply; but when one reflects that the President and the Congress had taken great precautions to preclude the growth of an operational agency and to do this by prohibiting the Agency from building up just such supplies of equipment, this whole process becomes more important on that score than it does from the point of view of the money involved. The CIA was not supposed to have money, men, materials, or global facilities. The ease with which the Agency got around these restraints was remarkable, and it explains why so few knew at the time it was being done. One of the only tried and tested methods by which any government can control its subordinate organizations is through the purse-strings. When an organization finds ways to get around the restraints of money control and grows from within in a parasitic manner, it becomes very difficult for the usual controls to operate. Add to this the thick screen of security that has kept most of the other normal review authorities from seeing what the Agency was doing, and it is not too surprising to find that neither Congress, the President, nor the American people had realized that by 1955 the ClA had become, right before their eyes, the largest and most active peacetime operational force in the country.

Some of these actions worked in strange ways. And some of these actions were subject to the same irregularities that plagued the rest of the operations that were kept from the eyes of the public and from the controls normal to an open government. The irresponsible step in from time to time and get away with things that would be discovered in normal activities.

At one overseas base heavily involved in air activities in support of the Agency and of the foreign nationals the Agency was assisting, there were a number of aircraft of doubtful ownership commingled with other aircraft that were on "loan" from the Air Force. These aircraft were flown and maintained for the most part by a civilian facility that had the appearance of being a civilian contract carrier; but there were also a number of Air Force and Navy personnel with the unit in various capacities. The primary base unit was under Navy cover and had been for years, as a result of an earlier mission. With such a mix of personnel and equipment it was all but impossible, and certainly impractical, to attempt rigid controls in the manner customary on a real military base.

One of the planes assigned to this unit was a small transport aircraft common to all three services and built by the Beech Aircraft Corporation. This plane was flown by the officers of the staff and was used for shorter administrative flights. One of the pilots who flew it regularly came in to land in a bad crosswind one day and momentarily lost control of the plane after it had touched the ground during landing, in what is called a "ground loop". He recovered in time to keep from doing very much damage and no one was hurt. The plane needed minor repairs to be as good as new. However, this pilot, who also had maintenance authority at this conglomerate base, ordered that the plane be hauled out behind the main hangar and covered with a large protective tarpaulin. It was left there for months, and unknown to others on the base, a report was filed to Washington that it would cost more to fix the plane than it was worth; so the plane was scheduled for what the military calls "salvage". This means it is put up for sale to the highest bidder for scrap, or whatever.

No one on this base, which was primarily managed by the CIA, gave this a thought, and after a while the plane was not even missed. During this time the pilot, a major who was actually a career CIA employee serving in his Air Force reserve grade, was transferred back to an assignment in Washington at CIA headquarters. He had not been there long when he located the paperwork on that plane and made a bid in his own name and that of a friend to purchase the plane for scrap prices. Since no one else even knew where the plane was (and even if they had they would not have wanted to go to that remote place to get it) and of course, since any other bidder would have believed that the plane was a total loss, there were no other bidders. The major bought the plane in a perfectly legal maneuver.

He then applied for a brief vacation. Dashing back to the overseas station, where he was well known, he arranged with the local maintenance crews to have the plane fixed at very little expense to himself, and in no time he and his friend shipped it back to the United States. Their profit on the deal was many times more than the actual money they had invested, and no one ever knew about it because all of the records had been kept in highly classified channels. Secrecy can be used for many purposes, and this was just one of the uses to which it can be put by those of the team who know how to get away with it.

Emboldened by this success, the same man arranged a few years later to be the project officer on a rather large air operation in Antarctica. He and his companions worked up a team that was going to accomplish some very special work on that remote continent. They had two Air Force twin-engined transport aircraft heavily modified and modernized, and then got together millions of dollars' worth of special electronic and photographic equipment. They filled the planes with equipment and still had so much left over that they had to have the Air Force fly it to Panama, where it caught up with the Navys regular shipments on the way to McMurdo Sound. They had this priority-classed equipment put aboard, even at the cost of off-loading some of the Navy's own equipment.

Everything was brought to Antarctica, where these men established their own base satellited upon the Navy from McMurdo Sound. Whereas most of the Navy's supplies for Antarctica are either ship-borne via the Panama Canal or airborne from Christchurch, New Zealand, this group flew down the coast of South America to Argentina, and then took off from there, with elaborate assistance from the Argentine navy.

After their project had been completed for the year, they reported that one of the planes could not operate because of some sort of engine trouble, and that since the dangerous trip back with only one plane would be too hazardous, they planned to leave both aircraft and all of their equipment cached in the Antarctic. All personnel were flown out by the Navy and returned to the United States. It just happened by coincidence nearly one year later that a U.S. military officer stationed in Argentina reported the arrival of a civilian who was working with contacts in the Argentine navy to see if arrangements could be made, privately, to bring those planes out of Antarctica. This chance tip was followed up, and it was learned that the same man had decided that if he could get away with one plane, he might as well try to get away with two much larger aircraft and with the millions of dollars' worth of equipment, which was, in his mind, fair salvage somewhere on the ice cap of Antarctica. With the excellent cooperation of the Antarctic project officers on the White House staff and with the support of the Navy, all of this equipment and the planes were recovered and returned to service.

These are special cases and do not reflect upon the system so much as they do upon the actions of a few individuals. The problem is that the U.S. Government is not properly constituted to deal with such actions when they are cloaked in heavy security wraps, and the incidence of such happenings is far greater than it need be, since in most cases there should not have been any security over any of the projects. The cost of allowing the ST to operate in secrecy is high.

There are a number of aircraft that have been completely scrubbed of all usual identification, and they are operated by the services for the CIA. For those unfamiliar with the complexities involved in maintaining aircraft, it will be worth a partial explanation to show what problems arise. The huge radial engines on these large transports are all carefully marked with serial numbers, decals, and other special identifications, which are so coded and catalogued that the men who do the heavy maintenance on them in the major depots of the services can work from drawings and instructions that are in turn coded to match the engine series involved. When engines are made non-attributable, for CIA use, all of these markings are removed or changed. This means then that only certain crews can work on these engines, and they have to be cleared to know that the aircraft are special.

Sometimes, something will happen to an engine when the plane is far from its regular base. In such instances, a message is sent to the nearest Air Force base commander, and he is told to fly a maintenance crew there to get the engine and to "melt", or destroy it. Instead of working on the engine and revealing that the plane and its intended mission were classified, a costly engine is destroyed. Then that engine must be replaced by another identical non-attributable engine before the plane can continue its flight.

Sometimes things will happen to the plane itself. The Air Force had a number of special aircraft in Europe that had been converted to use for certain classified projects, although from outward appearances they were perfectly normal four-engine transports. One time, one of these aircraft had a simple nose-wheel problem. It should have been an easy thing to have it worked on at the base and returned to fight operations. However, some of the simpler maintenance work had been turned over to native teams. One such activity was the repair of nose wheels. To keep this problem from the natives, a CIA crew chief took a torch and cut several of the main electric cables in the plane, then grounded it for serious maintenance problems. He thought that this would get him the authority to hire an American contract crew that could work on the nose wheel as well as on the cables.

Since the inspection report showed very severe damage to the plane, the reviewing authority in the United States would not authorize a team to fix the plane, and instead ordered it to be salvaged. In the salvaging process, the alert CIA had one of its civilian units bid for the plane, and in a short time it was back in the air, in good shape, as the property of a civilian airline, which put it to work in its own interest and incidentally for the CIA whenever requested. This could be called an inadvertent windfall. But in any event, it was very costly and had it not been for the security measures that made the whole thing unwieldy, the damage could have been repaired easily and the Air Force would still be flying that plane.

By the late nineteen-fifties, the CIA logistics system had all it could handle all over the world. It could deliver such unit shipments as forty thousand arms by airdrop in the period of a few days or it could send aircraft and helicopters into Laos and move tens of thousands of Meo tribesmen from one part of the country to another with ease. By that time, the CIA had no less than eight hundred to one thousand units, all cover units within the DOD. This was a huge and intricate system.

The Agency did not man all of the units. Many of them were no more than a telephone number with someone to answer the phone and give information or receive calls. If, for example, a group of military personnel from a foreign country were passing through Washington on their way home after a school on a Military Aid Program quota, and they had been told to get in touch with a certain contact, they could call a number in Washington and their contact would answer the phone and tell them where to meet him, where they were to stay, and so on. If a defector had been flown to the States, was living in some safe house, and was not permitted to leave unless he was escorted for his own safety, he could call a certain number in Washington and ask for a certain military officer, who would give him instructions of one kind or other.

Some of these "phone-drop" organizations were used for nothing more than to requisition supplies from another service. The supplying service would never know that the requisitioning outfit did not really exist. Of course, the Agency would go through the details of making certain that the units it was using were listed in the supply catalogues, in the regular military postal catalogues, and in other normal references.

Other units were manned with many people and served as active training units, storage sites, or operational facilities of one kind or another. In such cases, the manning would be either all Agency in the cover of military, or Agency and military blended together, or it might be all military supporting the Agency. In the latter case, the unit might be an Air Force Squadron that had aircraft and other equipment maintained in readiness complete with well-trained crews ready to fly out for the Agency on any of a great number of special missions. Everything possible would be done to make it appear to be a real Air Force unit.

Few people, even among those who are supposed to know all about the Agency's relationship with the DOD, have ever known exactly how many such units exist, and what is more important, what these units really do.

One day back in 1960 or 1961, it was necessary for me to brief the chairman of the JCS on a matter that had come up involving the CIA and the military. Such briefings, when they have been put on the regular agenda of the day, take place in a sort of reverse pecking order. Each item that comes before the Chiefs is briefed by its staff-supporting office from the least sensitive to the most highly classified. On this day there were a number of briefings on all sorts of subjects. The room where the Chiefs met was full and the anterooms were packed with briefing teams. One by one the teams were called in to give their briefings. As they finished, they would be dismissed, and if the Chief of any given service had any of his top-level staff there with him, he might dismiss that officer along with the briefers. (Sometimes, when one service is briefing, a Chief of another service will want to have one or more of his senior assistants there to hear the briefing with him.) As a result, as the briefings progress from least classified to most highly classified, the whole group begins to thin out. This is done with a very precise control, verging on the ritualistic.

Finally, the briefings on atomic energy matters, missiles and space, and other highly classified matters took place. Then the Chiefs began to hear some of the more closely held intelligence matters. The last item was the one that pertained to the CIA operational information. As I was ushered into the room I noted that everyone was leaving except the chairman and the commandant of the Marine Corps. The chairman was General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, and the commandant was General David M. Shoup. They were close friends and had known each other for years.

When the primary subject of the briefing had ended, General Lemnitzer asked me about the Army cover unit that was involved in the operation. I explained what its role was and more or less added that this was a rather routine matter. Then he said, "Prouty, if this is routine, yet General Shoup and I have never heard of it before, can you tell me in round numbers how many Army units there are that exist as "cover" for the CIA?" I replied that to my knowledge at that time there were about 605 such units, some real, some mixed, and some that were simply telephone drops. When he heard that he turned to General Shoup and said, "You know, I realized that we provided cover for the Agency from time to time; but I never knew that we had anywhere near so many permanent cover units and that they existed all over the world."

I then asked General Lemnitzer if I might ask him a question. He said I could. "General," I said, "during all of my military career I have done one thing or another at the direction of a senior officer. In all of those years and in all of those circumstances I have always believed that someone, either at the level of the officer who told me to do what I was doing or further up the chain of command, knew why I was doing what I had been directed to do and that he knew what the reason for doing it was. Now I am speaking to the senior military officer in the armed forces and I have just found out that some things I have been doing for years in support of the CIA have not been known and that they have been done, most likely, in response to other authority. Is this correct?"

This started a friendly, informal, and most enlightening conversation, more or less to the effect that where the CIA was concerned there were a lot of things no one seemed to know. It ended with those two generals asking me about matters that they had unwittingly participated in during earlier years that they had never been told about.

It was amazing, very basic, and very true that a great number of operations, some of them quite important in terms of foreign policy, and usually involving one or more foreign nations, had taken place in the guise of military activities when in reality they were not. Since the military had been used for support purposes, first in the context of war planning and later for more open and more active roles, as the CIA and the ST became more powerful and bold, the military had continued to believe that whatever it had been asked to do must have been sanctioned from above by someone.

This brings us back to the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report. One of the major undertakings of that report was to place the CIA quietly within the structure of the entire U.S. Government, ostensibly to obtain more complete secrecy when necessary. For example: It was necessary for the CIA to arrange for aircraft to enter the country quite frequently without the usual customs check that all military aircraft must undergo. In the earlier years the CIA would arrange directly or through State or Defense to have customs waive inspection of a plane with classified cargo or carrying a defector or on some other highly classified mission. Then, when such things had become more or less commonplace, the CIA would politely offer to provide a few men to work with the regular customs personnel to take the burden for such activity from them. This was the way it was put in the first place, and the customs office would gratefully accept the assistance. The CIA would go through all the necessary steps to get authorization for increasing the manpower allocations in the customs service by the number of men it planned to put there and then to make arrangements to reimburse the customs office for the payroll and other costs of the office.

This latter step would always be taken, because it would be best for the customs office to go through all of the normal motions of paying these men, including promoting them and paying for their travel or other usual expenses, so that their assignment would appear to be completely normal to all others in the office. Then, by special accounting procedures that would take place in the main office, the CIA would reimburse the Treasury Department for the money involved.

In the beginning this would all be done with elaborate open-handedness, even to the point where the new agency men would receive training and other prerequisites of the job. However, as the years passed, most of this procedure would be forgotten, and few would recall that those special assignments had even originated with the Agency. Accountants who had known how to transfer the funds would have been transferred themselves, and the Treasury Department might no longer bill for the costs involved. But the Agency men would stay on, their replacements would be carefully fitted into the manning tables, and few would even notice that they were there.

This has happened quite extensively in a great many places all throughout the Government. There are CIA men in the Federal Aviation Administration, in State, all over the DOD, and in most other offices where the CIA has wanted to place them. Few top officials, if any, would ever deny the Agency such a service; and as the appointive official departed, and his staffs came and went, the whole device would be lost with only the CIA remembering that they were still there.

Many of these people have reached positions of great responsibility. I believe that the most powerful and certainly the most useful agent the CIA has ever had operates in just such a capacity within another branch of the Government, and he has been there for so long that few have any idea that he is a long-term career agent of the CIA. Through his most excellent and skillful services, more CIA operations have been enabled to take place than can be laid at the feet of any other, more "legitimate", agent.

This was the plan and the wisdom of the Dulles idea from the beginning. On the basis of security he would place people in all areas of the Government, and then he would move them up and deeper into their cover jobs, until they began to take a very active part in the role of their own cover organizations. This is how the ST was born. Today, the role of the CIA is performed by an ad hoc organization that is much greater in size, strength, and resources than the CIA has ever been visualized to be.

There is another facet to this type of organization that has had a major impact upon the role of secret operations in this Government. With the spread of the influence of the CIA into so many other branches of the Federal Government, the agents found it very easy to make friends and win willing disciples in their new surroundings. There is a glamour and allure to the "fun and games" of Agency work that appeals to many people, and they go out of their way to provide support above and beyond what the CIA has ever asked for -- or thought to ask for.

As a case in point, consider the U-2 project. The Lockheed Company came up with the plane, but the Air Force knew it could not use it in peacetime and thought that it might be able to get it into use by offering it to the CIA. The CIA picked up the idea and operated the whole project, provided -- and this was a major "provided" -- the Air Force paid for it and actively supported it with men, material, and facilities. A proposal that began as a plan to get a new aircraft on the production line for Air Force reconnaissance purposes thus became a project to get the plane flying for CIA photographic intelligence purposes. As the photographs began to come in, the input data from them began to dictate new operations that arose not from some foreign policy or national planning staff, but from intelligence sources. Intelligence input began a cycle that supported intelligence itself. A new machine, which required more and more support of its own actions, was born within the Government.

By the time of the Bay of Pigs operations, the CIA was part of a greater team, which used the Agency and other parts of the Government to carry out almost any secret operation it wanted. By that time this organization had the equipment, the facilities, the men, and the funds to carry out clandestine operations that were so vast that even on the basis of simple definition they were no longer truly secret, nor could anyone hope that they might be.

The availability of supplies and facilities made it possible for all of this to come about. The growth of the CIA and of the greater ST has resulted more from the huge success of the DD/S side of the Agency than from either the DD/P or the DD/I. When Allen Dulles had abolished the DD/A (Administration) he had put nearly everything that was not intelligence and that was not secret operations into the DD/S division. The DD/S became responsible for the function of budget and comptrollership; for personnel and for the special personnel function that is most important in the Agency, personnel cover; for communications; for research and development including that very special Agency shop that is responsible for the development of all of the very special gadgets and other devices so important to the trade of intelligence; for transportation; for facilities -- a special resource so vast that few people even know 50 percent of what exists; for supply, and for maintenance.

Many of these functions, which are normal to any major enterprise, take on special meaning in the CIA. In fact every one of these general headings has buried somewhere deep in its staff special arrangements that make the Agency what it is.

Research and development is a most interesting enterprise as carried on by the CIA. For example, let us say that the CIA has a modified aircraft that it flies along the border of the Iron Curtain, or for that matter anywhere it wants to listen to electronic traffic. This monitoring airborne system is as sophisticated as the military can make it, and in many instances the CIA has been able to have even the newest military system modified to give it some special characteristics of particular use to the Agency.

In the normal pursuit of its mission, the plane cruises at altitude on a prearranged course and listens to every thing that it hears on all wavebands. After the flight, the plane lands at its Air Force home base, and the tapes it made during flight are immediately taken from the racks on the plane, sealed in shipping containers, and put on the first jet to Washington. Within twenty-four hours these tapes are processed in a special readout laboratory that might involve computerized read-out as well as human listening. As a result of this process, there might be found a certain signal that appeared as perhaps no more than a bit of static on some normal-appearing carrier wave. More detailed study of this signal reveals that it is unlike the usual static and that there is a chance that this split-second blip is something special; but there is no known system for interpreting such a signal.

A review of other tapes made in the same area might reveal that similar blips have been occurring on some of them. The CIA takes this up with the Air Force experts who designed the system and through them learns that the equipment was designed by a certain team working for a well-known manufacturer of electronic equipment. The Air Force, of course, has a contract with this manufacturer. The CIA goes to the manufacturer under the guise of the Air Force and asks what might be done to identify and if possible to read out the blips.

The manufacturer agrees to take on the problem as an overrun to the original development contract with the Air Force. The Agency people, known to the manufacturer only as Air Force people, agree. In due course, the manufacturer finds a scientist at Stanford who has experimented with a remarkable tube that seemed to promise some solutions to the problems involved. A subcontract is let, and further work is done on the tube. Finally, the manufacturer is able to demonstrate a receiver that is able to find these blips, which are actually hidden at all wave channels, and to get them recorded on tape. They are now able to get this new equipment to stretch these blips to the right length in terms of sound waves, and before long these blips are shown to contain decipherable data.

Now the development contract is terminated, and the receivers are put into production, also on the Air Force contract. As things turned out, the Air Force is able to use some of these fabulous sets itself, and it increases the production order. By this time, a small development project to which the CIA had agreed to contribute about sixty thousand dollars had grown into a total development project of more than one million dollars, with a long manufacturing and procurement contract on top of that.

The important thing in situations like this is that through this method, even when it was used honestly and properly, the services can pay out millions for the Agency without realizing it. Most of the Air Force intelligence and electronics technicians involved in this case -- which though hypothetical, has its basis in fact -- were not also procurement experts and had no experience in the intricacies of such financial matters. As a result, they went along thinking someone else was taking care of the money. The Agency went along, protesting that if someone sent them the bill, they would pay it. The bills were rarely if ever sent.

Such actions soon became known, and others who want work done for other reasons find the way to use this same technique. To cite a case: An Army project officer who had trouble getting his service to approve a new gun that he had been shown by a manufacturer found that a fellow officer, on a classified project, was interested in it. They demonstrated the new gun to a group, much as if it were a real Army demonstration. The manufacturer, willing to do anything to sell his new weapon, participated fully in these demonstrations and tests. He may have thought it odd that the tests had been scheduled at the Army Chemical Warfare station at Fort Detrick instead of at the Aberdeen Proving Ground where most tests are usually held; but he was selling, not asking questions, so he eagerly went along. After the tests at Detrick, there were meetings in a special section of the office of the Secretary of Defense, located near the office of the Deputy Director for Research and Engineering (DDR&E). The DDR&E representative was a prominent career civilian who had recently been made head of that office after a long tour of duty in the Office of Special Operations, where CIA matters were usually processed. In other words, this man was less an engineer than a special operations man; and he was less an Army or military counterpart than he was an Agency collaborator.

At this meeting, there were many Army officers, and there were Air Force officers. There may have been Marine and Navy officers, and there were many civilians. The manufacturer's representatives could not be faulted if they believed that they were selling their new weapon to a most highly qualified group. In fact, the main sponsor of the weapon, an Army Lieutenant Colonel in uniform, gave all appearances of being the Army representative, which he was not. The meeting ended with a consensus that the gun should be purchased in trial numbers by the Air Force for security reasons "for use by the Air Force Air Police units". Later, the Air Force did purchase tens of thousands of the new weapons, and they disappeared into the security-covered inventory of the CIA. This is a part of the story of the M-16 rifle of questionable repute in the Vietnam operations.

With the passage of time, the Agency has become more adept at getting any supplies and support it needs and in getting them supported, stored, and transported. (The story of the Agency transportation capability will be told later.) All military equipment is controlled by an elaborate supply system, and the funds that are required to develop, procure, and maintain this vast store of equipment all over the world are detailed in the budget. Anyone can easily make a case for occasional errors in such a vast system. There have been those who, along about budget time every year, show how the Air Force has purchased $.15 nuts and bolts for $28 each, how the Navy has procured 5,400,000 shrimp forks, and how the Army has been paying three times as much as the Navy for a common hospital blanket. In spite of all of this, the logistics services of the military establishment do an amazing job, and no military services in the world have ever had the support that they have provided. It is within this fabulous system that the CIA logistics experts, most of whom are retired military personnel themselves, have learned to create miracles.

There is on the books of Congress and in the Law of this country an old bit of legislation called the Economy Act of 1932. It remains in force, as amended. In theory, it is simple and important. During the early years of the depression it was found that a considerable amount of money could be saved if the Congress would permit the various departments and agencies of the Government to trade among themselves when one had a surplus that the other wanted. It used to be that each department had to keep rigid accounting of what it had and that it could not transfer what it had to another department. This Economy Act, among other things permits one department, say Agriculture, to let the Army, for example, buy desks that it may have in excess for a price to be agreed upon by both departments. This law has worked well, and it has permitted savings among all parts of the Government.

Early in its history, the CIA looked at this law and found that it could be used for some interesting purposes. The CIA might like to purchase some equipment that it could not afford or more likely, that it did not want anyone in the Government to know it had acquired. It would have one of its people, most likely "covered" in some other department, meet with the owning department and sound it out about the purchase, "in accordance with the provisions of the Economy Act of 1932, as amended". Usually, the Agency would know beforehand that the equipment was available and that the selling department would practically give it away. The Agency would then conclude the action and buy this material with funds of the department under whose cover it had entered into the agreement.

In certain cases, the buying department would require the Agency to reimburse it for the cost of the transaction; but increasingly this became a doubtful process. At other times, the CIA would approach another department, through a cover cut-out, to an office where it also had another cover arrangement.[2] These offices, bickering with each other as separate departments, would arrive at an agreement that they would actually staff through other sections to make it appear to be scrupulously legal and authentic, and then the CIA would end up with what it wanted without the expenditure of any funds.

Even the retelling of some of these arrangements sounds ridiculous, and the reader may be excused for wanting to believe that this could not have happened. Not only have things like this happened; but some that are even more portentous. The Agency will go to any ends when it has convinced itself that it is doing so on the grounds of security. The Agency, at the constant reminder and conditioning of Allen Dulles, always believed that anything it did was all right as long as it was carrying out the will of Congress to protect its secret sources and methods.

After decades of logistical endeavors of all kinds and of all types, the Agency has acquired more than enough in hardware, in facilities, in transport and warehousing to perform all the peacetime operations it could ever dream of. And if it should come up with a specially large project, it would easily supply itself from within the hoards of other departments and agencies. To the Agency, cost is no barrier. When things can be delivered by air, they are delivered by air, regardless of cost differential. When equipment can be obtained new, it is purchased new rather than surplus, when new is available. It is not so much that the Agency was always that way; but it became spoiled, because since Louis Johnson's time, just before the Korean War, there has not been a Secretary of Defense who really concerned himself with the cost of supporting the CIA. There has not been a Secretary who knew enough about what the CIA was really doing to believe that the volume of material warranted concern over the cost. So the Agency found its pipe attached to the boundless sea, and it learned to make the most of just letting it flow in.

The same can be said of the Congress. There are no members of the House or the Senate who have ever contemplated in anywhere near exact amounts the great volume of men, money, and materials the Agency has been able to acquire and to expend without observation by those normally charged with that responsibility. The Agency excuses its own actions on the basis that it employs these methods secretly for the good of the country; thus, it does not have to expose its sources and methods as it requests men, money, and supplies in the usual manner. Once the Agency has become accustomed to this form of rationalization, there are no limits to what it and its peripheral operators will be perfectly willing to do "for the good of the country" and for the cause, always unquestioned, of anti-Communism.

1. The Agency makes a specialty of covering its people with code names as they travel around the world. Thus the message traffic will he gibberish to most people when a list of names of the Agency's key men appear. Many years ago, "Red" White and another executive from Mr. Dulles' office made an extended trip through the Pacific. They were given code names just before they left. Some genius in the cover department gave "Red" White the code name "Ballew". As he traveled from station to station it was "Red, White, and Ballew", like the flag.

2. A cover cutout is some device or process that has been set up to circumvent or otherwise bypass normal procedure so that the connection with the CIA cannot be discovered in the normal course of business.

Chapter 12

Personnel: The Chameleon Game

An Australian scientist waiting at the counter of the Military Air Transport Service passenger service desk at 3: 00am felt ill at ease in these unfamiliar surroundings. He had been assured that his travel through to Washington had been arranged and that he would be met when his plane arrived from Manila at Travis Air Force Base in California. All he had in the way of instructions was a small note that said, "Major Adams will meet you upon arrival at Travis. If he should not be there, call him by base telephone, number 12-1234." The WAF on the other side of the counter could find no Major Adams listed anywhere in the Travis telephone book; but she volunteered to ring that number anyhow. A sleepy voice answered, "Special Support Squadron, Airman Jones speaking." The contact was made. "Airman Jones" appeared shortly at the passenger service desk in civilian attire and announced himself as Major Adams. The Australian had met his contact and would soon be on his way to South San Francisco airport for his commercial flight connection to Washington.

In Washington he was met again by another contact and spent two or three days at a hotel where from time to time he met various scientists and their companions. They discussed with him the meetings he would attend in Rotterdam, then later in Moscow, to join with the world's top radio astronomers in observing the latest massive antennas that were being used in Europe and in the Soviet Union. Nothing in the United States approached the sophistication of the Soviet equipment, and the Australians were far ahead with their own work. After a few days with his new friends in the scientific world, with whom he met on the basis that they were from the National Science Foundation, the Australian flew to Europe and thence to Moscow. In Europe he had more meetings with American scientists, and after the Moscow meetings he willingly discussed the advanced equipment and techniques he had seen and worked with there. He even talked about a totally new antenna concept of his own for which he hoped to get funds in Australia and which had been enthusiastically accepted by the scientists in Europe and Russia as a great advance over present fixed-parabola technology.

In return for free air travel and other amenities, this Australian had been willing to spend time with American scientists whom he knew or knew of and with certain of their friends and fellow workers. He was unaware of the fact that among those "fellow workers" were CIA personnel eager to learn all they could about the technology of the Russians. Advanced radio antenna work used in astronomical observations could, with minor changes, also be used in radar antennas for an advanced air defense system.

The recruitment of personnel for such special and fleeting requirements is one of the many skills of the Personnel Division of the CIA under the leadership of the DDIS. It is another of the logistics functions of that Directorate that performs major miracles for the CIA and even for the ST.

In the beginning, when a new organization is formed in the Government, such as HEW (Health, Education and Welfare), HUD (Housing and Urban Development), and others, it is customary to flesh out the unit with staff and resources from other organizations assembled for that purpose. Since the CIA was a totally new organization, this normal process could not be relied upon to build a professional staff in the period of time required for the Agency to become effective. Former OSS alumni from World War II were pulled in from wherever they were at the time and they were augmented as rapidly as possible by personnel from other units within the Government who had the special training for intelligence type of work. This meant that the FBI was "raided" to the point that its director called upon the DCI to ask that such raids be halted. Many other early personnel came from World War II military resources of all kinds. The straight-line intelligence personnel went into DD/I and a large number of logistics specialists went directly into the DD/S.

It was startling to see them take on new life as they began to realize that they no longer worked under the routinered tape and restraints of the military service in which they had been trained. Men who had fought to keep supply levels up to authorized quotas now found that they could exceed quotas with abandon. Men who had watched budget figures year after year to build little caches to take care of essential needs found that they could draw upon funds that never seemed to run out. The same was true for personnel needs, for transportation, and for communications. It was not long before the Agency was quite adequately manned, and wherever there were shortages, it was able quite easily to find military personnel who would voluntarily accept an assignment. As a result, thousands of military men served with the Agency from its inception.

This turned out to be fortunate. No long range organization can prosper with most of its employees in the same general age bracket. The Agency, having been born in the immediate postwar era, inherited people who were generally in the same age group. The men at the top and the men in lesser jobs all were about the same age. This meant that as the years rolled on, the openings at the top would be few and the log jam of those in lower grades would be terrific, stifling career development. The overhead of "disposable" military personnel helped clear up this problem. Therefore as all personnel, military and civilian, rose to higher positions, there became fewer of these higher positions. The military could be returned to their services and the overhead easily weeded out, leaving room for the more senior careerists. This helped, but it was not a total solution.

The Agency put into operation a Junior Officer Training program (JOT) something like an ROTC program. In fact, JOT drew many of its men from the college ROTC resources. As these men filtered into regular jobs they replaced military men who went back to their parent services. Meanwhile, the Agency pushed an "early-out" retirement program and other projects to clear up the age-bound overhead.

This had an interesting and perhaps unintentional bonus effect. A large number of men who had served with the Agency as volunteers had rotated back to their own military services, and in some cases, back to other government departments to pursue other tasks. However, the lure of "fun and games" is great, and most of these men still retained much of the old desire to play the intelligence game. The Agency found itself with willing alumni in all parts of the Government, and they made use of these men in every way possible.

This can be illustrated in the Pentagon Papers since that is an available source of names and other statistics. A quick survey of the Pentagon Papers as published by The New York Times reveals a random listing of military officers of general and admiral rank, all of whom in one way or other took part in the early activities in Vietnam. Some of them served with the Agency for a number of years and went back and forth from Agency assignments to military assignments. And in most cases the military assignment was simply an Agency cover assignment under which they served at the direction of CIA superiors. It is a most important fact that most of the political and military leaders of Asian countries from Korea to Pakistan could easily be sympathized with for not being able to discover whether the "military" officers with whom they were dealing were military or were CIA. Most of the generals mentioned in the Pentagon Papers were involved in CIA activities while they were in Southeast Asia and were not under the operational control and direction of the DOD.

When Marshall Sarit of Thailand met with an American Army general to discuss the buildup of the Thailand border patrols on the Laos border, he may have believed that he was talking with a U.S. Military officer and that the results of their talks were going to be achieved with the direct assistance of the U.S. military. He had no way of knowing that the results of his talks were going to be carried out by "U.S. military" under cover who were working under the direction and operational control of the CIA. The same can be said for such talks with Somanna Phouma and Phoumi Nosavan in Laos and for Generals Thieu and Ky in Vietnam. The Diem regime, far back in those early and formative days of the Vietnam operations, never did know who they were talking with, and Ngo Dinh Diem had to rely upon the few real American friends he had, such as Ed Lansdale, a bona fide U.S. Air Force general, but also a man who worked solely for the CIA for more than a decade. Diem could unravel some of the deals he became involved in by calling his friend Lansdale in Washington; but he could not get similar help from the contacts he had in Saigon. The string of generals who appeared in Saigon from 1954 through 1964 -- who were really not generals - would have been enough to confuse anyone. In fact, real generals stayed away from Saigon for fear of being labeled "CIA" by their contemporaries back in Honolulu or Washington.

The other side of the coin was equally significant. Military men found the CIA an easy means to promotion. As a result, they longed to get more of that valuable duty. Men who would have retired as majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels found that the CIA was the easy road to generals' stars. There are a great number of generals, even up to the full four-star rank, who would never have made that grade, and who never would have made general at any level had it not been for their CIA assignments and the role they played in the development of the Vietnam operations. There were a great many of these men; this force alone has had a considerable impact upon the nature of Vietnamese events and upon the escalation of activities in Vietnam back in the days when small but catalytic events propelled the early actions into a massive campaign.

The same thing was happening in Washington. As men who served under Allen Dulles went out into other parts of the Government -- into the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Rand corporation, certain key university jobs, into select businesses and major foundations -- Dulles found that he had a massive instrument upon which he could orchestrate events as he wished. It was not his technique to lay deep plans and to use all of these resources in pursuit of these plans. Rather, it was his game to continually call upon the vast and continuing resource of secret intelligence to supply him with input data, with the raw events that he could then toss upon the keyboard to sound their own chords across the field of foreign relations.

This may sound a bit weird at first telling; but how else can anyone explain the random series of events that has happened in the names of foreign affairs and anti-Communism since 1955? All personnel who had trained with the Agency had learned enough about its ways, its freedoms, and its ability to circumvent normal bureaucratic red tape, and were somewhat spoiled. Later, when they had gone out into other departments and agencies of the federal government, they would find themselves, at times, frustrated in their everyday activities. They tended to return to their Agency affiliations and found that they could still get things done through Agency channels. They also served as Agency conduits for things which the Agency wanted done where they now worked. This developed a loose but effective network, with tentacles that reached out in all directions.

There was a group that was utilized as airline operators. They went into various countries such as Ethiopia, Iran, Jordan, Laos, Vietnam, and many others and worked to establish airlines, many of which ostensibly were national air carriers. These airlines were put together by common interests, part civilian business and part clandestine operations. In such cases secrecy was not really very deep; but it was used to shield the identity of the interests concerned from other parties in the U.S. The host government certainly knew who was behind the airlines, and they knew that there was more money being spent than was coming in through commercial revenues.

These airlines and their supporting bases, which in many countries were relatively costly enterprises, became increasingly modern. They began with what were called World War II surplus aircraft, such as the old C-46 and the C-54. Then they began to get hand-me-down Constellations and DC-6 and DC-7 aircraft, which had been the backbone of the U.S. airline fleet before the advent of jet transports. Most of these countries did not have the pilots and other personnel essential to the operation of modern aircraft, so the Agency cover units filled these spaces. Soon, national pride dictated that these airlines have the finest modern equipment in order that their neighbors would not outshine them. It was not long before a number of these small and impecunious airlines began to flaunt their new jets before the public, from Manila to Tehran.

These operations all began as modest havens for personnel who had been affiliated with the Agency or who were still with the Agency but gave the appearance of having left. By 1960 the CIA had grown very large in comparison with the figures that had been projected and with the figures that various controlling authorities thought the Agency had. By the time of the Congo problems and the uncertainties of other emerging African nations, the CIA had not less than forty stations scattered all through that continent, all of them very active and all of them manned with everything from U.S. military to non-attributable civilians of all kinds. The agency that Harry Truman thought would be his quiet intelligence arm had become a vast organization, which no one could control for the simple reason that the Agency was no longer the finite organization that had been created by law and then built with properly appropriated funds. It was now a tremendous force, using its own funds as an ante to open the big game, and then playing the big game with money belonging to most of the rest of the Government.

In the Government, people (or as the bureaucratic euphemism goes, "bodies") are controlled by the appropriation and then authorization of funds. Thus, any Government organization is permitted to have precisely so many people; and to exactly control that number of people, the Congress appropriates only enough money to pay that number and no more. This is usually an effective method of control, provided measures to evade them are not cloaked in security. When the Air Force had the problem of manning the vast space center at Cape Canaveral, it found that it did not have sufficient people for the task but that it could get funds for the maintenance of that huge and fast-growing complex. So the Air Force obtained enough funds to contract the operation and maintenance of that base. Thus several companies bid for the job of operating the big space center, and Pan American Airlines was awarded the contract. By this device the Air Force could man a huge complex, with money and not with people. There are many obvious advantages of this method of performing a housekeeping task.

The Agency witnessed the simplicity and effectiveness of this action and began to use it for its own ends. It would transfer funds to another department of the Government, and in return it would get people. Thus the Army, for example, could truthfully say that it had perhaps forty-two people in the Military Advisory and Assistance Group (MAAG) in Athens, and yet any visitor to the MAAG offices in Athens could easily see that there were more than one hundred people working throughout that big building. As a matter of fact, some visiting Senators noticed this and commented on it. They were told, with a straight face by the local MAAG officials, that the Army did have only forty-two people there and that they would be glad to have the Department of the Army in Washington furnish the Senators with an exact accounting of those people. This satisfied the visitors, and upon their return to Washington they were given audited figures from the U.S. Army, certifying to the fact that the Army had spent no more than "X" dollars on personnel in Athens and therefore could not have had more than forty-two people there.

This is an old story. There are military bases that have been closed by the services. The records, based upon money audits, show that the bases are in fact closed, yet the base had been reopened by the service concerned with CIA funds and for CIA support purposes. There is a small but uniquely self-contained Army base near Washington that was closed in such a manner years ago. It is still open, and it is so active that it has a very lively housekeeping function, including a PX and commissary that services not only the special CIA elements on the base but a select group of senior retired military and naval personnel who live in baronial luxury in the adjacent horse country.

There is also a massive Army post that has been closed many times. No news is ever published to show that it has been opened; but there is always a fanfare when it is closed. This huge, forested reservation is one of the best hunting preserves in the Washington vicinity, and it is frequented by noble parties of ranking military and other high government officials who travel to their shooting sites on an old Army railroad in quaint old cars -- in real luxury attained by few people short of Hugh Hefner and the Onassis set.

There was a time when the late Senator Harry Byrd, father of the present Senator, used to have to intervene on behalf of a few of his select clientele, because he kept receiving letters and telephone calls about bombs and other explosives bursting at a "closed" U.S. Navy station. The Senator had these messages sent to the Honorable Secretary of the Navy, who in turn would pass them to the Chief of Naval Operations and thence on to the proper authorities in the Norfolk area. Time after time the Navy would reply to the good Senator that there were no explosives being detonated in the area and that the base in question was closed and secured by a proper guard force.

This exchange of correspondence went on for about three unpleasant cycles, until the Senator felt that he should bring it to the attention of the Secretary of Defense. Thus started an investigation that finally brought a harried naval officer to the Office of Special Operations at the Secretary of Defense level to ask if by some chance there might be some highly classified activity going on at that "closed" Navy base that the Navy did not know about. It was found that the Agency was in fact doing some demolitions and explosives training with a special group of foreign agents whom they did not want to expose at the Special Forces training site at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Agency was taking these men, from time to time, from Fort Bragg to this abandoned Navy base where it had set up some special training for them. Then the Office of Special Operations asked the Agency to move its training to another site, the Navy was given a polite but obtuse answer, from this the Navy wrote apologies to the Senator, and eventually things were settled graciously with the Senator's constituents.

These things, of course, are not earthshaking and are not too different from similar uncoordinated activities that can happen in any large operation. But the Agency had acquired the power to carry out such activities in spite of restrictions and in spite of other plans and policy. It was not just the one MAAG in Athens in which Agency people were hidden, but it was almost every MAAC all over the world. In fact, wherever the military might have some small out-of-the-way outpost in a foreign country where the Agency might wish to install one of its people, it would not take long before the position would be assigned to the Agency so that it could have its own man there. In many countries, the vast Military Air Transport Service network (now military Airlift Command, or MAC) would have only two or three men to handle landing and take-off requirements for a few planes a week. Such small pockets of men in remote places and with little apparent activity became havens for CIA personnel. And when activity grew in such locations, as it inevitably did, the Agency would make funds available to the parent service for more bodies, and the manning would be increased to provide for an invisible military expansion. Later auditing of the strength of the service involved would never show the increase. The Agency would never have to show the increase either, because all it had done was expend dollars and this would not be questioned.

One of the things Allen Dulles achieved shortly after the submission of this report to President Truman was the approval of an amendment of the National Security Act of 1947. The amendment was passed in 1949. Among other things, it gave the CIA much more latitude in the expenditure of and accounting for its authorized funds. As a result, all the DCI had to do was to personally certify that the money had been spent properly, and there would be no further review. It was not thought at the time that money such as this would be used to make major changes in the personnel strengths of supporting Government departments. This device was used, however, and it permitted vast expansion of CIA manning-strength in the guise of other Government department jobs. All of this went without review and audit.

By the time the Agency was ready to participate in an operation as large as the Indonesian campaign of 1958, it had the resources to open foreign bases, to create an entire supporting Tactical and Transport Air Force, and to demand the services of naval supporting forces. A former World War II air base on a remote Pacific island was reopened and put into commission, and a whole fleet of aircraft was put into major overhaul bases in the States to create an attack force of substantial capability. A rather considerable Air Transport force was able to deliver deep into Indonesia tens of thousands of weapons and the ammunition and other equipment necessary to support such a force, all by airdrop. The CIA had become a major power by 1958 and was ready to enter the world arena as the core of the greatest peacetime operational force ever assembled.

By this time the Agency was not working alone. It was getting the willing and most active support of other elements of the Department of Defense and from the White House and parts of the Government. It was becoming a broad-gauge ST. The CIA was being diverted from its original role by the actions of men who took their motivation from the substance of secret intelligence inputs and turned them into response activities as large as many overt military campaigns. Yet, for all of this, they covered their work in deep security, which of course was a false security, and veiled their true intentions and actions from the rest of the Government, and especially from those whose normal task and responsibility it would have been to carry out such actions had they been so directed by proper policy and authority.

In 1949 the Congress enacted what is called The Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, which restated the powers and duties of the CIA as they had been in the National Security Act of 1947, and added some interesting paragraphs concerned primarily with money and personnel. By 1949 it had become apparent that a great number of the personnel assigned to the CIA would be military personnel and that this situation would continue. Thus the new Act spelled out the terms and conditions of such assignments and did this in a manner that would not appear to expose or compromise the system; yet the whole procedure appears in clear text within the law. The clear text is written as though it were a description of the duties of the DCI or of the DDCI only; however, it is actually applicable to all military personnel on duty with the Agency:

(2) . . . the appointment to the office of Director, or Deputy Director, of a commissioned officer of the armed services, and his acceptance of and service in such office, shall in no way affect any status, office, rank, or grade he may occupy or hold in the armed services, or any emolument, perquisite, right, privilege, or benefit incident to or arising out of any such status, office, rank, or grade. Any such commissioned officer shall, while serving in the office of DCI, or DDCI, continue to hold rank and grade not lower than that in which serving at the time of his appointment and to receive the military pay and allowances (active or retired) as the case may be, including personal money allowance payable to a commissioned officer of his grade and length of service for which the appropriate department shall be reimbursed from any funds available to defray the expenses of the CIA. He also shall be paid by the CIA from such funds an annual compensation at the rate equal to the amount by which the compensation established for such position exceeds the amount of his annual military pay and allowances.

(3) The rank and grade of any such commissioned officer shall, during the period in which such commissioned officer occupies the office of DCI or DDCI, be in addition to the numbers and percentages otherwise authorized and appropriated for the armed services of which he is a member.

This is a most important feature of CIA personnel policy. Note that the law states that "the appropriate department shall be reimbursed from any funds available to defray the expenses of the CIA." The CIA is authorized to use money to buy people, and as long as they have the money, they can add people. This is one reason why few people really know how many personnel the Agency has; and why even these few may not know exactly, because so many of the cover people have been lost within the labyrinth of the total Government.

Another key phrase is that in Paragraph 3, wherein it states, "The rank or grade of any such of commissioned officer shall . . . be in addition to the numbers and percentages otherwise authorized . . . for the armed service . . . " The military services, as other departments and agencies of the Government, are bound precisely to certain total personnel strengths and to the percentage of rank and grade throughout those totals. This is an exact amount, and one that must be maintained and accounted for at all times. However, the CIA is not so bound. Thus the services are permitted to provide as many personnel as the CIA requests and can pay for, to the extent that the services simply deduct those totals by rank and grade from their own strict manpower ceilings. As a result, the services encourage certain personnel to join the CIA, and certainly do not discourage them from leaving the roles of the services for that purpose. In a sense, the more the better. Some five thousand or ten thousand military personnel in the CIA are just that many less for the military budget to account for and just that much more strength for the CIA, which it accounts for by "reimbursement". The Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 further underscores this bookkeeping device in favor of the CIA in the following manner:

Par 403j. CIA: appropriations; expenditures.

(a) Notwithstanding any other provisions of law, sums made available to the Agency by appropriation or otherwise may be expended for purposes necessary to carry out its functions, including (1) personal services, including personal services without regard to limitations on types of persons to be employed . . .

(2) supplies, equipment, and personnel and contractual services otherwise authorized by law and regulations, when approved by the Director.

(b) The sums made available to the Agency may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of Government funds; and for objects of a confidential, extraordinary, or emergency nature, such expenditures to be accounted for solely on the certificate of the Director . . .

Not only, then, is the CIA not required to account for the number and grade of all of its people by virtue of the fact that it is authorized to use money to buy people, without regard to other law; but as we see in these latter phrases, the CIA is not required to account for the money it spends either. In 1949 this was a reasonable piece of legislation. The reader may judge for himself whether this same reasonableness applies today and tomorrow.

There is another portion of this Act that touches upon another special facet of the personnel policies of the CIA. It states that "Whenever the Director, the Attorney General and the commissioner of Immigration shall determine that the entry of a particular alien into the United States for permanent residence is in the interest of the national intelligence mission, such alien and his immediate family shall be given entry into the United States for permanent residence without regard to their inadmissibility under the immigration or any other laws and regulations or to the failure to comply with such laws and regulations pertaining to admissibility: provided, that the number of aliens and members of their immediate families entering the United States under authority of this section shall in no case exceed one hundred persons in any one fiscal year." The common basis of understanding of the provisions of this paragraph is usually given as an allowance made for a valuable defector or official who might not otherwise be able to come into the country for such illegal reasons as that he was patently a Communist or at least a native and citizen of a Communist country. Certainly, in arranging for such defections the DCI and his agents must be able to guarantee to the defector that he and his family will be accepted permanently into the United States.

This is the surface reason for this portion of the law. However, we discuss it here in this chapter on personnel because there are many more "illegal" aliens brought into the country who have been recruited as agents than there are defectors. In one sense of the words, "illegal alien" and "defector" may be about the same thing. However, there cannot be much confusing the roles of defector and agent. Most defectors would not submit to becoming active agents and to going back into the world of clandestine intrigue. However, many men serve the United States who are, in a sense, totally citizens of the world. These men are technically United States citizens by virtue of the application of the above cited law, but they also have been given "citizenship" in other countries as cover. These are extremely intricate ploys that require considerable time, money, and effort to maintain, as well as the dedicated daring of the men so occupied. Some of these men are pilots, navigators, and members of other highly specialized professions, and the least of them would titillate a true-life James Bond on most scores.

They are, of course, but a nucleus of a greater segment of the Agency. There are a great number of non-U.S. citizens who work for the Agency in many capacities. Filipinos, for example, appear in the wake of so many CIA operations, including the Bay of Pigs and many Indochina projects, because there are a large number of skilled Philippines citizens in the regular or contract employ of the Agency.

With such a variegated personnel congregation, the CIA has been given very special authority with respect to retirement. This, too, is spelled out in plain language in the CIA Act of 1949, some of which has the same double meaning as the bits which we have dissected above. Retirement is a special thing for the "deep" Agency employee. If by circumstance any such employee must retire for reasons of health or other infirmity, the Agency is burdened to assure that whatever attention and treatment he may get will at no time result in disclosures that might occur during anesthesia, treatment by drugs, or during other periods when the principal might not be in full control of his mental processes. Furthermore, the CIA must remain concerned about the locale in which such people choose to retire, to assure that they are not unduly exposed to dangerous influences. The not-too-infrequent problems with alcohol and even hard drugs place a special burden upon the Agency. All of these men have been involved in many highly classified matters. All of them have at one time or another been "on the black box(polygraph)", and all of them have been debriefed; but these are no more than the routine precautions that a large government agency can take. Much more remains that must be done. A thorough debriefing may underscore the zones of deep security; but it cannot erase memories, the activity of the brain, and the area of human weaknesses. As more and more men reach retirement age, these problems are increasing. One solution for a great percentage of this problem lies in the area of rapid, effective, and continuing declassification of those numberless episodes that certainly have no reason to be classified. As with so many other things, unnecessary security measures crop up as an artificial generator of problems, whereas many of the problems would go away if unnecessary classification could be ended.

The remaining special characteristic of CIA personnel activity is that which is known in the trade as "cover". Except for the true and overt intelligence employee and other strictly administrative and service types, all Agency employees live under some form of cover. The great majority live out their days with the Agency as Department of Defense employees. Many others have other common cover, that cover which is essential for no more than their credit cards, driver's licenses, and other public documents, just so they will not have to say that they are employed by the CIA.

From this base, the vast intricacies of cover become manifold as the nature of the individual's work increases in areas of high specialization and security. Sometimes, cover is changed, and the man must go through a transition period and develop a whole new character, as when he may have served as a Navy man at one station and then must become an Army man at another. Such situations are rare, because of the ease with which such cover is blown with the passage of time.

Some of the deepest and most total cover exists right inside the U.S. Government itself. Some of the most buried of CIA men have been employed by other departments and agencies for years, and only a few know any longer that they are really CIA. This is a special use of cover, but the CIA gets more per capita benefit from these men than from any others of the profession.

There are other deep cover personnel all over the world; but their existence and occupation is not the subject of this book. That they are there is enough. Some of them exist to assure that others in precarious positions can exist, and the rupture of the thin thread that supports them all is fraught with personal danger to them and their networks. These men are a part of the trade, and all countries know about the profession.

Many people have tried to estimate the total personnel strength of the CIA. This is categorically a useless objective pursued by amateurs. First, there are the open, professional intelligence people. Next there is the vast army of support personnel, many of whom are buried as deeply as the "fun and games" types; upon them depends the success of the clandestine side of the house absolutely. This is a very large group, and it is certainly not all within the structure of the Agency. Then there is the DD/P (the Directorate of Plans) and all that it encompasses. In most respects, this operation is the largest by far, and in certain aspects the border between where DD/P begins and DD/S ends is seldom clear.

Add to all of this the great supporting structure behind both DD/P and DD/S, such as that which exists in Air America and other corporate subsidiaries of the worldwide Agency, and this will include tens of thousands of non-U.S. personnel. For example, Air America alone has no less than four thousand employees in Thailand and not less than four thousand more in Taiwan as of 1972.

Beyond these fringes, there are additional thousands of CIA camp followers. There are members of the business world who enroll themselves or who have become enrolled for various reasons in the lure of "fun and games"; there are people from the academic world, the publications field, and so on. And since the limits of the CIA personnel rosters are really only the limits of how much money that Agency can put its hands on, even the groupings herein set forth simply serve to give evidence of what surrounds us. Would anyone wish to conjecture whether the CIA has been on the moon?

Chapter 13

Communications: The Web of the World

Perhaps the greatest achievement of modern times is the communications revolution. Time and distance are all but obliterated by the speed and totality of worldwide communications networks -- even outer space networks. We have witnessed a man stepping onto the moon in the full view of live and instant television. We have listened to the President as he placed a call to the men on the moon and talked with them, just as you and I would talk to other men. As this is being written, a satellite laboratory is speeding through uncharted space on its way to the planet Jupiter and beyond. All of these wonders of physical science and of man's ingenuity are in the hands of the ST. The intelligence community has absolutely unlimited communications power, and there is literally no place to hide from it.

The Russians may wish to test fly a new bomber. To do this, they must arrange an intricate communications system between the crew, the instruments in the plane, monitoring airborne aircraft and other stations. The CIA and its sister agency, the NSA, will hear the communications support of the flight and will interpret all of the coded information almost as easily as the Russians themselves who are monitoring it. The Russians will orbit a satellite with intricate and complicated telemetering equipment aboard, designed only for their own ears. The long antenna of the CIA/NSA, among others -- United States and foreign - will monitor this satellite and read it out with ease directly proportional to the skill, technology, and energy they have invested in such things.

A small group of men will meet secretly in a room to discuss the overthrow of a government or to make plans to meet the agent of a foreign power. They will have with them an expert, trained in the high skill of electronic debugging. He will have checked their room and tested the telephone; yet every word they say will be recorded by a gang-monitor at a central switch belonging to the telephone company where all conversations, on any line, being made by anyone with any telephone in that huge network can be monitored with ease.

Soviet messages transmitted by a special device that varies its transmission frequency often and unexpectedly and that has the ability to send a long message in the briefest "squirt" of time will be monitored and recorded accurately. Massive all-wave and all-frequency band receivers with high-speed scanning capability have the means to capture the "squirt messages" and then to draw them out until they are intelligible enough to be turned over to the computers for decoding.

Even infrared signals, sound signals, and earth vibrations, such as are caused by railroad trains and mining operations, are recorded and translated into intelligence. The hum of high energy transmission lines carrying various loads gives indications of peak periods of line usage. There are no secrets.

As Norbert Wiener said years ago, " . . . society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it"; and " . . . development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part." And he adds, " . . . the theory of control in engineering, whether human or animal or mechanical, is a chapter in the theory of messages."[1]

In these modern times it may be added that the theory of control of governments is also another chapter in the theory of messages. That organization that controls the communication system will have in its power the ability to control the government. One of the greatest attributes of the communications system is its use in the development of feedback, the ability to generate future action -- usually response -- by the sensing of inputs from past performance. The total communications system makes it possible for the intelligence organization to collect and then to grade a great volume of information and to cull from this, those bits that will be made into the daily briefing and the essence of the current intelligence portfolio.

More than anything else, it is this tremendous communications system that makes the Agency operational system what it is. From all over the world, messages of all kinds pour in from agents buried in all sorts of places and making all sorts of contacts. From all over the world, small bits of information gleaned from all kinds of instrumental communications equipment and advanced sensors feed information back into the centers of collection. Behind all of this, there are action officers who evaluate and process the bits that are culled and selected from the gross input from all sources.

Whenever one of these action officers discovers something special, he will do his best to see that it is brought to the attention of his superiors. The system is so constructed that such data moves rapidly from the lower, gaining echelon, to the middle management areas where it is again weighed and evaluated. If the information survives this first sorting process, the action officer will be directed to go back to his source, whether it is mechanical or human, to seek further information to enhance the first bits. The occupational characteristic in this whole operation is that the action begins with the receipt of information. What happens afterwards is generally re-action. The message input becomes a control mechanism itself. The area of interest may build rapidly and require response in hours, or it may cover a period of months or even years. With each round of traffic the overall pattern begins to shape itself, and gradually the little projects become big ones. Then more and more people are put on the job, and responsibility for project development is moved higher and higher up the chain of command, until finally it will be considered for some sort of major action directly under the control of the DD/P and his senior staff.

The fact that information is sought and pursued effectively must not be overlooked or ruled out. When certain events take place, experience teaches that others may follow, and the intelligence machinery will be set in motion to look for such things. This is particularly true in long-range projects. In modern manufacturing, it is impossible to assemble things like television sets or motorcycles without a system of marking and coding the parts so that they may be assembled properly in any plant having that know-how; and so that spare parts may be ordered that will fit the original set properly. Modern manufacturing requires that parts and major assemblies be marked for cost control and inventory purposes. In many instances the marking and coding systems used are very sophisticated. Thus, if a Japanese solid-state transistor radio is put together using "Ten Nines" germanium (the element of germanium pure to .9 to the tenth power), the tiny transistors will be marked with a code that proves they are the genuine product and that they are of that quality.

This not only signifies that the transistors are a quality item; but it also indicates that the Japanese manufacturer has reached that level in the state-of-the-art that permits him to make and use such superior materials and techniques. The same is true for alloys, tolerances, and other things that are essential to quality work. Thus, if an agent buys several television sets in a foreign country and takes them apart to study them, he will find all of the subassemblies, down to tiny bits, coded and marked. If in the process he should find some novel, rare, or extremely precise technique, he will look further into the production methods of that factory and of that country to see what this means.

In a country like the Soviet Union with a highly developed nuclear program and a superior missile and space manufacturing capability, it is to be expected that every so often new telltale discoveries will be made by finding some little item in an exported product that signifies a technological achievement, and perhaps even a new breakthrough. It is almost impossible for any sophisticated manufacturing system to conceal such developments once they have gone into mass production. Furthermore, serial numbers that usually accompany the marking program will show development serially, and one item acquired in an Asian country may carry one series of numbers that link with others found in a Latin American country. Reconstruction of the series which the codes, markings, and numbers reveal will give a quite accurate indication of rate of production, among other things.

From such leads, the system then puts its agents to finding out whether these new metals, techniques, or ideas have developed from the space program, from weapons systems work, or what. The communications system feeds all of this back, and agents all over the world are coordinated in their development of this information speedily and accurately, as if they were assembling some massive jigsaw puzzle.

So all communications bits are not just happenstance; but the distinction usually lies in the difference between intelligence collection and special operations. Since it is our objective to look more closely into the operational efforts of the ST, it is then more in character to see the communications network as a great machine that continually feeds bits of action information into a system that is prepared to respond whenever the "communist-inspired subversive insurgency" button is pushed.

The ambassador to any foreign country is by Presidential appointment the senior official and representative of the Government of the United States. In peacetime, before World War II, his role was relatively uncomplicated, and most of the work done by the ambassador and his staff had to do with the processing of visas and taking care of traveling dignitaries and businessmen. Since World War II, the role of the ambassador has become much more complex. He is still the senior representative of his country, but now he may have with him in the country of his appointment a senior military officer and perhaps even a UN command with U.S. military components. He will have a senior CIA station chief, and he will have many other government officials, such as those from the Departments of Labor, Commerce, Agriculture, and other agencies.

In spite of all of this, the Ambassador is still supposed to be the head of the country team, and all other Americans are supposed to be under his control. Special arrangements have been made where military units have active roles within that country as a part of larger organizations such as NATO. Troops move in and out of the country, and he is informed about such things but he rarely enters into any official contact with them. With the CIA, things are different, although they protest in public that they are always subservient to the ambassador. One of the areas this is most noticeable in is communications. The ambassador has communications channels directly from his post to the State Department. The ambassador has the authority to contact the Secretary of State directly, and some ambassadors, like Galbraith in India, find reason even to contact the President directly. These are exceptions and certainly not the rules of the game.

When an ambassador communicates with State, his messages are received by the geographical-area desk responsible for his country. From there they are processed to the Secretary, Under Secretaries, and wherever else they need to go. Much of this routine is a protocol, which has developed over the years, and much of it is dictated by true security precautions, which demand that diplomatic matters be handled with secrecy and discretion.

In accordance with these practices, the other members of the embassy, such as the labor attach and the agricultural experts, all utilize the embassy communications channels and then rely upon the Department of State to make distribution for them in Washington to their own departments. The same is true of military attach traffic. And in many cases embassy channels may carry certain CIA traffic. But this is not the limit of the CIA capability. In every country the Agency station chief has access in one way or other to direct communications contact with the CIA in Washington and when necessary he has direct contact to the DCI.

The global U.S. military system is without question the most massive, the most powerful, and the most capable communications system in existence. However, the best and most efficacious system in the world belongs to the CIA. In making this statement, allowance should be made for the capability of the National Security Agency, but that is more or less a part of the military system and need not be explored here. The CIA is able to cover the entire world, not like a blanket, but like a rapier. There is no place it cannot reach out to get to an agent or to a busy station chief on its own secure facilities. In doing this, the Agency makes use of all kinds of communications; some are considered rather old and crude but effective, and others are highly sophisticated.

Early in its buildup the CIA obtained the services of one of the military's top communications giants, General Harold McClelland. General McClelland began with a typical military base system and then let brains and technology run their course. He died in 1966 and left behind a superior system and the men to operate it.

When a U-2 is thousands of miles away and all by itself over hostile lands, it is tracked silently by sensitive devices that provide assurance that it is still in operation and on course to a hidden destination. When an agent has made a contact in Istanbul or Koforidua he is able, if he so arranges, to be continually in contact with a back-up agent, either to record his conversation or to provide directions and advice for other activities that may arise. Agents may have effective radios built inconspicuously into a suit coat, antenna and all, and they have motoring pickups (bugs) of fantastic capability and design. But above all this, the most important communications are provided all the time between the station chief -- the man who is the prime mover in any given area and his boss in Washington.

One of the most radical things about the CIA network is that it does not have to go through any intermediate echelons. In State, the ambassador goes through the desk man, and woe befall the ambassador who tries to avoid that simple and red-tape structure. In the military the commanders overseas must go through their in-between military joint command chiefs in addition to the various levels of their own service echelons. Not so with the CIA station chief. When he wants to contact the DCI or the DD/P, he gets on the transmitter and he gets his man. Communications travel with the speed of light; yet many of the finest systems in existence are slowed down by the necessity of going through channels and then of decoding, review action, and encoding for retransmittal. The Agency avoids most of this on its essential traffic. The Agency may have a man who works day and night in a full-time military assignment in India; but when that man has something to send to the CIA, he gets it out through his station chief right to Washington, and none of the military channels will ever see it. The same applies to the ambassador.

There are protests from time to time, and the Agency, for its own bureaucratic well-being, will retransmit a "clear" message by way of State channels or military channels to make it appear that a given wire of the same date and time group was transmitted properly. But when the chips are down, the "hot" message, the one that really got the action done, would have been transmitted by Agency circuits first.

Of course, the reason given for all of this is to provide security over its sources and methods. The same old chestnut appears every time and is swallowed by most of official Washington year after year. There are cases when security for just that reason is essential, but for every one of those occasions that are true and fully justifiable, there are perhaps ten thousand or a hundred thousand times when such security has not been the case, and the CIA separate and direct channel has been used for Agency reasons alone.

For example: There have been times when the Agency wanted to get something done in a certain country but the staff in Washington felt that is should be done on the basis of some agent input of one kind or other and its relationship to other information they had or wanted to use. However, the man in the field, not realizing that Washington wanted it done in a certain manner, did not come up with the exact language the Agency needed to present the idea to the Special Group for action. The Agency would find itself in a position not unlike a player in the parlor game of charades. It was making all the suggestive moves, but the unwitting partner was not getting the idea. On such an occasion the CIA is not averse to getting on its own secret system and canning a message to its contact in the distant country and saying explicitly, "Send us this message with information copies to the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the White House," and to anywhere else where they wish to make an impression. Then when they call the meeting, which they planned to do all along, they can say, for instance, "Gentlemen, we have a message which we understand you all have too, that leads us to believe there is grave trouble on the borders of India." All the other Government conferees especially gathered on the basis of top secret clearances and the need to know would agree that the situation looked grim. Perhaps the Army representative would say, "Yes, we have that message and we have several more from our attach, who says that trouble has been brewing for some time and that the Indian army may need help on the border." The White House might concur by pulling out its sheaf of copies of the attach traffic which also supported the idea that the Indian army was in trouble on the border.

At such time the Agency would ask everyone to look at his copy of message Number 123 from New Delhi Embassy on such a date. That message would say that the trouble on the border was severe; however the group having the problem was the border police and not the army. Since border police assistance would fall under the jurisdiction of the Agency and not the U.S. Army, the Agency would propose that the assistance given to the Indians should be clandestine police support, under the cover of a Military Aid Program project accelerated because of the border problems. Everyone else would have his portfolio of messages and would be convinced that the ClA's view of the situation was correct. The Group would agree that the MAP project should be set up and that the aid delivered should be turned over to the CIA representatives and that the training program should be under CIA operation and direction.

Superior and independent communications makes all the difference in the world at times like these. There are other times when an operator on a special project has the means to communicate with his headquarters in Washington independently of other channels. In such cases, this operator will at times bypass not only the ambassador and military hierarchy, but he may even bypass his own station chief. All of this is excused on the grounds of security and expediency. In some cases the station chief has become incensed over such actions; but, as in the case of the baseball player arguing with the umpire, his anger seldom got him very far. One of the most famous of these differences occurred in the Philippines when Ed Lansdale was operating with Magsaysay, and the station chief, who was on excellent terms with Magsaysay himself, was not aware of some of the operations that Lansdale and his Filipino cohorts had set in motion.

Other instances have arisen where the ambassador and his CIA counterpart have come to grief over message traffic that the ambassador learned of somehow and then demanded from State and CIA in Washington an explanation of what was going on in his country. Such things were more important in the earlier days. As the CIA and the ST have become stronger there are not so many surface problems. Most ambassadors and most military commanders do as the Congress has been doing; they bury their heads in the sand and hope that the peacetime operation will go away so that they will not have to know a thing about it.

When the question "what to do with Trujillo in the Dominican Republic" arose, a great proportion of military and of diplomats in the Department of State defended him. They maintained that Trujillo may not have been the ideal ruler of his country and that his strong one-man government was oppressive and diabolical; but at the same time, he was anti-Communist in the extreme when anti-Communism was supposed to be the epitome of good sense and good character regardless of all else. Why should anyone want to dispose of such a staunch anti-Communist? But several factions converged in the Trujillo case. It became known to those who would overthrow him that if they took action against this island strongman, the United States would not lift a finger.

During this period, there were reports coming from military channels, from diplomatic channels, and from CIA channels. All of these reports came together in Washington in meetings of the highest order, and the fate of the Trujillo regime hung in the balance. It became evident that the United States would not do anything and that the policy would be that if such an overthrow took place, the United States would not support anyone and would not back anyone. However, it also became evident that the United States would not support Trujillo, nor would it warn him or move to protect him. It is this factor that makes a coup d'état possible. It is not so much positive action; it is the understanding that there will be no support of that regime in power by the United States once the uprising begins.

Although the Pentagon Papers do not provide all of the insight, it becomes clear that the Diem regime was toppled not so much by anything the United States did as by the fact that we did nothing. It is this exposure to his enemies that seals the fate of a government leader, as certainly as if the trigger were pulled from the embassy.

One of the key elements in all of these situations is the ability of the Agency to have its own message traffic quickly and deftly in hand while the other major communicators are going through their channels.

In the broad sense, communications involves much more than the means of transmitting messages. In this broad sense the ST has even greater weapons to employ. Even the fastest message system and the most direct routing and processing will not assure supremacy unless the men at both ends of the system are experts and unless they are able to act with the information they have. Here is where the ST excels and where it shows its superiority. An agent in a foreign country can send a message by a select channel with security coding that keeps the information from everyone who does not have the proper clearance and the need to know. This assures that very few people will get that message in the first stage of handling. The basic message will go to a control office in the CIA, and an information copy may go to cleared parties in the White House, State, and Defense. The men who receive these messages in those other departments may very well be CIA personnel who are in cover assignments. This means then that the State, White House, and Defense copies are still in the hands of Agency personnel, even though the record will show that they have been properly transmitted to the other addressees. Thus the control has not been lost, and delivery of these messages will be in strict compliance with and in timing with what the ST wants.

This is why so many messages that have been made public in the Pentagon Papers appear to be part of Pentagon, or more specifically, JCS activity, when in reality this traffic was between Saigon and the Agency, with the information copy being delivered to the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities (SACSA). This section in the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was manned, for the most part, by military personnel. They did have some normal military functions but most of their work was involved with the support of the CIA. In this capacity they would control communications coming to the Joint Staff and in turn coordinate them with counterpart ClA-support offices in the office of the Secretary of Defense, or to a Focal Point office in each of the military services. During the period described, the OSD offices were those of Bill Bundy, General Lansdale, and others, in such places as the Directorate of Research and Engineering.

To anyone not knowing the process, it would then appear that the Saigon message in question would have been properly staffed to the OSD, JCS, and all services, when in reality it had simply been to all of the CIA control points in those offices. The real military would not have seen it. In cases where action was to follow, it would be up to those persons who received such messages to call them to the attention of the Secretaries and Chiefs of Staff involved. This would be done with care, and yet these senior men seldom had all of the facts and all of the background to be able to see what really was under way since they would be seeing these messages piece by piece and rarely as a whole. Emboldened by knowledge of the fact that they had properly touched base with all parties and offices concerned, the ST would then go ahead with the project, on the assumption that no one had said not to go ahead with it after having been advised.

This was one of the major steps forward taken by Allen Dulles as a result of his report. It looked like a small thing, and it was applied bit by bit; but once the NSC found itself in the position of doing no more than "authorizing" activities of the CIA rather than "directing" them, the roles began to turn 180 degrees, and the ST became the active party. When the NSC was established, it was realized that if such an eminent body of men made decisions and then directed that they be carried out, they would not necessarily be in a position to see that someone actually did carry them out. Therefore, provision was made for an Operations Coordinating Board, (OCB), which would see that the decisions of the President and his Council were carried out. This was effective only as long as the NSC was directing activity. The OCB would require that the NSC staff keep a record of decisions in duplicate, and the Board would ride herd on these decisions and see that they were done. It had trouble doing this when CIA was just getting its proposals "authorized".

When the NSC was divided into a small and elite Special Group for the purpose of working with the CIA on matters that were from time to time clandestine, the task of the OCB became more difficult because of the cloak of security. Still, the OCB tried to keep up with such decisions, if by no other means than to require "blind" progress reports. But when the NSC, through the Special Group, simply sat and listened to outside proposals and then permitted or authorized actions that were highly classified and highly limited by need to know, the role of the OCB became impossible to perform. This was exactly what Allen Dulles wanted. His report had stated that he should be able to initiate operations and to take his proposals directly to the President, and that the President or an authorized representative would then approve what the DCI brought to him. He had not been given that authority by the law, and he could not have done it under Truman because Truman used the NSC and OCB differently from what Dulles visualized. But year by year during the Eisenhower Administration he worked to erode the NSC-OCB pattern until he was able to work through the Special Group 5412/2 almost without interference. Part of his success was due to his effective control of communications, which made it appear all the time that projects had been thoroughly staffed in all parts of the Government concerned and that the approval of the NSC (Special Group) was merely a formality.

By the time Kennedy became President, he was led to believe that the NSC was unimportant, one of those Eisenhower idiosyncrasies, and that he could do without it. If he could do without the NSC, he certainly could do without the OCB. (Since it could be shown that the OCB was not able to perform its job properly because it was unable to find out what the Special Group had approved, there was no reason for OCB either.) Without either of these bodies in session, the DCI was able to move in as he desired, with very little effective control from any Council member. This was a major change brought about by a kind of evolution and erosion. It was certainly a downgrading process; but the trouble was that all too few people had any realization of what had taken place, and those who had were either with the CIA or the ST, and they were not about to tell anyone.

In concluding our review of this function of the CIA communications system, it would be a mistake to overlook what is perhaps the heaviest source of volume. The CIA monitors electronic signals all over the world, and it gathers so much of this that it is practically swamped with taped information. However, it does a most excellent job in keeping its ear to the traffic of the world. There can be little question that an enlightened system of listening can pick up about all of the information any country would ever need, to keep itself well informed of what any other country is doing. In this day and age, almost all major parts of the Government and of industry must utilize and depend upon electronically transmitted messages and data transfer. All of this can be monitored, and even if it is in code it can be read sooner or later. This is one task of the Agency, and it is a major part of its role and responsibility to coordinate all national intelligence.

Perhaps no other function of the Agency so clearly demonstrates the dual nature of the CIA more than does communications. In the intelligence business, communications is absolutely essential to make bits of information available to the collection center. However, by its very nature, the more capacity the communications system has and the more information bits it handles the more it tends to degrade the value of the information. The Agency receives so much information every day that the great proportion of it is never seen, never processed, and never analyzed . . . and most likely should not be.

On the other hand, in this flood of information there is always the good chance that much is intentional deception and gibberish. Just having the information does not insure that it is worth anything. In this country in particular, information on almost anything is becoming something that has a price and can be bought and sold; yet even this does not ensure that it has value.

From the other point of view, a high-caliber communications system makes it possible for the center to go out to all of its outposts and agents with instructions seeking certain information of value. This is certain to produce the best input, since the return product will be what is sought and not some random article. One of the greatest needs of an intelligence system is to know what it is looking for, along with all of the technical know-how in the organization. "Know what" is so much more valuable than know-how.

But, as we said above, communications brings out the duality of the agency. While agents all over the world are seeking information, the operator is always looking for that choice morsel of data that can be used for another operation. In all of the material flashed over the communications network, there are those special bits and pieces -- border trouble between two countries, a political slaying, an uprising in a remote village, a student riot on an urban campus -- that provide fuel for clandestine operations. Such things provide the "fun and games" people with the fuel for their fires.

When the Agency wishes to pursue one of these leads, it flashes the word back to get more information. It may activate a dormant agent network to see what further information can be acquired. If the situation warrants, agents may be flown in quickly to where the action is. A planeload of guns may be moved to a border area for early airdrop if called for; and so it goes. To the clandestine operators, communications is the lifeblood of the whole business.

One thing is common to both sides. They always wish to keep their information secret. As we have seen, there are many reasons for secrecy, and many of them have little to do with real secrecy -- which would keep the information, or the fact that we have it, from the enemy. But both parties should keep in mind that information is a continuing process. The dissemination of all information, all secrets, is only a matter of time. There is no "first line of defense" for the brain. Any idea conceived by one brain and known to a few more is bound to be general information in a short time. The purpose of secrecy is self-defeating. It is much more important for us to have adequate knowledge than it is for us to try to keep some other country from that knowledge. More harm is done every day by keeping essential information from those who should have it than ever is done by those whom we say we are trying to keep from getting it. If more experienced military men had known about the Bay of Pigs operation, it either would not have happened, or if it did, it would have had a better chance of success. On the other hand, the very people whom the cloak of secrecy was supposed to keep from knowing about the operation, ostensibly the Cubans and the Russians, knew all they needed to know about it.

The best communications system in the world is certainly a tremendous asset for any intelligence organization; but in the hands of those who wish to use its information for the creation and promotion of clandestine operations it is another one of those facilities that lead to the type of problems described by President Truman and Arnold Toynbee.

1. The Human Use of Human Beings, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1954.

Chapter 14

Transportation: Anywhere in the World -- Now

In moonlight so clear that the high Himalayas could be seen one hundred miles away, an Air Force C-130 transport few over the multinational border region of Laos, Burma, and China. In the cargo compartment a small, highly skilled team of Tibetan Khamba tribesmen huddled quietly beside the heavy airdrop pallets that lined the center compartment. Under a dim light in the forward part of the huge cargo area, four Agency men played nickel-and-dime poker while they sipped hot coffee from the plane's airborne kitchen hotplate. The crew peered into the darkness at brilliant stars guiding them on into the vast remoteness of Western China. From time to time the navigator was busy taking star shots to verify the electronic navigation signals he was getting, but which were growing dimmer and less reliable as each hour passed.

The Operations officials of the Agency had directed that the crew fly as low and as close to the horizon as they could with safety, so that that their radar profile would be obscured by ground clutter. This same low pattern played havoc with long-range navigational signals from remote sites. But this gave the experienced crew little concern. The C-130 was in fine shape, the four turboprop engines purred in their sleek nacelles, and fuel flow was well within the flight-plan parameters. Precise navigation at this point was essential only to verify wind conditions and to warn if major shifts in strength and direction might have an impact upon total effective range. They knew that this mission was going to demand all the range the C-130 had, and a little more. The target for the airdrop of the Khambas and the black cargo was in the vicinity of Koko Nor, deep in the outback of unknown China.

A trainload of olive-drab Gl six-by-six U.S. Army trucks had been delivered to a siding in North Carolina. A crew of men had worked for days unloading the trucks and towing them to a small remote dockside facility for loading onto an old, World War II front-loading landing craft. Another old, but newly shipshape, vessel lay at anchor, ready to shove off for the south as soon as the last shipment of trucks had been hoisted aboard. Both ships, with skeleton crews, slipped out of the port quietly and ran southward to Puerto Rico, where they would await orders to join the small armada bound for an unknown beach in the Bay of Pigs region of western Cuba.

The temperature sometimes reached 125 degrees, perhaps even 135 degrees, in the scorching sunlight of northern Libya. The jet fighters lining the runways shimmered in the ever-present mirage that hung over the concrete runways. Men fueling these planes wore heavy gloves, in spite of the intense heat, to protect themselves from burns. Far across this huge base in the remote area reserved for rockets and other armament, a few low outbuildings were the only evidence of a below-ground ammunition and arms cache of a most unusual nature. A steady stream of trucks had been weaving back and forth all day from the huge C-124 transport planes to this dump area to unload heavy cases of guns. These were not the usual World War II leftovers. These were British Enfields, French guns, and most important, they were a good mix of guns from Iron Curtain countries, picked up from many sources, including war-captured booty from the Israeli campaign in the Sinai Desert.

The common thread through all of these anecdotes is the fact that in every case the Agency was operating in its own interest with transportation provided by the military forces. The aircraft belonged to the U.S. Air Force. The trucks and the special flatbed rail carriers were provided by the U. S. Army. And the ships that made the run to Cuba had been U.S. Navy equipment, refitted for use in that operation. The Agency has ready access to all kinds of transportation all over the world in the global transportation system of the Department of Defense. This great network gives the Agency the opportunity to carry out its work behind the screen of regular military movements. This saves the CIA the problem of covering the bulk of its movements, and it saves a tremendous amount of money. Again, this is money that the Agency usually protests it will gladly reimburse to the prime agent of the DOD, provided it is billed for it. Most shipments made by the CIA through the military networks are made to and from Agency cover units using military designations. The cost therefore is not identifiable unless a knowledgeable person intercepts the shipment. This is not likely, because the Agency will protest and the top echelons of the service will support it that the high classification of the shipment precludes such identification. Thus the bulk airlift of tons of guns, which would mean nothing to military shipping clerks, travels without charge under the guise of secrecy.

Much military shipment is made by contract airlift. During the peak Vietnam operation years, the total of military-purchased contract-airlift averaged three quarters of a billion dollars per year. With the CIA responsible for a $1 billion a year "pacification" program in Vietnam, it can be seen that the Agency's share of that airlift could have been appreciable; yet the chances are very good that no one ever knew just which shipments were Agency shipments and what to charge for them or how to collect reimbursement for them. When one reflects upon the early days of the CIA and upon the serious precautions taken to assure that the CIA would not grow beyond the size of a small, truly special operations capability, it is most significant to remember how all of this was done and how it has become such a normal and accepted practice today that at times even the U.S. Army has moved into certain operations under the cover of the CIA.

When the CIA leaves the realm of the DOD and must strike out for itself into non-military areas and into areas where military relationships must be abandoned, it is able to use its own funds to provide its own first-class transportation to meet the situation. Most Agency personnel going overseas do so under one form of military cover or other, and as a result they travel on military aircraft or military contract shipping. This includes their household goods and other equipment as well. But there are times when CIA personnel cannot travel as military personnel, and then they travel as ordinary civilians and utilize all other means available.

In foreign countries, the CIA procures fleets of indigenous vehicles to be able to pass more easily among the population among whom they will be working. It would be unwise for some man, attempting to be inconspicuous in Istanbul, to be seen driving around that crowded city in a new Buick or Chrysler. More than likely, the Agency will see that he has a Volkswagen or Renault, and perhaps one that is a few years old. In like manner, the Agency purchases civilian aircraft and boats of various types and sizes, to meet other special requirements. I have known of CIA personnel traveling in dog-sled parties and in sleek civilian business jets.

The Agency does not want for transportation anytime, anywhere, and of any type, and they get so much of it free or for so little relative cost that what they need over and above the bulk military support, their own funds are more than adequate to provide. The Agency has a very large and special fleet of its own equipment, most of which is covered as commercial equipment. At the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA used landing ships of World War II origin, which it had purchased from surplus sources and then refitted for the occasion. In other water moves, the CIA has used special Norwegian-built high speed boats, and it has used small, light canoes. In such instances, the Agency mans these vessels with its own personnel, and augments the agent cadre with experienced men when necessary. Where the Agency excels in this business is with its many clandestine airlines, which are scattered throughout the United States and around the world. The most famous of these is Air America.

Air America, the airline of the flying mercenaries, conjures up stories true and imagined, real and unreal, of the Dragon Lady and Terry and the Pirates and of deep, secret missions into rebel-held territory in countries from faraway Asia to Latin America. Air America, Incorporated, is a worldwide operation, chartered in Delaware and listed solidly in Dun and Bradstreet. Its main offices are within a few hundred yards of the White House, on Washington's posh Connecticut Avenue, and it numbers among its directors many famous names, including several former Navy admirals who have at one time or other been Commanders in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC). Air America is a most important adjunct of the CIA.

When the travel to Mecca is heaviest with the devout Moslems involved in the hadj, a nondescript old transport aircraft will shuttle pilgrims across the Arabian desert. When summer travel peaks in Europe and thousands of students hire charter planes to take them to an international peace festival in Munich, among these available planes will be aircraft belonging to Air America and flying under one of its countless cover, subordinate companies. If the Agency wishes to make a clandestine cargo drop in some out-of-the-way place like Burma, Pakistan, or Indonesia, a perfectly normal appearing commercial transport aircraft will find itself on business through and around that area for a while, until any suspicion that might be aroused has died down; then on one special flight it will open its rear cargo door and para-drop the supplies, equipment, and perhaps agents over the selected target zone.

The men of Air America are legendary, from the incomparable "Earthquake" McCoon, who lost his life over Dien Bien Phu in an unarmed C-119, to nameless and faceless Chinese and Anzacs, who have flown for Air America on flights that would make fiction accounts tame by comparison.

In the middle nineteen fifties, it became necessary to resupply Agency outposts deep in Laos. The usual DC-3 or C-46 from World War II surplus stockpiles required too much runway for some of these rugged areas. Helicopters lacked the range and load-carrying ability required. The CIA turned to light planes and worked with the native tribesmen to clear landing strips deep in the forested valleys of Laos. For a short time these strips were useful, until their adversaries found them and showered them with gunfire from the surrounding mountainsides.

Air America came in and selected landing sites in the most precarious positions. It had become expert in the use of a small, special plane used by the Air Force Special Air Warfare squadrons and by the Army Special Forces troops. This plane was called the L-28, or commercially, the Helio Courier. It was as rugged as a Jeep and could land and take off in remarkably short distances. This ability to land and take off in short distances is not by itself sufficient to commend an aircraft to this special use. Almost any light plane can, with a big engine, take off or land from short distances. However, once that same plane is in the air, if it does not have superior control surfaces and other slow flying characteristics designed for really slow-speed control in the air, it will be lethal in regular service. The Agency learned this the hard way when it and the United States Information Agency (USIA) missions attempted to use other aircraft that seemed able to do the job and were a little cheaper. More than 50 percent of those planes crashed in the first year of use. Meanwhile, the Air America planes and experienced crews actually operated from fantastically short and crude airstrips, which had been cleared by the natives on top of the ridge lines of the high, forested mountains of Laos. Even today, the flight handbook for pilots in Southeast Asia speaks of two categories of landing grounds in Laos -- regular and Helio. Air America and the rugged Helio have made an unheralded and unequaled record all over Laos.

Air America is not a small unseen company. At two bases alone, one in Thailand and one in Taiwan, it has more than four thousand employees at each. To live its cover as a commercial airline, it flies regular routes and is a major contract carrier airline competing with other airlines of the world for flying business and for aircraft maintenance work.

Years ago, when pilots and ground-crew men of the old Chennault Flying Tiger groups decided to stay in China and to form an airline there, CAT Airlines, the forerunner of Air America and others of that time, operated all over the mainland. They bought a fleet of World War II surplus C-46 cargo aircraft and set up a big maintenance facility at a Chinese mainland airport. As the fortunes of war drove them from one base to another, someone decided to put the maintenance facility on board a big war surplus ship. Finally, with the defeat of the forces under Chiang Kai-shek, this shop with its facilities and stockpile of equipment sailed to Taiwan and anchored beside a dock in Tainan. There this most unusual aircraft maintenance facility performed maintenance for a fast-growing and very busy fleet of planes for many years.

One could walk through that ship absolutely amazed at the beehive-like activity on board. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Chinese worked in that ship on stages, rather than floors or decks, joined by narrow catwalks. Many of those workers worked in small basket-like spaces, barely large enough for a small Chinese. Parts and materials were brought to them and poured into each work space as through a funnel. The worker would finish his special task and then drop the part through a short chute, where it would end up for the next worker to do his part. The whole operation worked on a sort of force-of-gravity basis, with the finished item falling out at the bottom, ready for an alert runner to carry it to the packaging room. Whole sets of aircraft engine spark plugs would be specially treated and then placed into a big slab of plank, drilled out specially to accommodate just enough plugs for a certain type of engine, e.g., twenty-eight plugs for a 14-cylinder engine. This was done so mechanics would not have to check plugs; they simply removed all of them and put in a whole set of new plugs, while the old ones would be returned complete to the shop.

Even instruments were rebuilt, and as they were, the faces and decals were changed to have Chinese or English markings, as required. There were propeller shops and wheel shops. Planes could be completely rebuilt from this one facility. As a matter of fact, the CIA had obtained master transparent film slide sets of the aircraft manufacturers parts and supplies kits, and for such planes as the DC-6. Air America could make every part just about as well as Douglas Aircraft. The ClA justified this irregular and perhaps illegal operation on the basis that it was working with sanitized engines and aircraft and that it could not put such items back in the supply line of the services. As a result, instead of buying from Douglas, through the services, it simply made the parts in its Tainan facility. It is entirely possible that complete small aircraft were made in this manner and that Air America or its subsidiaries ended up with more aircraft in operation than it had had in the first place.

This technique is "justified" by the nature of air registry, which precludes the availability and even the existence of "extra" aircraft. Every aircraft built and flown must be registered. Once it has been registered, that serial number stays with it for the rest of its existence. Therefore, if the Agency wishes to remove all traces of identity and ownership from an airplane in order to make it plausibly deniable, it must also arrange to cover that plane in the registry. This is done in many ways, one of which is to assemble an extra plane from the parts available. To begin with, the CIA may be able to salvage a destroyed aircraft and have it declared discarded. Then from the frame or some other essential part it will rebuild the plane from parts not having any serial numbers at all. This method must be used with larger aircraft; but the Tainan facility had the capability to build smaller aircraft from scratch, just by assembling spare parts, many of which it would have made itself right at the plant.

With this splendid maintenance organization, the Agency faces the necessity to assure it sufficient business to be able to live its cover as a commercial establishment. At this date and time it is doubtful that the cover of Air America is of any real value. Certainly, anyone who needs to know by now knows all about Air America; but in any event, such a plant and all that equipment cannot be permitted to stand idle. As a result, Air America and its subsidiary maintenance components bid actively for commercial airline contracts and especially for U.S. military contracts. It is this military business that actually supports Air America. This is true also in the airline passenger and cargo business.

Air America has a fine record, and on the basis of experience and service it is at least the equal of other contract carrier airlines that bid for U.S. military airlift. However, since the Agency has a proprietary interest in Air America, the CIA feels that the services should give the airline every opportunity to bid, and everything else being equal, the opportunity to be selected for contracts up to the minimum income level the Agency holds is essential to keep the airline in business and give it the added capacity to support ST activities when called upon.

There was a time when contract carrier bidding was very competitive because the Pacific airlift had been cut back and there was very little to go around. After a few cycles of bidding, other airlines noted that Air America was getting business steadily, even if not in large volume. One new and most enterprising contract airline president flew into Washington and presented his views to the proper authorities in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and in the Air Force. At every turn he was assured that the bidding had been perfectly legal and correct, and that Air America was getting no more than its share and that Air America had made valid low bids. This man had heard some stories about Air America's pedigree, stories that were very easy to come by in any bar in Hong Kong where Air America pilots were very popular; so he went into town and hired a lawyer. As his good fortune and, no doubt, his good sense would have it, the lawyer he retained was a knowledgeable individual who among other things had served as Secretary of the Air Force.

Accompanied by this gentleman, the airline president returned to the Pentagon and held a brief meeting with certain aware officials there. By the time they left the Pentagon, this airline had the promise of a contract in the Pacific. The contract saved that airline from lean years, and it would be nice to be able to leave the story there with a happy ending.

Actually, once that airline president had learned the trick, it was only inevitable that he would resort to that game again and again. Middle-level executives and appointive officers in the Pentagon rotate and move on after brief terms. With each generation of new faces someone sooner or later would be confronted by the same "pirate" airline president with the same story. Each time, the heavy cloak of security had kept the new man from knowing the antecedents of the case; so he would have to seek help and advice from the staff. Inevitably he would be told, "Do anything you can to placate the man. That subject is highly classified, and we can't let legal action compromise the real facts in the case." As a result, the president would get his contract again and again. Because he knew that, he had all the high cards in the deck. Today that contract carrier advertises as one of the largest and most successful in the business, and its very successful leader has done very well with his secret formula.

What was involved here was not such a lot of money; but it is indicative of a great weakness in this sort of a system. What works in one case works in countless others. It is a sort of blackmail predicated on not breaking security, and no real consideration is given to whether the security is worth the price or not. This same type of "security blackmail" exists in many forms. If a government does not get the Military Aid Program material it thinks it should get, it will put pressure on the CIA liaison people, telling them it will have to stop supporting a reconnaissance unit or some radar installations, or some similar threat. Then CIA puts pressure on the MAP staff and gets the additional material for them, or may even get it out of its own resources of stockpiled military material. Or, as in the case of the Bay of Pigs operation, the governments that assisted Guatemala and Nicaragua either kept what they "found on base" or bargained for more. This upset other assistance plans because other countries claimed the right to more equipment based upon a balanced formula, security or not.

We see other applications of such blackmail, as in the case of the ransom paid to Castro for the Cuban invaders. This figure in money and heavy equipment as well as in medicine has been quoted as being $53 million or more. It seems pertinent to note that so much money and equipment was paid willingly for captured Cubans and as far as we know, not one cent has been offered, except by certain private citizens, for the release of our own prisoners of war in Indochina.

After the adventure in Indonesia, considerable amounts of equipment and preferential purchasing rights were paid to the Government of Indonesia as a sort of compensation for that misadventure.

In the case of the airline president above, he has made a success of this technique, which has been exceeded only by the success of Air America itself. This is now a very large and honorable company directed and managed by some very able men. It is the excellence and superiority of the men on the logistics side of CIA who have made the Agency look good year after year in spite of some of the problems created by the more adventuresome operators. As Air America has become quite overt, respectable, and above-board, it in turn has had to be the cover unit for much really deep operational work. It has the capacity and the know-how, and it certainly has the people, to perform aircraft support for almost any operation that can be conceived.

In fact, it is organizations such as Air America that show how the Agency could have done things from the beginning, if it had not turned so quickly to the soft touch in the Department of Defense. If the early opportunists had been content to perform truly clandestine missions of a size and expectation that would have had the chance to remain clandestine, then the CIA might have managed to live within its charter and to have limited its operational efforts to those actually in support of intelligence, instead of becoming a vast international operational force. It was the broad-gauge goals set by the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report and the exploitation of the war-planning largesse of the military that launched the Agency upon a runaway operational activity, which resulted finally in the Indochina venture.

Chapter 15 Logistics by Miracle

Historians attribute to Napoleon the statement that armies move on their stomachs. In actual practice, it may have worked the other way around. The army's stomach may have been what made the General move. When the great Genghis Khan captured and pillaged a city, his army ate well for a while. However, when the food began to run low Genghis Khan was already looking for the next city to capture. Historians may attribute his conquests to a vast imperial effort; but objective analysis may reveal his sweeping across the cold and hostile land-mass of Asia was due more to the need to feed the growing horde of men behind him than to any other one incontestable factor.

It is logistics that permits armies to move. When the British Army sat at El Alamein holding the Rommel advance at bay, their failure to attack was more a function of logistics than it was of tactics. Montgomery and his great assistant, Alexander, knew all too well that once the army moved, it would be absolutely dependent upon a flow of supplies that must remain unbroken all the way to Tunis. They were not about to give the order to move until that flow of supplies was assured.

When Patton broke out across the fields of France in his dash for the Rhine and the destruction of the German armies, his fate lay in the hands of General J. C. H. Lee, Eisenhower's logistics chief, more than it did in his tactical wizardry.

And so it has been with the CIA. The important thing about the logistics system of the Agency is not that it has so much and that it can do almost anything it wants with its horn of plenty; but that it has achieved this position without specific authorization and quite generally without the knowledge and approval of the rest of the Government, especially Congress. The ultimate control over any agency of the Government lies in the purse-strings that are held by Congress. Yet the Agency grows and grows, and Congress seems to have little to do with it and to know little of what it has created. Of course, everyone knows that the CIA has a fleet of aircraft, tens of thousands of people, ships and trucks, overseas facilities, weapons of all types in vast quantities, and almost limitless funds. Almost anyone, especially any member of Congress can say, "I certainly am aware of the fact that the CIA has secret overseas facilities." And another can say, "I know that the CIA is mixed up with Air America, the contract carrier airline, in some manner or other." Another might add, "I have visited overseas capitals and I have found that the CIA had a number of people there under cover assignments." And some other Congressman might even say that he has heard that the Agency gets plenty of money through various secret channels from other Government sources.

The Agency likes to conceal the fact that it has so much under heavy security wraps. Whether these facts are concealed for real security reasons, or whether they are concealed simply to keep them from the eyes and ears of Congress and of the American public is the big question. Actually, the CIA prefers to keep its wealth under security so that all Americans, including the members of Congress, do not know how much it has and how it got it. There is a very good chance that the other nations of this world have a much better idea of what the CIA has in their countries than we do in this country. They make it their business to know, and we do not. We have just let it happen before our eyes without ever making a real investigation of the facts. If everyone else in the world knows, why shouldn't we? If Greece is the locale of one stockpile and they know what is in it; and if Turkey, Iran, and Jordan all have stockpiles in their countries and know what they contain and where they are, what makes someone here think that they do not talk to each other and compare notes? As a matter of fact, they not only compare notes, they use each other's knowledge to improve their own game. The only ones who don't know what the CIA has in Greece, Turkey, Iran, and Jordan are the American people and their representatives in Congress.

And for all those Congressmen who know about the Agency, there are none who can say that they know all of the things the Agency has of all kinds. Each Congressman may have a smattering of knowledge of some of the things that the Agency has. But the CIA has achieved this vast wealth in manpower, money, and materials, as well as facilities all over the world, without the knowledge of the rest of the Government. This means that the rest of the Government does not know about it in total -- all in one place, as in Congress.

Undoubtedly, someone from the CIA and perhaps from the executive branch of the Government may say, "That is not exactly right. We are fully aware of the total inventory of the Agency. We are aware of its manpower resources and of its goods all over the world, and we have an inventory of its facilities and installations, including those in foreign countries." Certainly, there is no need to doubt or to question such a blanket statement of faith. Somewhere there must be a fairly accurate total of what the CIA is supposed to have; but at that point one will be confronted with the tautology, "This inventory of the Agency lists everything the Agency has; therefore, everything that the Agency has is listed in this inventory."

For the CIA, the idea of property takes on a new meaning. Any other agency of the Government that wanted to use one hundred trucks would have to buy one hundred trucks or make some arrangement with another agency of the Government, or with a private organization, to acquire the trucks. And that agency would have to show in its budget the expenditure of a certain amount of its funds for the purchase or lease of the hundred trucks. In other words, its utilization or ownership of property could be verified and accounted for by reviewing or auditing its appropriated funds. The CIA can use and the CIA can acquire and "own" one hundred trucks without any budgeted fund transaction at all.

The CIA has the authority, or at least it is given the authority by other Government agencies, to create cover organization within other parts of the Government. This is one of the key tasks that the old Dulles-Jackson-Correa report set out for the Agency. Having once created such units, the CIA is then able to use those units as though they were real elements of the covering organization and to do with them pretty much what it pleases. So if the CIA wants to use one hundred Army trucks, it may have one of its Air Force cover units (it could use an Army unit; but it is easier to use cross-service channels to conceal such a transaction) duly and properly requisition the trucks. In response to this order, the Army will furnish, and write off, the trucks to the Air Force. However, the Air Force won't really know that one of its units, a cover unit, has acquired these trucks; so the Air Force will not pick them up on its inventory. The trucks are then in a sort of never-never land. They are "owned" by an Air Force cover unit that the CIA has the authority to direct, and those trucks will be used as the CIA wishes and for as long as the CIA wishes. There have been cases where the CIA turned around and transferred such property to another country in a sort of a CIA-MAP project all of its own.

In this manner, only one of numerous variations, the Agency has acquired countless mountains of material, which it stockpiles, uses, loses, gives away, and just plain warehouses all over the world. Even the Agency doesn't know what it all is and where it all is. No one in the Government really knows how much the Agency has. A corollary of this statement is that the Agency has been able to stockpile money in a somewhat similar manner, because if it had money to buy trucks and then was never billed for them, it still has those funds to spend elsewhere.

With these funds that the CIA has stockpiled for its own use, it develops areas beyond those in the realm of the military and other regular branches of the Government. The Agency has a wonderful little shop called "TSS". Few know what TSS really means; but it probably means something like "Top Secret Stuff". This shop makes all kinds of James Bond trinkets. It is the place where they design briefcases that will not burn, that will blow up if someone attempts to open them the wrong way, and that will put out long spidery legs if they are released by the agent who is carrying them. And it is the shop that puts a full-blown tape recorder into a Zippo lighter case or a ladys lip-rouge container.

The TSS shop works on all kinds of unusual and very special weapons, and it works with chemicals that can perform all manner of special tasks. It has the finest bugging devices available and the very best debugging facilities. TSS goes out into industry and has things made without telling the people who have made them what their uses will be. At one time for photographic purposes the Agency wanted to develop a brilliant floodlight that could be carried on the wing-tip of an airplane in a pod. This light required so much energy to operate it that the normal electrical supply of the aircraft could not ignite it properly. The Agency then developed, with the help of a private corporation, a generator driven by a propeller attached to the pod. This small propeller was so efficient that it could drive a generator for the floodlight to illuminate an entire area below the plane.

Although this was a splendid development, it was found that in a tactical situation the worst thing you could do was to send a plane into a hostile situation lit up like the sun. This would be an easy target for ground gunners. The next step was to synchronize the light and the camera shutter to the point that the flash would be so brilliant and so brief that an unwitting ground party would not realize it had blinked.

This created new problems; a whole new automated photographic and lighting system had to be developed. This was done, and Agency aircraft can now approach targets in the dark, even at times in an engine-out or engine-idling glide for silence, and take high-speed pictures without anyone on the ground knowing that they have been photographed. TSS was also able to make another advance in aerial photography. The U-2 had proved that it could fly across denied or unwitting territory without notice or without danger from attack because of its speed, altitude, and range. It was also a relatively small radar target. However, at the flight altitude at which the U-2 operated, any normal aerial camera was being pushed to its limits. The camera lens had to focus on the target area and put what it saw on film as precisely as possible. At some point the lens became better than the film paper. This meant that the image that the lens put on the paper was finer than the grade and grain of the paper. Therefore the process of enlarging such pictures and then enlarging them again and again became limited, not because the lens could not accurately transmit the image but because the paper itself had a grain structure that began to break down the detail after a certain amount of enlargement. By working on this problem, TSS and its corporate research associates were able to create a means by which enlargement could be carried so far, for example, that it could distinguish between an oval table or a roundtable of about four feet in diameter from the operational altitude of the U-2, or even higher.

This became a most useful facility in the days of the U-2; but it had not reached the zenith of its utility until the Agency went into space. Now the Spy-in-the-Sky orbital laboratories park out in space at about 110 miles mean altitude and take very valuable pictures of the earth's surface on predetermined schedules or on signals. For example, such pictures of the Chinese atomic energy facilities clearly delineate between dry drying flats and moist drying flats. The continuing variations give a fairly accurate estimate of the rate of activity at the facility.

These developments have led to policy problems that this country has not faced up to primarily because so few people really know about them. They are hardly secret from our enemies, and for that matter they are not secrets from our friends. They are the kind of secrets we keep from ourselves in order that secret operations may be continued in the hands of the ST. For example, Secretary of Defense Laird has made a strong case before the Congress on behalf of the development of the B-l supersonic bomber, which the U.S. Air Force states it will need for the defense of the country in the decade of the eighties. As a function of his presentation to Congress, Mr. Laird gave information about a Soviet supersonic bomber, which he said had already been built and flown. As a result of the impact of this information, he drew the conclusion that the United States must get on with a project to build a bomber that would be equal to or even better than the Soviet bomber. In support of what he had been saying about the Soviet bomber he gave sufficient details of that new plane to artists to permit them to arrive at a suitable pictorial representation of it. A copy of this artists' conception of the Soviet bomber appeared in an issue of Time magazine and was used in that periodical as the basis for a strong article in support of a crash program to build an American supersonic bomber without delay. This whole process, which most Americans will recognize as a familiar pattern used for submarines, super-carriers, and for missiles, is intended to make everyone believe that we are behind the Russians and that we must catch up; we must close the bomber gap.

To the tune of an opening request for $11 billion, Congress is supposed to vote for production of this bomber based on the information given in limited fashion and upon a poor picture of an alleged flying aircraft. When the stakes are so high and so costly, it is time that the intelligence community and the DOD give up this facade of secrecy. Everyone knows that the intelligence community uses cameras of great ability and that they use orbiting laboratories from which photographic canisters are dropped for recovery and development. And everyone knows that these orbiting laboratories take pictures of Soviet territory and of any other territory desired. None of these things would be done if the pictures were not excellent and if they were not getting an excellent product. Therefore, if the intelligence community has hard information about a bomber, which includes photographs of that bomber, why should it not show the actual pictures of that bomber to Mr. Laird, to the President, to the Congress, and most of all to the American public and to the whole world? What possible case can be made for keeping such things secret, especially when they are asking for $11 billion? Is the reason they do not show these pictures to Congress the fact that they do not have these pictures? And if they do not have the pictures, why not? Is it because they have been unable to find the bomber and to get a picture of it outside its hangar? Or perhaps their conjecture about the bomber is a bit premature, and the bomber is perhaps only on the Soviet drawing-boards, like too many American bombers?

Of course, there are technical problems. An orbiting photographic laboratory can only take a useful picture of such a bomber at certain optimum times in its orbiting periodic cycles. And an orbiting lab can be tracked by the Soviets, and they can hide the bomber whenever they know a satellite, suspected of being a photographic type, is due to fly by. But, by the same token, there are tactical things the intelligence community can and should be doing to get such pictures anyhow. They are not established to get second-best pictures or none at all. If the long ears of electronic intelligence and of other sensors tell us that the Russians are flying a new supersonic bomber, then there are other ways of getting its picture and of getting so much concrete information about it that we do not have to depend upon incomplete data. This is what an intelligence agency should be for, instead of a lot of other things that it would rather be for.

Such frankness openly discussed and openly aired would give up nothing to our enemies and would in the long run improve the total program. It would be most helpful and it would save billions of dollars. However, so many of these things that the wonders of U.S. industrial capability have developed for the CIA and for its TSS, have been kept under wraps -- not so much because some form of security has been established that makes this reasonable and correct, but because the security shield leaves room for maneuvering when the ST needs to create a story that intelligence, for the time being perhaps, cannot actually support. Furthermore, if the huge spy satellite program were to be brought out in the open as a routine technical achievement, which it is, it might better be operated by NASA or one of the services than by an element of the intelligence community.

Much could be said for the merits of the TSS side of the Agency. The ability of the intelligence community to develop truly remarkable equipment and to extend the reach of surveillance and knowledge has been really magnificent. However, just as one would like to commend the community for having done something well, one realizes that the human factor has crept back in and beclouded the issue again by throwing up artificial barriers about these developments and by keeping them under wraps so that the controlling members of the "big game" may be able at one time or another to spring facts as surprises and at other times to spring surprises with or without the facts; and no one anywhere will be in a position to know otherwise, including, as President Truman has said, the very President and Commander in Chief.

What is so miraculous about the Agency's logistics system is that it has grown to such tremendous proportions in spite of the fact that the NSC directives specifically stated that the CIA should not have the men, money, or materials to pursue operations unless and until the CIA had been directed to carry them out by the NSC in the first place. During the early nineteen fifties, the Council was in the process of issuing a directive revision and an updating of the old NSCID 10/2 -- which would authorize the CIA to carry out special operations when directed by the NSC. A copy of the original draft of this directive used to be in the files of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the paragraph that pertained to what might be called the "logistics plan" of this directive had been carefully and elaborately annotated in plain handwriting. The handwriting was that of the President, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He wanted to make it so certain that the Agency could not acquire the logistics base for regular operations that he wrote into this directive his own stipulations.

When the final draft was published, these stringent stipulations were still there, and they required that whenever the Agency was directed to carry out a special operation, it would be instructed as a function of the same decision of the NSC, to request assistance from one Government agency or another, and that this assistance would be granted from "time to time" and would not be kept by the Agency for use from one operation to another. In other words, Eisenhower prohibited the CIA from stockpiling material for clandestine operations.

This philosophy ran at cross-purposes to the course laid down for himself and for his agency by Allen Dulles. Even though his brother was Secretary of State and his friend Ike was in the White House, he found ways to erode and to get around these stipulations. His report had said that a central intelligence agency should have the power to combine the secret intelligence function and the secret operation function under one official -- the DCI. He was getting closer and closer to having the authority to carry out special operations; but to go all the way he must have the logistics. This is why the early war planning role of the Agency had been so important and then later why the Army Special Forces and Air Force Air Resupply and Communications Wing concepts had proved so opportune. With ready resources such as these all over the world, Dulles never lacked for equipment, facilities, and personnel. On top of this, he was greatly aided toward his goal by the zeal and initiative of the services themselves. They practically fought with each other to see who could provide the Agency with the most at the lowest cost, or for nothing at all.

It was this latter phase of developments that moved the CIA into a position of sufficiency. By the time of the mid-fifties, so many military men had been rotated through the Agency and had been retained as ardent disciples of Allen Dulles that the military services were shot through with men who were even more zealous for the CIA than some of its own people were able to be. When the Agency had not figured out some way to get something it wanted, or when in its own straight-laced manner -- and there were some straight-laced people in the Agency -- it could not bring itself to suggest that one of the services should do this or that, it frequently happened that a general or other ranking individual, still carried away by the "fun and games" fervor of his Agency tour, would set up procedures whereby the agency would get exactly what it wanted. In a sense, the whole U-2 program was an outgrowth of such zeal.

Gradually and with security-concealed movement, the Agency advanced toward its goals, and the glacier-like progress was reinforced by the assurance that in its relationship with the DOD the CIA would never lack for logistics support. During the later part of the fifties, the Agency began to set up storage facilities of its own in many foreign countries. Most this equipment was labeled for war-plan-directed utilization and was otherwise concealed as 'military' property. By 1955 the Agency was ready to try for the big game, and by 1955 knew that it had the equipment to move out. Although the directives had not been changed in that respect, no one noticed the movement of the glacier as it slid along toward Dulles-inspired goals. And by 1955 the Agency was more than the CIA -- by that year the quiet intelligence arm of the President had been diverted into a vast operational organization and its direction had passed from the limited control by the DCI to the ST.