Francesco/who-killed-jfk huggingface dataset:
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SECRETto. And sometimes they did, like the Cuban missile crisis. And the Presidentstopped the distribution all across. Completely.INTERVIEWER: Was there any feeling -- you talked about the Band of Brothersin Clandestine Service - was there any similar feeling in the DDI?MR. HALPERN: I don't know. You'd have to ask somebody there that could tellyou. Because I am in effect the Johnny-come-lately to the DDP because Istarted out in OSS and R&A, and then moved from R&A over into the SSU, the SIside -- the Secret Intelligence side. And I know when I was in R&A ourfeeling then was we were part of OSS, the whole thing, and even though the SIpeople didn't always tell us what they were doing, we found out later that weshouldn't know. At least I found out later. There was a good reason why weshouldn't know. We could work with them and we worked very well with them interms of providing intelligence support for their operations in the field inSoutheast Asia, which was my beat, and we would sit and work with the officerswho were going out (not the agents) but the officers going out to do the job,and when I was in Ceylon (again R&A) we worked very closely together with themin terms of planned operations against various parts of Japanese heldterritory. And we wrote all kinds of papers for them and pulled together allkinds of stuff, and the question was in those days we felt more like we wereall part of OSS and OSS was a brand new thing. At least that is the attitudeI felt from talking to my friends about it, even as a part of R&A. But laterwhen it became a bigger outfit (a peacetime outfit) it was more -- well, wewere part of CIA in DDP but we felt for good and sufficient reasons that itwould be better if we could work out some decent cover so we'd be on theoutside totally devoid and divorced from the government. I don't know, thenumber of times we had study groups planning on how to do this, to have a real
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SECRETclandestine outfit working outside the government, with proper communications obviously and clearances and what have you. We talked about Colorado before in one of the papers -- go out to Colorado somewhere. You know, way out in nowhere. This was in the '40's -- the late '40's -- or go to some other part of the country and get hooked up by telephone or wire or what have you long before all of this computer nonsense. Or even get buried in New York City, Wall Street, or one of those huge monstrosities that existed even then as a private company somewhere. And do actual company business -- be a real business, but also run your operation. Well, this has been tried so many times in terms of study groups and nothing has ever come of it. Nothing.INTERVIEWER: Didn't even come close.MR. HALPERN: No. You couldn't get people willing to provide you the money, the material, work out all of the legal aspects and it was really a hell of a job when you consider you have the salaries and social security and workman's compensation and how do you work out decent pensions for people and making a career out of it and all that kind of stuff. You could do it for a few (as we have done over the past years). We used to do anyway. We'd have decent proprietaries. We'd run our own insurance companies and all that kind of stuff and provide lifetime pensions for people and work on a system that would work. But you could do it for a few and we did. I don't know what they are doing today, and I am not interested in knowing. But to do it for a mass, it would be tough -- very, very, very tough. So when you talk about brothers or family, as we got bigger the DDP-DDI split was very evident and, as a matter of fact, at one time, believe it or not, in the very early days DDP case officers on the desks were not even allowed to talk to DDI analysts because we thought, in those days, we thought the DDI analyst would be able to convince
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# SECRETthe clandestine operator enough so that pretty soon the clandestine operator was captive of the analyst and would be doing his research for him. And we had plenty of calls from DDI analysts which in effect, the answers were in the Library of Congress, for God's sake go get them. We are not going down there and get them for you and we are not going to burden the field people with going to get those kind of figures for you. They are right there. Go get them. And we had lots of fights about that. Oh yea.INTERVIEWER: I suppose there must have been a lot of tension?MR. HALPERN: There was. There was. Because we kept saying the DDI analyst was supposed to do their own research; do your own job. And I said in the first place, and I remember I got into some arguments with some of them, and I am sure my colleagues did too, that collecting intelligence via a clandestine mechanism is the most expensive, time-consuming way of collecting a piece of information. You have to have long lead time, you don't have a whole bunch of agents in various departments of foreign governments so that you can just press buttons and get answers out of them. And it takes time to identify what you are looking for. And our job is a selected job and you have to go for the hard targets. I am not interested in finding out the railway statistics for you or the tonnage of wheat that goes through ports, for God's sakes. We can get that from the Department of Agriculture or Commerce or something. This is a very, very expensive way to do business. This is why we had to set up actually a requirements staff which screened requirements so that we wouldn't get flooded with this nonsensical stuff that should be done by somebody in the US Government, don't get me wrong, but not the Clandestine Service. The collector has got to be so fine-tuned that it is only after you've tried everything else that you go for this particular thing. And don't expect the
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SECRETanswer tomorrow morning. So we had a whole mechanism just in the screeningprocess. As a result the orders went out, "Don't talk to each other." Well,over a number of years we finally broke that down which I thought we shouldhave.INTERVIEWER: When would you say what point of time was it pretty well brokendown?MR. HALPERN: It began to be broken down let me give you two examples. Onein 1957 and '58 when I was involved as the Exec then for Far East Division ofthe DDP. We were involved in an operation in Indonesia with the Colonel fromSumatra and later the Colonel from Celebes. I told my boss I was going to dothis and he said fine. I personally knew from the war from the OSS daysthe analyst in the DDI, and I think it was OCI, who was on the Indonesiandesk. And I kept her very well clued on important developments in theoperation as it was going along so that she wouldn't be caught short by thingsand would be able to watch what went into the President's Daily Brief and wentinto the daily stuff and I mean it worked fine. But that was on a one-to-onebasis. And how much she told the DDDI personally, that was up to her. Iwasn't going to tell her how to run the show. But it never was on a DDP-DDIbasis, you see, the two got together and said, "Here's the operation." Noway. The second time we were breaking it even more was after the CubanMissile Crisis. After the Cuban Missile Crisis. 1963 now we have movedabout five or six years.INTERVIEWER: Right.MR. HALPERN: Des Fitzgerald was transferred from Chief of the Far EastDivision to take over from Bill Harvey on the Cuban operation. Under Bill itwas called TFW (Task Force W) and under Des Fitzgerald it was called Special
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SECRETAffairs Staff. This was after Operation Mongoose and Des had an uneasy feeling that the intelligence we were collecting on Cuba was just not being accepted by the analysts. And it wasn't. Well, it wasn't a picture and it wasn't COMINT. The analyst only believed pictures and COMINT. And maybe today they believe telemetry or something, I don't know, maybe if it's not a picture it is something else. Anyhow, if it wasn't technical in one way or another, Cuban sources, the hell with them. And they were just being washed out. And Des took it upon himself (and he was the kind of guy who would do these things without getting approval or clearances). He decided he would ask the DDI to send a senior officer down to (I say down because we were in the basement of the building) to come to us on SAS, and Des would make available to this one man (a very senior guy -- I don't remember who; my memory has gone bad), would make available true identities of all sources, and that created holy hell within the DDP because, obviously, it went up and down the line and Des' colleagues (as division staff chiefs) thought he was crazy, and it was just a really big battle royal on this thing, but Des being Des said, "The hell with it, I'm going to do it. They're my sources, I'm responsible, it's my operation, and goddamnit, you have to give credit where it is due." Dick Helms supported him against the argumentation by all the other senior officers. Nobody else wanted to go along with this.INTERVIEWER: Is that right?MR. HALPERN: So this guy came down and he sat for days, weeks, I don't know, and he had access, believe it or not. I thought he was crazy. I thought Des had lost his marbles. The one thing you protect is sources. Allen Dulles is supposed to have said, he would even lie to the President if necessary to protect a source. And that was sacrosanct. You don't tel-T anybody your
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SECRETsources, for God's sakes. You don't even tell the guy who's sitting and working next to you who your source is. But anyway this was done and after (I wish I could remember his name), anyway, after this fellow had gone through all this nonsense and all the information, he came up with a report that simply, in effect, said to the DDI people involved, "You don't know what you are missing. These are honest, bona fide sources by and large and," he said, "I think you are crazy for not using them." So from that point of view it starts to break down. The animosity, the differences of approach on how you work this thing, and it was a good thing from that point of view, and I must say not one of our sources was ever revealed by this man. He kept it, you know - integrity.INTERVIEWER: Sure.MR. HALPERN: And he became one of us, in effect. OK, he knew the sources. He knew more than I did and I was the Exec. I never asked for sources. But Des also had another thing as part of this program. Des started to expand what is called the source description on the disseminations. We used to have just a one liner or something like that, the guy had access on it. And we ended up by writing a short paragraph about the source, without identifying the source, which in effect gave the reader some idea of the source's reliability, his access to this particular type of information, how long he had been around with us, and, in effect, we're telling you this is good, bad or indifferent.INTERVIEWER: They were a tested source.MR. HALPERN: Yes. And without going into that numbering system or the grading system which is hard to work with. And this was a departure. And this was a test again. And only on the task force we began that before it
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SECRETbecame DDP-wide and the DDP hierarchy was opposed to that too. Because if you work with us long enough and you don't change these by-lines often enough, somebody can sit and pretty much zero in on who the source is. And it is a hell of a lot of extra work. Believe me, a hell of a lot of extra work. But Des insisted. Again being Des, and then when he became DDP, he put that system in effect throughout the DDP. And unfortunately he was in the DDP only a short period before he died in July of '67. So when you're talking about the time frame of breakdown, it began in '63. Des took that system into WH when he became the Division Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, as it's called now LA. And then he took it into the DDP when he became DDP in '65.INTERVIEWER: My goodness.MR. HALPERN: And he remained there until 1967.INTERVIEWER: Gee. That's good background.MR. HALPERN: So best when you are talking about breakdown of the dispute, or the fight between the two, there were very valid reasons for both sides to maintain the position that they had at the time. I can see their side. Having been from R&A, I can understand what their problem was, like I understand our problem on the collecting side. And so, but gradually, I don't know what the system is today and how it works, but anyway we began to break it down, but it took, well, it began in '47 and took until '67. 20 years. What you've got is two different worlds. And this is one of the reasons I keep telling journalists who talk to me, we're both in the same business. You are collecting information, and you want to protect sources. That's what we are doing. You do it to get a Pulitzer Prize and we do it to protect the United States.
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SECRETIt took all this time because of the very firm positions held by both sides. It took all this time to get a better approach, a more reasoned approach, to talk to each other, and both sides still maintained their respective jobs.INTERVIEWER: And Des was a key figure.MR. HALPERN: Des was a very key figure in this and he was doing this mostly on his own. He had a hell of a lot of opposition. And, as I say, even his closest allies, and I was his Exec, and I thought he was crazy. And I told him so. I said you know you are giving away the store.INTERVIEWER: And Helms backed him?MR. HALPERN: Finally. It took a lot of doing, but Helms backed him. Helms said, "All right, let Des try as an experiment. He'll be the guinea pig. Let's see what happens." And I must say if the DDI man who was chosen (it was a very senior, goddammit), he'd been around a long time and had a marvelous reputation. And a man of integrity and all of that, and boy he proved it. But if he had broken, if he had slipped even just telling the DDI himself the identities of some of the sources, the thing would have fallen right flat on its face. But simply because of this one individual being who he was in terms of an honest man, knew what the job was, he knew what had to be done and he kept it all to himself.INTERVIEWER: Great.MR. HALPERN: He knew more about our sources when he was finished with the job than Des did.INTERVIEWER: Is that right?MR. HALPERN: Well, Des didn't know what the sources were. He knew them by cryptonyms. You know, "Radiator," yea he is the guy from the army. You know. Or "Lamb," he's the guy that gives the stuff on the Mig-22 or 21. You
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13-00000SECRETknow, that's all you needed to know. But this guy knew who the sources were.He knew them by name, rank and serial number. And it was an unbelievablething that was done.INTERVIEWER: And no leaks.MR. HALPERN: Not a bit. That was the most important thing. And I guess heknew what he was up to and he knew what the consequences of leaking were. Theexperiment would have dropped dead in its tracks and nobody would have evertried it again. Ever. So it worked. But that's what finally broke it. So,as I say, you were up to '65, '66, '67 when Des was DDP.INTERVIEWER: Okay. Earlier we were just touching on Congressional committeesand there are some critics who say the Congressional committees overseeing theAgency before 1975 were "blind and toothless watchdogs; that members ofCongress were unaware or unconcerned about Agency excesses." What are yourviews with regard to Congressional oversight of the Agency?MR. HALPERN: Well, in those days the four committees were not blind, were nottoothless and they were not whatever the other phrase you had there. The fourgroups were largely controlled by senior members of Congress who really ranthe Congress in those days. And their concern was: a) not themselvesgetting to know too much of the secrets that went on; and b) they feltlargely, you pick good people, you give them a job to do, you give them thetools to do it and don't muck around with them. Particularly, in thisparticular field. Maybe it was ignorance. I don't know. But that was thegeneral attitude. As I say and as I have said before, I have had enoughreports from my bosses. The DCI was dying to talk substance with some ofthese leaders on the Hill, and they did not want to listen. And that, Ithink, was wrong. Maybe they could have helped. Maybe it would have been23SECRET
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SECRETdifferent. I don't know. But they weren't blind and they weren't toothless. They were deliberate on that part. And they didn't deliberately blind themselves. They were taken in a little, I think, sometimes when we used to show them all kinds of little goodies and fancy gidgets and gadgets and secret devices and what have you, just like show and tell. And I used to have to prepare some of these things or get the stuff from the agent or from rest of the DDP for the goodies -- and we called them goodies -- to show the Hill. Well, they weren't always interested in seeing even those things.INTERVIEWER: Is that right?MR. HALPERN: Well, "We know you're doing a good job. Go. Go. Go."INTERVIEWER: These goodies might be radios or . . ?MR. HALPERN: Could be radios, could be concealment devices, secret writing devices -- all kinds of gadgets with different kinds of bugs in them. And obviously they got smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller they got more and more heisted into looking at them, but it also meant goodies in terms of good intelligence we picked up. I differ completely with Admiral Turner who said that the years he was a DCI he never saw a piece of intelligence that was worth the life of anybody. I differ with him about that. There was some intelligence which I think was worth more than the life of a person. I can give you an example of that later. But, the committees, I think, deliberately didn't want to get involved. They weren't lined up or held us for fools. I don't think they were fooled a bit. They knew what they were doing. They wanted it that way. And they kept it that way. And even in the staffs in those days of those committee people were limited staffs who were cleared for all this kind of stuff, and they were not interested in jogging, or pushing, or goading their bosses into unnecessary mucking around of what the hell was
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SECRETgoing on. They just weren't. Usually the staff directors of each of thesmall units were the only ones cleared for most of things and sat in on themeetings.INTERVIEWER: They were cleared by the Agency?MR. HALPERN: Oh sure.INTERVIEWER: They went through the whole, the background...?MR. HALPERN: I don't know if ... They weren't given polygraphs. That'sfor sure. At least I don't think so. How they did the clearances I neverasked. But anyway, they were cleared. So that, people say they were takeninto camp. I don't think that is the proper phrase. My own feeling is therewas a different attitude. They weren't out to do investigative reporting, ineffect, for themselves. They weren't looking for titles, they weren't lookingfor television headlines. They were just trying to do an honest day's work,quietly, peacefully and get enough information to know about the budget thenthey got all the budgetary information they wanted, all the budgets wentthrough them without an exception. No question about that, they knew exactlywhere every penny was and approved it and what have you and all theseso-called covert operations were always cleared with the proper committee.The committees had to alert the OMB in those days, the BOB really, the Bureauof the Budget. The BOB wouldn't release money for some of our activitiesuntil they got the word from the committees on the Hill.INTERVIEWER: Is that right?MR. HALPERN: Yes, the four committees. So we didn't have a pot full of moneythat we could just willy nilly use.INTERVIEWER: Did you have a contingency fund? Modest.MR. HALPERN: Well, the contingency fund was up on the Hill. I mean, it was
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SECRETcontrolled by the Hill. And it is today, I believe. But before you get money released by the BOB, somebody up there had to say OK. And that happened on every one of the operations I know about. In the Far East, I don't know about the European ones, I am sure the system is the same. It was a well-oiled machine. Sure, they didn't ask the kind of questions that are asked today, but they knew what the operation was.INTERVIEWER: There was a feeling between the Agency and the Congress that there was good liaison?MR. HALPERN: Oh yes. It was overt. Completely. Always. It worked very well indeed. And the system worked so that the Legislative Counsel, whether it was Pforzheimer or John Warner or anybody else, they knew who to call within the DDP, for example. If they were sitting up on the Hill and one of the members -- could be a Senator or Representative of the committees -- wanted to know something, they knew who to call, and when I had the job they usually called me for the DDP because I was able to get them the answer and it worked very well. In case someone didn't know everything, they knew where to get the information. And when Congress asked you gave it to them.INTERVIEWER: Do you think this was also a reflection of the view that the Agency and the Congress both saw the Soviet threat as a real threat?MR. HALPERN: I am not sure that was part of it. It may have been. But that's a conjecture on my part. I think it was more the people we were dealing with on the Hill had also been through the same things most of us had been through. They are all part of the same generation. We were all working together in terms of protecting the country. At least we thought we were protecting the country. The business where some of this falls down is when we started, because we had to, start working operations more in the United States
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SECRETin order to get assets to go abroad, and once you start that you're touching a very sensitive area and we all knew that. And we'll talk about that later. We'll talk about MHCHAOS.INTERVIEWER: Yes.MR. HALPERN: But until then the consensus was, you know, we've got to have a united front, we've got to find out what's going on in the world, we're getting more involved in the world, and we all need to help each other. And I don't think -- yeah, the Soviet threat was there but it was different, I think, it was a different -- I mean, we weren't expecting the Soviets to march over the border except very early in the late -- right after the war in the '40's when you had the Berlin blockade and that kind of stuff. Yeah, at that time people were expecting the Soviet troops to come marching not only into Bonn but also into Paris. But that didn't last into the '50's. It was a totally, sure there was a Soviet threat abroad and later a Chinese Communist threat in Southeast Asia, no question of that. And there was a matter of, I guess when Dean Rusk said many years later in the '60's, something about, there is a dirty war going on in the alleys of the world in which we don't see, but he said it's important, and, yeah, we were there.INTERVIEWER: Was there much more cooperation?MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah, it was total. What broke it down was the Vietnam war again and I guess Watergate. When '74 came around, I mean the Congressional elections of '74 came, and you had a totally different bunch of guys coming in, and Congress became 435 on one side and 100 on another side. Totally independent kingdoms and principalities. And you had no cohesion and no control. I think that's when it all broke. You couldn't go to two or three guys on the Congressional Hill and say, "Here are the facts, this is what we