Francesco/who-killed-jfk huggingface dataset:
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 174]
SECRET1975. On September the 18th, 1975, two days later, Dr. Charles      A. Senseney, spelled S-E-N-S-E-N-E-Y. He was Department of      Defense employee formerly in a Special Operations Division at      Fort Dietrich, Maryland. And if you'll wait a minute I'll give      you the actual page number of that. I've been trying to get      this damn thing. People won't listen to me and nobody will.      INTERVIEWER: Well I am and the machine is and we'll get it out      to the public.MR. HALPERN: If you'll hang on one minute -- here it is. Thisis what I wrote to John Ranelagh and I sent it to him in thisform. He took 80 percent of these 38 pages when he put out hispaperback. Anyway, I'm saying this, "Re the photo of SenatorChurch holding a dart gun. The gun was not a CIA gun. It wasnot developed in the early 60's. It was not developed as partof Operation MONGOOSE. See Church Committee Hearings, VolumeI, Testimony of Charles A. Senseney, Department of Defense,Special Operations Division, September 18, 1975, Pages 159 to177. . . The gun was developed long after MONGOOSE which wasrun from October 1961 to October 1962. It was developed in1965 for Special Forces in Vietnam and was available for allinterested government agencies." Quote unquote. And there'sthe text. But the media two days later never mentioned a wordabout, "Two days ago we gave you a report about that dart gun.We called it a CIA gun. Oops, we made a mistake. It's not aCIA dart gun." You think Colby as DCI even tried to put out a
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 175]
SECRETcorrection to the press, a notice saying, "Hey fellas, pleaseput even a little half-inch box in somewhere on page 55." CIAdidn't do a thing. And I hold Bill responsible for that andI'm sorry to be so strong about it. But that is Bill's fault.He brought that bloody gun up there. He knew what they weredoing. He saw the headlines as well as you and me, and theprint media and the television media, the electronic media andthe radio. He never did anything at all to try to correct therecord. At the time it might, big might, big question mark,might have had some impact on some of the media to say, "OOPS,it wasn't a CIA gun, it was a Department of Defense gun."Never. Never! I tried to do it in my own little way. Ididn't have a chance to even start. I've told everybody that Icould think of including Bill Colby the same story I am tellingyou. I said, "I am not making it up. It's all in the samegreen document."INTERVIEWER: Does he mention that in his book? I don'tremember that. Does he mention that in his book? Does BillColby mention this? I don't think so.MR. HALPERN: He never made any attempt to correct the record.Sure the gun was there. I'm not denying that. But it wasn't aCIA dart gun or the CIA assassination gun. Nobody in the mediatried to correct the record. Church didn't, obviously.Never. But the guy who should have done something is BillColby. And I hold Bill personally responsible for not doing
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 176]
SECRETanything about it.INTERVIEWER: I'm glad to get it on the record.MR. HALPERN: It's on the record. I've had it on the record so many times with people. I've told this to Seymour Hersh. But he didn't believe me until he did his own homework. He didn't even believe in looking at my copy. It wasn't here in this house. I was out with him. I do my homework. And when I've got, you know, I said, "I'm not saying this. Here, you read it." He had to do his own homework and he finally told me at another subsequent session, he said, "Yes, you were right, Sam." I said, "I didn't make it up." And I don't know Senseney from a hole in the wall. You got me at the wrong moment.INTERVIEWER: I'm glad to get it.MR. HALPERN: I'm getting hot under the collar.INTERVIEWER: That's fine. That's fine.MR. HALPERN: I don't mind, you know, taking blame for something we did. And there is no blame in having a dart gun, by dammit. I think Senseney was right to have perfected one. The fact that we didn't use it and nobody else used it, that's another one of those wasted things, wasted efforts maybe. But if suddenly somebody needed -- well, we did use it, I'm sorry. But not as an assassination weapon. We used it against dogs.INTERVIEWER: Right, guard dogs.
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 177]
SECRETMR. HALPERN: The guard dogs were put to sleep in at least one operation.INTERVIEWER: You know in *Spy Catcher* there is mention of a dart gun. And I wondered when I read that whether the British had worked on it and then we did? I wasn't sure.MR. HALPERN: According to Senseney, he did this on his own. He and his laboratory types. I don't know Senseney. It's all in here. Read the written report.INTERVIEWER: All right. I'm going to.MR. HALPERN: You know, it's like this business I told you about my being out in Boulder, Colorado at the World Affairs Conference. Perfect example. It's okay for somebody to use the Church Committee Reports to damn CIA, but I can't use the same bloody report to defend CIA. So where the hell do you go?INTERVIEWER: In one hell of a circle, that's for sure.MR. HALPERN: That's for sure. Round and round and round. Anyway, you caught me at a wrong moment.INTERVIEWER: No, it's fine. Tell me, why do you think the press was playing all CIA up and playing CIA . .?MR. HALPERN: I think part of the same business of being anti-establishment, anti-government. Remember, this is after Vietnam, after Watergate. It all adds up. Attack, attack, attack, attack, attack.INTERVIEWER: Anti-secrecy?
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 178]
SECRETMR. HALPERN: Well, partly. Sure. Remember, the Freedom ofInformation Act was just beginning to be used. And it's partof the whole business, it's against the establishment. And oneof the guys who was on the Church Committee staff, one of thestaffers, Rick Inderfurth, I think is his name.INTERVIEWER: Yeah.MR. HALPERN: Okay, you know that name?INTERVIEWER: Yes, I do.MR. HALPERN: Well, after the Church Committee business, hisnext job was in the media on television as a correspondent.INTERVIEWER: Oh, I didn't know that.MR. HALPERN: Guys were looking for other jobs. So, you knowlooking out for their future. I don't object to that but Ihate for them to have gotten ahead over the dead bodies of theIntelligence Community. I mean, it's a little bit beyond thepale as far as I'm concerned.INTERVIEWER: Okay, how about the writings of Seymour Hersh.Significant factor?MR. HALPERN: Yes. If nothing else *The New York Times* and *The New York Times* still has an impact and when you have twobig front page stories like that, it's going to make animpact. And it did make an impact. And particularly when hehad the help, and he admits it, and Colby admits it, he had thehelp of the DCI, Colby, who confirmed to him a lot of the stuffhe had about some of the activities in New York, some of which
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 179]
SECRETwere wrong. And Colby didn't even know they were wrong. ButColby went ahead. This is part of Colby's problem again --giving away more than he has to give away. Why the hell hetalked to Hersh beats the hell out of me.INTERVIEWER: Okay. How about certain newspapers. Were theyespecially harsh in their treatment of CIA during the time?MR. HALPERN: Yeah. I don't know of any that wasn't. Theremay have been some around the country.INTERVIEWER: Christain Science Monitor, maybe?MR. HALPERN: Nope. Oh no, no, no, no. The Monitor was alongwith everybody else. They were a part of the pack. And I'vegot all the clippings. The Monitor was part of the pack.INTERVIEWER: Wall Street Journal?MR. HALPERN: That I don't know. I don't read the Wall StreetJournal religiously. I used to read The Monitor, The Post, andThe New York Times very religiously. I found that I: a.couldn't afford them all, and b. my clippings were overflowingthe room anyway, and I just read The Monitor and The WashingtonPost and, of course, Time magazine.INTERVIEWER: Washington Star? Was that . . .MR. HALPERN: The Washington Star was going but they were allon the attack. Nobody wanted to be left out. Everyone, theyall wanted to be part of the show. And that's why you had thetelevision and the radio, all the different channels. I don'tcare what, all the news broadcast. It was almost as if
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 180]
SECRETeverybody said, "This is the time fellas and we are all going to make headlines." And they were all looking for headlines no matter what it was. Good, bad, or indifferent. They didn't care about the facts. This was one of the reasons that AFIO was created -- we called it ARIO when we first began under Dave Phillips -- to try to put some kind of moderation and some kind of factual sense into some of these guys who had absolutely no concept of what the hell they were doing, what they were talking about. It was just like the Representatives and the Senators who didn't have any idea except that they all thought this was James Bond fun and games stuff. And there was no leavening of any kind of criticism. And what we were trying to do, at least in the AFIO side or the ARIO side, was to have a place where the media could come and talk to us. And we weren't going to give away any secrets. And we didn't. But to put things in perspective, put things in context. Try to explain to them what the hell that terminology was, what the definitions were, what covert action was. You know, nobody knew.INTERVIEWER: AFIO or ARIO ran a questionnaire with its membership. Do you know whatever happened to the questionnaire?MR. HALPERN: The questionnaire was put out at the request of one of the members who was doing some kind of a study -- a Ph.D. or a Masters or something. He was doing a paper. And this was a part of his paper. And I don't know what the
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 181]
SECRETresults were. I never saw the finished product. But you can check with the office and see if they have it.INTERVIEWER: I saw some mention in one of the Congressional documents, Dave Phillips in testimony, maybe for government operations.MR. HALPERN: Well, it may have been. But again, Dave wasn't running the questionnaire. That was an individual member's effort and using AFIO as a means of getting it out to the membership in kind of one fell swoop. He didn't have any way of getting -- I don't know what the membership was, maybe a thousand or fifteen-hundred something like that -- he wouldn't have any way of reaching that many people as a private individual. So we sent out the questionnaire that he prepared. And as a matter of fact I don't think I even responded to it because I thought some of the questions were silly. And I didn't see any point in answering silly questions.INTERVIEWER: You didn't save it?MR. HALPERN: No, I didn't. I'm sorry.INTERVIEWER: I'm just curious because from the testimony there are some percentages.MR. HALPERN: Dave may have. You might ask Dave. Dave may have saved it. I don't know if the office itself saved it. They weren't very history-minded in the office.
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 182]
SECRETINTERVIEWER: How about your impressions regarding support from the White House during the Congressional investigations?MR. HALPERN: Again, from the outside looking in . . .INTERVIEWER: Right.MR. HALPERN: I don't think the White House was very supportive, or at least as supportive as they might have been. But I think I've always thought that they might have been more supportive if Colby had been more honest with the White House in the very beginning. And the beginning to me is January 15, 1975, before the Church Committee. And read Colby's book about that. I mean, he himself says, you know, says he was out of step, basically. And if I were sitting in the White House, why would I suddenly think that this guy was going to work with me. You know, he cut my feet off at the stumps, at the hips, the first time around. And there is no way I can pull him back now. I think the White House was concerned, I think Henry Kissinger was concerned about the fact of the loss of emphasis and the loss of capability in the Intelligence Community and how to stem that particular problem. And if you remember, Ford came out with his own plan of reorganizing the Community and took a bit of the wind out of the sails of the Church Committee, which I thought was a smart thing to do. It may have been cosmetic and it may have been simply a deal. But by that time he was dealing with Bush in '76, a different kind of a guy. And well, an Executive Order came out under Ford in
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 183]
SECRETFebruary of '76 and it's called the Bush paper. It wasn't. I mean, Bush couldn't possibly, even with his staff, have written a new Executive Order in the couple of weeks that he was in the office. It had to be the one that was prepared by Colby and his staff or his staff officers. So that was basically the order that came out in '76 with a Bill Colby related order, an attempt to do something. But again, why should the White House and all of it's parts gone out of its way to work with a guy they weren't sure of? Now when Bush took over in '76 it's a different story. But by that time the damage had been done. It was '75 when the damage was done, not '76, because by '76 the Hearings had died down, the coverage had died down, and it was only starting to come up again when they started to show these green books and the reports and the Hearings and by that time it was the middle of '76. But it doesn't take long to destroy an Intelligence Community. You know, boom.INTERVIEWER: Did you ever hear anything of the role of Mr. Haig?MR. HALPERN: Not much. Not much. At least I don't remember. I think by that time Al was out of town. Wasn't he in Europe at that time? By '76?INTERVIEWER: By '76, he would have been.MR. HALPERN: Yes, he would have been in Europe by that time. So I don't remember hearing of Al very much.
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 184]
SECRETINTERVIEWER: That's right. He went off to Europe. How about this: A number of observers believe the Congressional Hearings in this year of investigation were a real watershed in CIA history.MR. HALPERN: Oh sure. Before the deluge and after the deluge. No question. No question. We thought we had a problem in '67. That's about nine years earlier, eight years earlier when we had the *Ramparts* flap. And that was a tremendous flap. And I think we discussed that last time and I'm on tape on that. But that was the first big real problem we had, big war issue. I mean, the Bay of Pigs was bad enough, but that was limited, by comparison, to the *Ramparts* flap which was worldwide in its significance; and covered a whole variety of subjects, in terms of the different covers we had used and in terms of the different things we had done. Even though it was all covert action. But by '75 we weren't just talking covert action. The Bay of Pigs was also covert action. It just happened to be paramilitary activity of covert action, but it was covert action. But by '75 you are getting into intelligence, you are getting into counterintelligence, you're getting the whole "shmear," let alone the CA stuff, the covert action stuff. So '75 was the first time there was across the board from A to Zed and back again. And it was the kitchen sink, soup, apples, nuts, everything. And it wasn't just CIA, it was the entire Community, which even hurt worse than that.
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 185]
SECRETIt included things like NSA, which up until then had beenreally sacrosanct. And they blew stuff in NSA like, I wish Iknew the detail. But all you've got to do is read the stuffand can have a feel for what the hell went wrong there. Theyblew more than they should have.INTERVIEWER: There was a comment by Bob Woodward in *Veil* thatBill Colby in the Hearings, his real success was that heprotected NSA.MR. HALPERN: Oh, I've got hearings in there about NSA and NSAbeing on the firing line, and I know the staff officer whohelped prepare most of the testimony by the Director of NSA atthe time, General something or other. I forget his name rightnow. The guy who did most of the work had been a collegeclassmate of mine at the National War College, Jack Harding.And it hurt very badly all the way around. And Colby couldn'thave possibly protected them.INTERVIEWER: Woodward overstated it.MR. HALPERN: And as a matter of fact, I think part of theproblem, again sitting on the outside, was that each of theagencies in turn had to protect their own domain and their ownactivities. And no DCI, I don't care who he was, could havebeen able to coordinate and alter the extent of trying to comeup with a solid front. I think if he did there might have beensome law which said you are in collusion. So you can't, you
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 186]
SECRETknow, you are not allowed to defend yourself together. I don'tknow, I'm just guessing.INTERVIEWER: Okay. How about the Congressional investigations-- affect Agency morale a lot or . . .MR. HALPERN: Well, I can only assume again from the outsidethat they had to. I know people talked to me about it frompeople who were inside, talking to me on the outside, in termsof what its done in terms of morale. I think as I said before,the feelings of, if you guys who had been here before hadn'tdone those nasty things, we wouldn't be under the gun. We areback to square one on that.INTERVIEWER: Sure. Okay. The issue of oversight. Do youbelieve that oversight by two select committees is preferableto the earlier oversight by six to eight committees?MR. HALPERN: We never had six to eight as such. There werefour committees of Congress which had oversight, two in theHouse and two in the Senate. There was under the Hughes-RyanAmendment six to eight committees we reported to. I wasn'tinvolved anymore. But anyway, the Agency had to report oncovert action. It was a separate subject.INTERVIEWER: Right, good distinction.MR. HALPERN: So that there never were more than four oversightcommittees as such. And now we are down to two. And I havebeen on public record and in print favoring one committee. Aslong as you are going to have committees, have one. But people
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 187]
SECRETforget that even when you have only two now, we still have to -- remember the Agency still reports to Foreign Affairs, briefs them on foreign affairs. The House Armed Services Committee still gets special reporting. The Appropriations Committees in both the House and the Senate are *always* involved with *everything*. So you've got four committees right now anyway. Minimum. In practical daily life. You've got to go to Appropriations and nobody in Congress is ever going to keep Appropriations out of *anything*. And on top of that, then there is Government Operations. I could go on forever. So boiling it down to even one joint committee, it'll help some, but it won't solve the problem. But it is better than having two, with two separate staffs.INTERVIEWER: Okay how about, do you think it is practical for the Congress to be informed of the covert activities of the Agency?MR. HALPERN: Yes, within limits, within reason. They are not, as I said before, they are not part of the Executive and they are not going to be -- I hope they are not going to be -- in charge of or as part of making the decision whether you are going to do something or not. And whether that is cover action or whether that is sending the Marines in, you can't have them sitting there telling you you can do it or you can't do it. Not if you are going to be a President.
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 188]
SECRETINTERVIEWER: Okay, what about this one, Sam, and you've really been very, very patient. I really appreciate it. What are the lessons that you think are to be learned from the Church and Pike investigations? Either institutional lessons, that is the Agency or.MR. HALPERN: I think first of all you need one, I think if you are going to have an oversight it should be one joint committee, a small oversight committee, not very many numbers either in staff or in Representatives and Senators. The Director has to be honest with these guys. He has got to tell them lots of things that he normally wouldn't tell them, I think. And what he tells them has to be cleared with the President before he tells them, except for the normal mundane things like normal budget stuff and normal personnel figures. No President should get involved in that. It's silly. But in terms of specific activities, whether intelligence collection or counterintelligence or covert action, don't dummy up with Congress. On the other hand, you've got to build a rapport where there are certain things they are not going to ask you about -- they shouldn't ask you about -- such as identities of agents; and that kind of thing. Such as the kind of liaison arrangements you make with foreign governments. Yeah, they might consider it as a treaty and, therefore, it comes under the treaty making power. It's advise and consent powers of the Senate. But I think they've got to bite the bullet themselves
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 189]
SECRETand realize that certain things are not for discussion even at that level. I think a DCI has to glad-hand the people on the Hill -- not all 100 of them in the Senate or 435 in the House, obviously. But the House and the Senate have got to have some delegation of their responsibilities, their authority and what have you to a handful of people And that can't change every six months or every two years. There are going to be some guys who are going to stay there for a while. And that's why the arguments against the joint committee because the House of Representatives has an election every two years. But a lot of guys are in there for life, basically. They come from safe, what the British would call safe boroughs, you know, safe districts. It's only the rare thing that's going to change it. So there has got to be some kind of give and take on this. And they've got to grow into this real world, on the Hill, that certain things you just don't ask about particularly in the intelligence and the counterintelligence field. You know, if a Congressman says, "Tell me who the Soviet spies, who the Soviets have recruited on my staff." Uh uh. You don't tell them that if you've got any good hard information, not until you are absolutely certain and not until you've got some kind of an operation running to control the damn thing and play them back or whatever the situation is, because these guys, the first thing they do is fire the guy. That's the last thing in the world you want to do if you are running a counterintelligence operation. So you've got to have give and
[104-10324-10002.pdf — page 190]
SECRETtake on this kind of stuff. You've got to play games withthese guys on the Hill. You've got to wine them and dine themand breakfast them, or whatever the phrase is. I think theDCI, whoever he is, has got to be able to work with a selectgroup of people on the Hill who have got to have the confidenceof the rest of their colleagues, whom they can trust and whocan understand, like Huddleston says, that not everybody inCongress is going to know everything that these guys are goingto know. These guys in turn are going to have to understandthat they can't know everything either. There are some thingsthat you just don't talk about. And I'm not talking aboutthese big covert action operations and what have you. They'11hear about those when it comes to passing the money for aparticular political action operation or a paramilitaryoperation. Those things take lots of dough. It's like in theold days the Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty took lots ofmoney to run those radios. And Congress knew what the hell wasgoing on. And Congress knew that RFE and RL were advertisingin this country from the very beginning for American donationsby American citizens to fight Communism via the radioairwaves. And I don't know if that was legal or not to thisday, but I guess nobody objected. And they didn't object inthe Church Committee to this thing. Except that now that it isrun by another part of the US Government, that makes it okay.It's the same thing.