Francesco/who-killed-jfk huggingface dataset:
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SECRETthe Senate to look into intelligence across the board. CIA was just one ofthe targets, I guess one of the main targets, but not the only one. And itwas just a happy (from their point of view), a happy combination ofcircumstances. Seymour Hersh was looking at different things and had accessto different sources and wrote those two stories in December of '74, whichjust dovetailed beautifully with what they were trying to do and broughttogether what they needed and what they wanted. And that is where the titlecame from something the Church group came up with the title. It was thestaffers and the various other committees who had worked this out monthsbefore. And by the summer and early fall of '74 these guys were ready to goand when views from the Church Committee impetus came, there it was. They hadthe title, they had the paperwork, they had everything done, and they justpushed it through.INTERVIEWER: Do you feel their efforts along these lines even pre-date theWatergate investigation?MR. HALPERN: Well I don't know if it pre-dates the Watergate or not. I can'tsay. I just don't know. I think there were some possibilities of going intandem with the Watergate. But I don't think that the Watergate problemitself was what these guys were interested in but I wish I could identify thembetter. They were targeting against intelligence as such and they succeeded.INTERVIEWER: And some of it was disillusionment with the...MR HALPERN: Disillusionment with the Vietnam War. No question about that.There was another guy. The name was Paul and the reason I say that - the lastname was Paul because we; in the working of the intelligence officer, we hada hell of a time with two Congressional teams that used to go out forCongressional committees -- these were staffers. One was made up of Pincus
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SECRETwho later became the Washington Post guy. Pincus and Paul (I am trying to remember what the first name of Paul was) but we always regarded them Pincus and Paul: P squared.INTERVIEWER: That is P-A-U-L?MR. HALPERN: P-A-U-L, yes. And they were problem children in terms of having to advise the field; the State Department had a similar problem advising the Embassies on how to handle these guys and how to brief them, what to brief them. We weren't trying to hide anything, or kid them or lie to them or anything like that, but it was a matter of how you really work with these people to try to get them to understand what you are trying to do. These guys were always traveling around Southeast Asia, in particular, and it was mostly during the Vietnam War problem. And the second team (we called them L&Ms) first the L stood for - Lowenstein was the L (and I'll be damned if I can think of what the M was). But I think in looking into *The New York Times* in 1973 and 1974 long before the Watergate thing and the Church Committee business began, these guys were always floating around as Congressional staffers. I forget if they were the Senate or the House but anyway they had these two teams which were real problems in terms of the Executive branch of the government having to deal with the Congressional branch of the government. The old conflict of foreign policy that lives in the Constitution. I think the Constitution was made that way, to have the stresses and strains that we still see today.INTERVIEWER: Were these teams looking at the domestic?MR. HALPERN: No, no. This was all foreign.INTERVIEWER: Oh, all foreign.MR. HALPERN: They were all looking at foreign at that point. They had
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SECRETnothing with the Church nonsense and MHCHAOS. It was all in the foreignaffairs field. And they were mucking around all over the place trying to getinto stuff which we held as classified both we the State Department, theDefense Department, what have you. Including the use of the Meo tribes inLaos, it came out some money was involved, people were using Air America wasused, all that kind of stuff. These people were not representatives of thethen Intelligence Oversight Committees and with the advice of the thenOversight Committees (the four of them we had) we had to be careful as to whatwe told these people from different committees of the Congress. The fouroversight committees were jealous of their prerogatives you could imagineparticularly in the days when you had real strong men running the Congress andthey did not want all of these other committees, in terms of jurisdictionalfights, mucking around in what they were supposed to be handling it. And sosomehow we were caught in the middle of the jurisdictional fights in theCongress at the same time we were handling classified stuff we didn't know howfar you can go with these people. They weren't cleared for a lot of stuff.So they were real problem children. And these two teams were the precursorsto what later became the Church and Pike Committees.INTERVIEWER: Well, were these teams attached to particular committees orsubcommittees?MR. HALPERN: Yes, well they were representatives of particular committees. Ijust can't remember what the committees' names were.INTERVIEWER: OK, right.MR. HALPERN: It didn't really matter to us. They were not part of the fouroversight committees.INTERVIEWER: They were not?
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SECRETMR. HALPERN: They were not.INTERVIEWER: OK.MR. HALPERN: And the oversight committees, maybe that was one of the problems, didn't do much oversight as you well know. And as a matter of fact I remember these reports from DCI's coming back saying, "I got nobody to talk to up on the Hill. They won't listen. All they want to do is give me money and personnel. And they say, you know, "Go do your job." And so this is true. I have heard that from senior officers in the jobs I have held at staff meetings over and over again. The Director came back again and he doesn't have anybody to talk to. Nobody wants to listen. Nobody wants to know. And there is Senator Stennis and Saltonstall and all of those others.INTERVIEWER: And Russell?MR. HALPERN: And Russell who sat on the floor of the Senate. You know there are certain things you have to just accept and not know about. Or Goldwater even today, when he was chairman of the Senate Committee said, "This Committee shouldn't exist." So the four oversight committees never gave us any trouble really except toward the end, they were very clear about one thing. I think it was Russell who told I think Dick Helms, DCI -- and you can check the record on this one I'm sure -- who told him, "this is the last year," (I forget what year it was, I guess it must have been '71 or something like that.) This is the last year we are going to fund those Meo tribes for you. It's getting too big. Turn it over to the military," you know, "and lose it in the Defense budget." Because it got to over a hundred million dollars and all that kind of stuff, I guess in those days that was a little big.INTERVIEWER: Well did you have the impression besides Pincus that Paul and L&M were also Vietnam veterans or...?
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SECRETMR. HALPERN: I don't know if they were Vietnam veterans as such. I thinkthey did not like what was going on in Southeast Asia. And the so-calledSecret War wasn't a secret in Laos. It wasn't a secret war, for God'ssakes. How could it be secret if the press was writing about it?INTERVIEW: Sure.MR. HALPERN: It was the press that gave it the name Secret War. The Senatorsand the Representatives, they knew what the hell they were appropriating. Imean, at least the committee members did when they put down money into thebudget, and all the budgets and all that money was cleared by Congress. TheCIA doesn't print its own money for God's sakes. Somebody had to appropriatethe money, and it was there. And as a matter of fact it was (what the heck ishis name) Saltonstall, I think.INTERVIEWER: Symington?MR. HALPERN: Symington. I'm sorry. Symington was the guy who later got DickHelms in trouble in '73 in front of the Church Multinational CorporationSubcommittee of the Foreign Affairs Committee and not his own committee. Itwas Symington, Christ, he reviewed the troops out in Laos. Bob Jantzen whowas then Chief of Station, Bangkok, arranged for (I forget who the heck wasChief in Laos and Vietnam), but anyway, he went up to the Meo tribes andreviewed them and then he goes, "I never heard of things like this." What areyou going to do with them when they do when they do that? So, but that ismuch later. I mean, earlier than the Church Committee itself, the one we allknow about. But this was all background in terms of, I think, it was theVietnam war basically that got people upset, the problem of the war.INTERVIEWER: Did you also have the feeling that there was a different
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SECRETattitude that threat of the Soviet Union wasn't as great. Not necessarily seen that way in the Agency but outside the Agency?MR. HALPERN: Oh. By that time people were looking at Vietnam. They weren't looking at the Soviets. There is no question. I am talking '73, '74. There was no question about that. The spirit of Detente may have something to do with that. The spirit of Glassboro, do you remember Glassboro, NJ?INTERVIEWER: Sure, yes.MR. HALPERN: Johnson, which began even before Henry and Nixon and what have you. But I think that all, I think, was totally overshadowed by Vietnam. I think that was one of the big problems, the Vietnam War.INTERVIEWER: And you saw this not only in the public but also in the Congress.MR. HALPERN: Uh huh. No question. No question. I don't think Congress ever really understood -- well, I know they never understood what Jim Angleton was talking about on counterintelligence. Hell, for that matter very few people in the Agency I think really understood that one. And I didn't have any appreciation of it either until I got into the job as the Exec for the DDP. Because unless you see an overall world picture it is hard to imagine this big thing happening around you when you are worrying in one little area. But anyway, I honestly think it was Vietnam that upset the apple cart. Watergate just added to it.INTERVIEWER: Just added to it.MR. HALPERN: The frosting on the cake I suppose or the whip cream on the banana split. Whatever you want to call it. But I think with Vietnam that hurt most of all.INTERVIEWER: So even if Watergate hadn't occurred, it was moving toward investigation.
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SECRETMR. HALPERN: It would have been. No question. No question. Because if I remember it correctly, the P&P and L&M teams were concentrating on Southeast Asia and looking into what the US Government as a whole was doing, not just CIA, but they didn't like anything that was going on in that area and I think that is what began gnawing away at the thing and broke it apart.INTERVIEWER: OK.MR. HALPERN: You know in terms of an operation these guys did a magnificent job in terms of their objectives. They, in effect, were able to stop the whole machinery of government and wreck the intelligence system in the entire community, not just CIA. And it is going to take of couple of generations to rebuild it. If we ever can. You can't go home again. That is for sure. But to rebuild what we had at one time is going to take at least a couple of generations. Hell, it took us 25-30 years, that's a whole generation to get the thing organized and then it came apart. It really came apart. And a lot of this, because of the Vietnam, also had an effect not just inside the government but it had the effect of the recruits you got. Even as early or late, whichever way you want to look at it, from about 1970 on, we had been in the war in Vietnam, for five years by then. The recruits, the new people coming in, who passed all the tests and what have you, and been through the first training courses and what have you, and they were on their first assignments from the desks or some of them even going overseas for instance. The ones that I saw, and I made it my practice sitting in the DDP's office as the Exec, to talk to as many young officers as I could. Always had an excuse: a cable who was coming up for release by the DDP, or going up to the DCI coming through the channels, I always was able to call the guy who wrote the thing. I didn't care about the guy who coordinated, I was interested in8SECRET
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SECRETwho wrote it. And to talk to them. If you have to stop let me know.INTERVIEWER: No, we are fine, keep going.MR HALPERN: Anyway, I used to talk to these fellows and women to see what made them tick and it was a very difficult job listening to them many times when they had all these bright ideas about intelligence, how you could do this and how you could do that. And I had to bite my tongue and say, "Well, wait a minute. You know, we tried that 25 years ago or 20 years ago and it didn't work." And you couldn't just dampen their spirits by pouring cold water every time they would come up with an idea, and yet somehow you had to try to get them interested enough to look into the history of what happened and how you did this and how you couldn't do this and how, why certain things would seem beautiful when you dream them up and write them down on a piece of paper. In the real world it just don't work. And we learned the hard way. All of us. Trial and error. But you hope that the next group coming up didn't have to go through that same torture if they would look at the record. And my concern was that very few people were borrowing stuff out of the registry. Very few people were interested in going back into the history of what took place and certain activities. And you can't get it all out of a classroom.INTERVIEWER: Right.MR. HALPERN: And this was one of the things that bothered me while I was in that job for those last few years is that: how do you pass on the experiences so that people understand and learn without feeling that they are being pushed down, without feeling that they are being squashed? Because you want initiative. Half the business in dealing with human beings is initiative and I don't know enough about the technical side but I know enough about the human side. But you have to stop them. Why spin wheels? Why push a lot of paper
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SECRETthrough if they're going to be disapproved anyway? And yet keep them interested enough. And that's a tough job.INTERVIEWER: And were these recruits, say, '70's - were they much different from those that you would have had in the '60's?MR. HALPERN: Yes, the early '60's.INTERVIEWER: The early '60's?MR. HALPERN: Before the Vietnam war. A lot of people were coming in, and I blame the educational system for this, in terms of the teachers they had. And I discovered this to my horror, as I mentioned earlier, about the Colorado business -- the teachers there were worse than the students. Facts don't mean anything to them. For example in Colorado it seemed to be, it was perfectly all right for the students and the faculty to use the Church Committee documents to prove one of their points about how bad CIA was or how bad DIA was or what have you. But when I tried to use the same documents quoting different pages, that was wrong. I wasn't allowed to do that. "That's just junk. That doesn't mean anything." And I looked at them and I said, "I thought I was at a university where you are supposed to be able to argue from text." No, it was all right for them to do it but not all right for me to do it.INTERVIEWER: It fit in their pattern.MR. HALPERN: Yea, and so, you know, what do you do?INTERVIEWER: Were these recruits coming in in the early '70's and so on --MR. HALPERN: The early '70's.INTERVIEWER: Are they more questioning, are they . .?MR. HALPERN: No, that was one of the things that bothered me. One of the things that struck me, both male and female, when they came in most of them,10SECRET
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SECRETwhen we got into discussions about operations or what have you, they seemed to be more concerned about when they were going to become a division chief, a station chief, and when they were going to become DDP and then eventually, "how do I get to be DCI?" And finally after all of that is over, "What about my pension rights?"INTERVIEWER: That's already coming?MR. HALPERN: Yea, in the very beginning in '71, '72, '73, and at least '70, '71 and '72 when I was more concerned about talking to them because by '73 we were having difficulties with the Schlesinger turnover and what have you. But this was one of the things that struck me very strong, and I was bothered by it, and these were the best of the applicants. They had already been through all of the machinery and all the screening processes and what have you and these were the shining stars from the academe, and I was concerned about that. But again, what do you do?INTERVIEWER: Were others troubled as well?MR. HALPERN: Yea, some of my colleagues were. They picked it up the same way I did except on a different level. They were doing it in the branches or in the staffs, most in the branches, or in the area units and I was looking from across the board. But it was the same idea. We used to kick this around at lunch. How do you get instilled into the new group, the upcoming generation, the guys who are going to take over from us, that there is more to this business than worrying about your pension? I tried to tell some of them, look some of us are going to be in this business their whole career and never see the DCI's office let alone be the DCI. And so I said, "In all organizations not everybody can be the field marshall. Some of them have to be privates and stay as privates our whole career." And that didn't go down at all.
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SECRETINTERVIEWER: It didn't go down?MR. HALPERN: No way. No way. You know it was frightening then and I guess it is even more frightening now. I don't know what the situation is now but its a bad show. I don't know. Maybe we were brought up in a totally different generation. I don't know different backgrounds. I don't know whether it was things like the Depression or World War II or what, but we all had a different -- we all wanted to get promotions; sure, we all wanted more money; sure, we all wanted honors and titles and God knows what else and medals but.INTERVIEWER: I wondered the same thing.MR. HALPERN: You didn't sort of aim what the hell you were doing. "Hey, if I do this right I'll get a medal." Or again, you may have thought maybe a couple of these good things I do I'll get a promotion or something like that. Yea, but that's normal. But you didn't do it for the purpose of the promotion. And here these people are talking to me about: how do I get to this and how do I get to that. I guess it's called career planning or something. I have been through a lot of that, by the way, on career planning from a personnel point of view, trying to chart out people's whole careers, and I thought that was for the birds. How do you sit there and say in 25 years from now he is going to be in X, Y, and Z. Maybe you can do it.INTERVIEWER: That will come in with Schlesinger?MR. HALPERN: That came in with Bill Colby. Management by Objective and all of that kind of nonsense.INTERVIEWER: I've got some questions on that coming up.MR. HALPERN: But I remember specifically, and you had better cut and paste this tape I think, but I remember, for example, when Colby's Management by
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SECRETObjective started coming out, one of the articles that was given to us, written by a Britisher I believe, had a whole series of things -- things not to do if you are going to go into Management by Objective. And we all looked at this thing -- we, I mean, all of my colleagues -- every single one of these points, things not to do before you go into Management by Objective, we had already done. So how can we go into this thing? We went into it anyway.INTERVIEWER: Damn the torpedoes.MR. HALPERN: Oh yea. It was great stuff.INTERVIEWER: And was their a feeling -- again when you talk about these new, these young officers coming on in the early '70's -- was there still a feeling of family or is that a term that really . . ?MR. HALPERN: Yes, that is a good old term. "Band of Brothers" is a better term. We really felt, all of us did, we were a Band of Brothers. Oh, sure, we had arguments and fights and all of that kind of stuff, competition on who was going to get what job, who was gonna be chief of station or who was gonna do this, but we still felt ourselves a band of brothers. I like that term better than family. Maybe other people use family but we were different. We were guys who had gone through the war and had started from scratch, building an organization and building a concept which was mainly an intelligence service. And particularly us in the Clandestine Service, long before we got into this covert action nonsense but anyway we were interested in how you collect intelligence using human sources and with technical support, but anyway, we were building a service. We thought we were. An important one. And even though it only produces a very small percentage of the total take of the US Government, we thought it was an important take. It was never going to match something like Ultra or this overhead reconnaissance. You couldn't
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SECRETpossibly. But we were zeroing in what we called the hard targets and the intentions and plans more than anything else. And as that kind of a group we were all, "We came up the hard way" kind of thing. And we felt closer together as a result of that.INTERVIEWER: And did the Band of Brothers include everyone in the Agency or was it -- ?MR. HALPERN: No, it was just the Clandestine Services.INTERVIEWER: Just the Clandestine Services.MR. HALPERN: And as a matter of fact a lot of us in the Clandestine Services, I wasn't one of them, a lot of us felt that we should not be part of CIA. We should be separate. Totally separate and not be involved with anybody else. And that was one of the fights that went on for a long time between the DDI and the DDP in that most of the DDI people felt (and the top brass particularly felt) that the DDP should be an adjunct of the DDI, responding only to DDI requests for information and in effect be the DDI's library and research staff. You know, find out if the bridge is still standing between "x" and "y" in the middle of Uganda or something like that. And we felt differently. The DDI felt that they were the national intelligence analyst group and we felt that we were the national intelligence collector's group -- human sources.INTERVIEWER: Sure.MR. HALPERN: And drew big arguments on that. Big fights. And DDI always felt that we (DDP) should disseminate intelligence that we collect only to the DDI. They would decide who else was going to get the information. We thought that was a farce. We were everybody's collector from the President on down and it was up to the President to tell us who else to give the information