Francesco/who-killed-jfk huggingface dataset:
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SECRETthink we ought to do about it. If you agree, fine; if you don't agree, fine. Tell us." But these guys could sit up there and they could say, okay, they can commit the Congress. As a cohesive unit, they could get those votes when they needed them. And if somebody, some freshman Congressman said, "Hey, I want to know about this." "We'll tell you later buddy, you can't vote." And it worked. Today, there is no way you could do it. We haven't been able to do it since the Congressional election of '74. But coming back to what I said earlier though, those guys who were working in the committees in advance of what later became the Church Committee on Intelligence, they were with the old crowd but they were beginning to break apart then and they were working within the framework, and what helped them, obviously, was a totally new Congress in '75. And all hell broke loose.INTERVIEWER: Yes, yes, and it still. . .MR HALPERN: And it still hasn't been put back together. Even Tip O'Neill couldn't control it. In all what, he had 30 years up there or more, and he couldn't control it. And until you get -- I'm not even talking consensus now -- but until you get back to some kind of a better hold on a Congress so that you don't have these independent kingdoms and fiefdoms and they work together more as a cohesive unit on various activity -- talk about special interest groups -- that's where they need them up there. They have to get together. I don't care whether it's a special interest group on social security and on medicare and on intelligence and on something else and on something else but you've got to have better control.INTERVIEWER: It's really fragmented.MR. HALPERN: It's very fragmented. You can't run a government that way. Impossible. You don't know who to talk to. And even with the Intelligence
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SECRETCommittee, I remember, for example, Senator Huddleston, who was on the ChurchCommitttee and later was on the Intelligence Committee. During the days ofthe Church Committee he was talking about, "You can't just have CIA or theintelligence people talk to a couple of people up on the Hill and that's it.You've got to talk to everybody." After he'd been on the IntelligenceCommittee for a while, and I've got his clippings somewhere in my stack ofclippings, Huddleston said, "The Congress, the members of Congress" he wasaddressing his own buddies "the members of Congress have to accept us onthe Intelligence Committee as your surrogates." And that is all we weretrying to do. In an intelligence community to have an intelligence committeebe the surrogate and there was four of them be the surrogate for thewhole Congress. But Huddletson when he was on the Church committee said, "You.can't do that, you can't do that. We all have to know." Well, he found outpersonally.INTERVIEWER: He finally changed.MR. HALPERN: He changed his mind.İNTERVIEWER: That's neat.MR. HALPERN: So you know, that's all they were saying. And it finally, ittook him a long while to get around to it, but he finally did it.INTERVIEWER: Some get educated faster than others.MR. HALPERN: That's right. So when you talk about. . . The '74 break, Ithink, was a big thing, a big thing. And I think if the election of Congressin '74 had gone a little bit differently, and there hadn't been that totalbreak and disorder up on the Hill, the disarray I call it, which all beganwith the Vietnam business and aided by the WatergateINTERVIEWER: And Nixon resigning in '74.
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SECRETMR. HALPERN: Yeah, he did in '74. He was pardoned in, what, August of '74. But I think if the election had gone differently, and there had been some control under the Congress -- more cohesion -- the Church Committee and Pike Committee might have been prepared a little better. I don't know. I'm just guessing. Obviously we can't rewrite history.INTERVIEWER: No reruns.MR. HALPERN: No reruns, no reruns. None at all.INTERVIEWER: Okay. How about some indications that younger Agency officers were troubled by certain domestic practices such as mail openings in the years before 1974.MR. HALPERN: That's correct.INTERVIEWER: Were you aware of these tensions?MR. HALPERN: Oh sure. They were all over the place. When the MHCHAOS program began, I think it began in what -- I'm trying to think now -- '69, '70 something like that?INTERVIEWER: Yes.MR. HALPERN: '70, something like that. Anyway, yes, this was very much felt by all the officers, well not all but a good majority of the officers. They didn't like the idea of following Americans abroad unless we had some real hard evidence that such and such was happening with an American and Soviet agent or whatever. But then you had the old question of the chicken and the egg. How do you find out whether the guy is alone until you follow him? Where do you begin? How do you get to the point where you know he is involved until you start somewhere? Obviously it got out of hand in terms of the number of people we started to follow and look at. But it basically began as a way of getting support and finding assets in this country (leftists assets)
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SECRETwho could go abroad as bona fide leftists as reporting mechanisms. It was all targetted abroad. We never targetted it here in the United States. I think the record of the Committee proves that, even the Rockefeller Commission or what have you. And this was something new, we'd never tried before on a massive scale, and we worked very closely with the FBI on this. And most of the files we opened up were names the FBI gave us with duplicate copies of what they had in their files on a lot of these Americans with leftists leanings and what have you. The officer corps in the DDP didn't like it, thought we were going beyond our charter, obviously thought we were trying to become a Gestapo, in effect, in the United States. And that was never the case. The appeals from various officers from various levels, and it was intensive argumentation, both here and abroad, the appeals went up the line. There was no intention of trying to dampen down the arguments or the objections or the concerns. The appeals went up, not once, but several times -- right up to Helms, the Director -- each and every time these things were examined again, looked at again, and orders came down to continue in terms of: our target is abroad, not the United States. Everything we are doing here has to be geared to something abroad. And we even changed procedures on a lot of this stuff. It was tightly held information, the cables were tightly held, and MHCHAOS itself as an indicator. (The MH was just a digraph of the DDP-wide activity.) Everything was done on special channels, special cable channels, special pouch channels. It wasn't given wide distribution at all. Well, everyone knew the program was going on. We had many a staff meeting about this, DDP staff meetings. There was a lot of tension, no question about that.INTERVIEWER: And was the tension just with the young officers or. .?
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SECRETMR. HALPERN: No. It was up and down throughout.INTERVIEWER: Throughout?MR.HALPERN: Including some of the old hands who didn't like the system, didn't like the program. And even those who understood that this was basically geared abroad as a counterintelligence operation, just didn't think that we should be involved in it. We preferred to have the Bureau or somebody else get involved in it. But again, you talk about turf battles and equity or what have you, a lot of the liaison services abroad -- the foreign liaison services -- we had a deal with. Many of them didn't want to work with the Bureau and only wanted to work with us. And you can't have both agencies suddenly hitting the same foreign service and asking the same questions. It just gets silly. So there were lots of problems on this one and the officers, as I say, even some of the old hands, didn't like it. They wanted to go back to doing the normal collection job and not go looking for what amounts to, you know, Bolsheviks with bombs under the bed. And that tension was there and I think it continues, and even under Bill Colby who modified the program even more in '73, in late or middle '73 with Schlesinger and Colby. But the program by and large continued in a slightly reduced fashion and a different terminology and with much more emphasis on doing that over there than in the States. I think it's the kind of thing that, you know, you're damned if you do and you are damned if you don't. I don't think we ever convinced everybody that what we were doing was within bounds and, obviously, we had the information, the information wasn't going anywhere. Nobody was going to court on it, nobody was going to get shot, nobody was going to get put in jail. I mean, we were just pulling it all together.INTERVIEWER: Would you say dozens of officers knew about this?
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SECRETMR. HALPERN: Oh, hundreds of them.INTERVIEWER: Hundreds of officers.MR. HALPERN: Sure. I think everybody in the DDP knew about it. They didn't see the traffic, but they knew about it.INTERVIEWER: They knew about it?MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah. It was common hall gossip and lunch room gossip and what have you. And as I say, there was lots of opposition to it by senior officers as well as -- well, in the first place a lot of the senior officers thought that we were taking our time and effort and our assets away from the important job, which was the Soviet target. You know, it takes time, it takes people, and it takes money. And you only have so much that you can do in 24 hours a day, and you can't do everything. That's why you end up with what we used to call a Related Mission Director for the priority - trying to do things in some kind of priority order. And you can't just pick the easy ones. You know, you would get a bad report card if you pick only the easy ones. You've got to pick some of the hard ones too.INTERVIEWER: Where was it thought that these orders came from, relative to . .?MR. HALPERN: Oh, they knew, people knew where the orders came from. They knew it was a Presidential directive. Nothing was hidden from them. Oh, no question about that. This was a part of the Johnson presidential requirement. What he was looking for was evidence of Soviet or domestic upheaval in the United States. We couldn't find it. And no matter, and every time we told him that, he said, "Intensify your efforts." You know, and as Dick Helms has said, you know, "I only have one president at a time. That's where I get my orders." So what do you do? And if Dick said that I'm not
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SECRETgoing to do it, there would be a new DCI in 24 hours -- or thereabouts.INTERVIEWER: And I think your point that it went up and down wasn't just the younger.MR. HALPERN: No, no. It was up and down on the entire hierarchy. There were pro and con argumentation and what have you. Now they say a lot of the older hands are saying, you know, "We haven't got time to do everything for God's sakes. Which is more important: the Soviet target or to find out if there are a couple of bucks coming into the country? People are going to be in the streets anyway whether they get Soviet money or not." I mean, it doesn't take very much to get people into the streets in this country, as you can see. And that is part of the breakdown. And that is Vietnam. Not Watergate. You know, Kent State didn't happen until 1970. We'd been in the war since '65 basically. And I remember arguing with my National War College colleagues, the military and the State Department guys and what have you, and I said when we went in. . . Let's see -- the Marines went in in March of '65 in Danang. The class didn't start until August of '65. I was with the class of '66, so we'd been in there a few months. And we went to a briefing in one of the secure rooms down in the bowels of the Pentagon. And this was DCSLOGS (Deputy Chief of Staff Logistics) DCSLOGS, and they had a big briefing for us. We were all senior officers in the War College with clearances and what have you, and they were telling us -- this is October of '65 -- they had the usual Colonels with pointers attached showing us the charts for what they were planning for Vietnam. And the graphs were going like this for five years. The number of troops that were going to be in Vietnam -- five years! I looked around at my buddies and I said, "What the hell is going on here? We just got there! How the hell you are planning a five year war? You guys are crazy!"
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SECRETI said, "This country -- the only time it's had a war longer than four years was the American Revolution. You are not going to have the support of the American people if you go that long. It's crazy! You can't plan five years ahead." They had half a million men. Five year plan. This wasn't out in public, obviously, in October '65. If the American public or the Congress knew about that, there would have been a revolt right then. And I told them, I argued with my buddies who were members of the State Department -- not military, State Department. "Oh, Sam, you don't understand the American people. They'll go along with you as long as you do it. It'll be slow, sure." I said, "No way. You mark my words. If you plan that way, it's crazy. If you're going to go fight a war, fight a war. Don't tickle them." Anyway, what you had there in '65 when we went into the war, and I think Johnson thought with the American flag flying nobody was going to dare do anything with him, and everybody melted in the background. But by '70 you had lost the consensus in this country. Totally. And Kent State just added to it. I don't blame Nixon for Kent State. Obviously nobody can. Crazy National Guardsmen with young kids, sensitive triggers, and unfortunate deaths. But that just added to it.INTERVIEWER: And you have all the street rioting and civil rights issues.MR. HALPERN: Civil rights is another one in '68. But that wasn't really part of the Vietnam problem. That was a totally separate issue. And when you add it all together, it was just bad. So that when Johnson says, "I want to find out about Soviets supporting all of this stuff," I think he was crazy. But he wouldn't listen. And so we had to keep going. And so the Officer Corps in the Clandestine Services didn't like being taken away from their job. And we didn't like being. . . I know this was a big problem too, the Vietnam station
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SECRETgot bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger -- it was crazy. We even had whatwas called a Vietnam levy. Des Fitzgerald decided, when he became DDP, he wasgoing to have each division and staff charged with producing so many bodies.And I mean bodies.INTERVIEWER: To go over.MR. HALPERN: Yeah. To go to Vietnam. Because it got bigger and bigger andyou had to have men all over the bloody country. And so he wanted some good,some bad, and some middle. But he didn't want all bad. You know, and thatkind of stuff. And so, we were putting our assets into one little place andit was the most important thing, sure, I understand, but that wasn't the maintarget or what the hell CIA was in business for. We weren't, at least theclandestine side wasn't supposed to be out there fighting a war. It's crazy.And so the people were objecting to that. The officer corps was objecting tothe Vietnam levy. On top of that comes CHAOS and CHAOS really takes us awayfrom more of our normal activity and who the hell is going to worry about theSoviet target in terms of intelligence collection. And by that time, morethan just Soviet targets, a lot of other targets too. So yeah, there was alot of opposition.INTERVIEWER: Okay. Do have any feeling about the Presidents. Do you feelthat they knew about the mail opening program?MR. HALPERN: Oh; in a general way.INTERVIEWER: In a general way.MR. HALPERN: Yeah, Presidents don't ask detailed questions. They don'tnormally ask that kind of stuff. They just want to know, they want to see apiece of paper. They want to know what is going on. And if he is bringing insomething hot, he might ask, "Hey, how'd you get this?" But, let me give you
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SECRETanother example, not a President but a Secretary of State, Dean Rusk. We put out at one point, Des was DDP at the time, we put out a very good report from an asset from behind the Curtain, if I can still use the old phraseology. And so, it was a good report. And suddenly we get a call, the DDPs, not the office but the DDP mechanism, gets a call, a requirement he get a call from somebody in the State Department asking for the identity of the source. The guy comes hot footing it up to me and says, "Sam, the State Department wants to know the source." I said, "Who in the State Department? State Department wants to know. Tell me who." "Secretary wants to know." I said, "Oh, okay. You have whoever you were talking to tell the Secretary to call Des Fitzgerald or Dick Helms. It's simple." "I can't say that." I said, "Well, if you can't, I will. The man is crazy. We don't give sources." And so, I go in and tell my boss that such and such is going to happen. He might get the call from Dean Rusk on the secure line. I tell him what the story is, and he says, "Okay I will wait for the call." And sure enough, I happened to be in the office on something else when the call came later that day, and it was Dean Rusk. And I could tell from the conversation what is going on. And it points out that Dean Rusk didn't want to know the identity of the source, never asked for the identity of the source, All he wanted to know was how good is this piece of information. And Des said, "I'll put my arm in the fire up to the shoulder blade. It's a good source." Knew what he meant. End of conversation. You know, Presidents don't ask, Secretaries of the State don't ask for details that they shouldn't. They know that. And they've been around long enough. I mean, I don't know about Jimmy Carter, but the other guys don't. And so, I think Presidents knew in general terms that there was mail opening, wire tapping, and that kind of stuff. Well, they engaged it
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SECRETthemselves for God's sake, not the mail opening but the wire tapping, andbugging offices or bug somebody elses or tell somebody to bug somebody. Hell,it started with Roosevelt himself, you know, nothing new.INTERVIEWER: Was the mail opening program known very extensively in theAgency?MR. HALPERN: No. I'll give you an example. I didn't know it.INTERVIEWER: You did not know it?MR. HALPERN: I did not know it and even when I was Exec to the DDP I knewsome operational cryptonyms, and all I know was that they were good sources ofinformation. I never asked beyond that. And nobody ever told me beyond thatand I had no reason to know. I didn't. As a matter of fact, to give you anexample of how naive I was, when I was called back, right after I retired inearly '75 to help on getting ready for the Congressional investigations, whichwe didn't even know was going on at the time (this was January of '75), thenewspaper stories were talking about mail openings and that kind of stuff.And I was silly enough and foolish enough to say to the security guy I wasdealing with -- the security officer (the Office of Security ran HTLINGUAL) --that what we were doing was in support of trying to get information about howthe Chinese or the Russians were operating and what it took to getdocumentation and all that kind of stuff -- what you needed. Hell, perfectlyhonest. I didn't know what the hell was going on. And all I know is that thesecurity guy said, "Yeah Sam yeah yeah that's a good idea. We'll think aboutthat yeah Sam that's a good idea yeah yeah we'll think about that." Theynever said anything at that point that they were running a real mail coverageand what have you. And I didn't know that I was doing the normal, you know.This is what you were in an operation for. But it was more than that,
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SECRETobviously. So, it was not widely known.INTERVIEWER: No. No.MR. HALPERN: Information. You might have had access like I did to information and you knew a good source or a bad source.INTERVIEWER: And you might know the information came from HTLINGUAL.MR. HALPERN: No. I never heard the cryptonymn.INTERVIEWER: Never heard the cryptonymn. Okay.MR. HALPERN: Didn't even need that. All I knew is that it was a good source.INTERVIEWER: Okay. How would you characterize morale in the Agency in the two to three years just prior to the Church and Pike Hearings.MR. HALPERN: Oh, I think it was largely unsettled because in '73 you had the turnover under Schlesinger.INTERVIEWER: Right.MR. HALPERN: And it was unsettling, totally unsettling. In the end of '72 when Schlesinger was announced as the new man on the block and everybody knew Helms was out, from there on it was utter turmoil and debacle. Both in the DDP and God knows, where else.INTERVIEWER: The worst you had seen?MR. HALPERN: Oh yes. Totally. Never had anything that bad before. Unbelievable. It was bad. And we had had reduction in forces before throughout the Agency from time to time. We had a "701 Program," it was called, one of them I remember. And several others from time to time. You had reduction programs and it was bad in those days. But nothing like '73. Absolutely nothing. All hell broke loose.INTERVIEWER: Bad in the sense that he was going to cut a thousand or two thousand?
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SECRETMR. HALPERN: Bad in terms that the leadership had no trust in us.INTERVIEWER: Which leadership are you referring to, Sam?MR. HALPERN: Schlesinger/Colby, obviously. Leadership no longer had any trust in us. They were treating us like dirt. No appreciation of what we had done or what we could do. No reason and no appreciation that we even exist. They wanted to wipe us out. Then, of course, the personal aspect of it my job and where am I going to go from here and do I get a pension or don't I get a pension -- and so on. And it was awful. Unbelievably awful both here and abroad. And I don't know what happened when the Halloween Massacre under Turner came around. That I guess must have been equally dramatic. But in '73 none of us had ever seen anything like that before. When, you know, everybody's life work was suddenly up for grabs. And it was just a horrible mess.INTERVIEWER: Well, was there a feeling that President Nixon, while Helms was Director, that President Nixon was supportive of the Agency?MR. HALPERN: Yes, yeah there was. Largely because, I don't know if it was Nixon, but it was Kissinger who supported the Agency. And most of us knew that most of the foreign policy was coming out of Henry anyway. But with Nixon's support of course. And he had Nixon's chops to do what he had to do or wanted to do. But by and large we worked very closely, as an Agency with Kissinger. We provided all kinds of support, assets, did all kinds of things at his request and so on. I was on the phone to Al Haig, for example, although I never met him, but was on the phone almost daily when he was still a Colonel on the Kissinger staff doing all kinds of things. And exchanging papers with him via the new (I forget what it was called in those days) long distance xerography but it was totally encrypted. We had one machine up in