Francesco/who-killed-jfk huggingface dataset:
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SECRETOr whatever you want to call it. Ask the poor guys who were on the other end of the line who are dead. But whatever you call it, Congress didn't have the balls to cut it off when they wanted to cut it off. It took them until '75, '73 first, to do it. Well, by jingo, you can't run governments this way. You know, you've got the power of the purse, use it. If you want to get into the act of being an executive, goddammit, stop paying the President of the United States. Don't send him any checks.INTERVIEWER: I bring this up in class.MR. HALPERN: Sure. Close his bank account. Take away his credit card. Don't give him any money. Close down the White House. Paint it black. You know, make up your mind what you want to do. If you want to follow this system, there's going to be tension between the two branches of government forever. And the judiciary sits on the side, and look at the tension that was there initially before you had the great decisions about whether or not the Supreme Court is going to declare something unconstitutional or not. Nobody was sure how that was going to work. And that always hasn't worked smoothly either. Now we've come to accept it more and more and more and more. And everybody has calmed down about it. In terms of the role of the Supreme Court, it wasn't written into the Constitution. It developed. Now as far as executive and legislative, nobody has come up with a simple way of handling that one.
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SECRETINTERVIEWER: Do think that more intelligence data and so on has been going to Congress in the last decade? Is it your impression?MR. HALPERN: My impression is that it has. Just by reading the newspapers you can tell that the stuff has been going up there by, not by the bushel basket loads, it has been going up by the truckload. And I wouldn't be surprised if their computers are hooked up so the stuff goes instantaneously. So I'm sure. First of all they are on distribution for the NID, The National Intelligence Daily, as I am told, I mean, I read in the paper. Even that shouldn't be available to me and the press. Why the hell should I know about it? It doesn't do me any good as a citizen to know that my Congressman can read the National Intelligence Daily along with another 1,000 or 1,500 people in the Executive Branch. What the hell good is that going to do? And I don't know how many people on the Hill have access to it. And I shouldn't know. I hope they don't get the PDB. At least in my day we used to use the PDB as a vehicle for providing the President and a handful of other people, like the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, with intelligence which didn't normally get into the normal distribution channels. It was a very simple, convenient method for doing that. And we did it specifically with President Nixon. From the very first, well, he was inaugurated on the 20th. The 21st there was a meeting in his office, and it was agreed right then and there that we would put certain sensitive
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SECRETInformation in the PDB only and he would be able to tell by a certain phrase we used. And nobody else except those several people in the room knew it. So that even the other people that got copies of the PDB didn't know exactly what the hell that phrase meant. And it was good hot intelligence from a good source. You can't, you know. If they give that kind of stuff to the Congressional people, including the committee, specifically just the intelligence committees, I don't see why. There is no reason for it. They are not involved with the day to day running of the government as much as they'd like to be. In which case leave the Senate and become President.INTERVIEWER: Maybe more of them are trying to play a larger role in making foreign policy.MR. HALPERN: Yeah, okay. They've got a perfect right to give their advice to the President of the United States. He, theoretically, makes the policy, whoever he may be. His staff doesn't, the Secretary of State isn't supposed to do it, and nobody else is. According to the way I read the rule book the President of the United States makes foreign policy.INTERVIEWER: What about this statement, Sam, an officer said, "Congressional investigations in 1975 especially were like being pillaged by a foreign power only we had been occupied by the Congress with our files rifled, our officials humiliated, and our agents exposed."MR. HALPERN: Right on. Absolutely correct.INTERVIEWER: You feel that is an accurate appraisal?
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SECRETMR. HALPERN: It was exactly the same way as when the Soviets got into the Tsarist's files and exposed all the secret treaties and everything else. It's exactly the same thing. I have no objection to their coming in and looking at the stuff. I have great objection to their taking a bunch of stuff and splattering it all over the television tube and the front pages of all the newspapers. There is a big difference. I see no reason why you can't clear the necessary people on the Hill to do whatever is necessary in terms of the oversight. But that doesn't mean they're coming into camp, but then damn it, handle the information exactly the same way the rest of us have always handled the information.INTERVIEWER: How about the Church Committee Report?MR. HALPERN: I thought that was awful. And if you read the Congressional Record, and if you haven't you should take a look at it, but the Congressional Record of the executive session -- it was first an executive session of the Senate -- to discuss whether the committee Report should be released. And as one of the Senators, I forget who he was now, maybe I can dig it up, said that when you've got a hundred copies of your Report (printed Report) already on each one of our desks, there is no way that this Report is going to stay secret even if we vote to keep it secret. And it was that kind of discussion that went on all morning. To show you what they finally did, they finally released the Congressional Record right away, after they made their vote. And they pointed out, this is silly, you
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SECRETcan't stop this thing. It should have never been printed. The point was made that this thing should never have been printed until we had voted. And we should have read this thing kind of in draft, in typescript form. Not even everybody having a copy. I mean, some of the Senators had some sense. If you've got this kind of decision to make, whether a Congressional document is to be published, don't publish it. I mean, don't print the damn thing first and then ask us. Ask us first. And Church's view was, "As a committee chairman, I had a right to do it." Well, under the rules of the Senate that's true. You know, judgment. Well, obviously, this stuff came out and it shouldn't have come out. I use a very simple example. There is no reason under God's green earth why they had to talk about Black Leaf-40 being the chemical to be used by AMLASH. Why couldn't they just say some commercially available insecticide or pesticide, whatever it was? Why specifically name that thing? I don't know how many people even read the thing. But, you know, some idiot could pick up Black Leaf-40 and decide, "Hey, this is a good way to kill somebody." It's got nothing to do with intelligence. And that's why I think that it was irresponsible, and I think that statement is an absolutely good statement and is absolutely correct. And particularly as far as the Pike Committee is concerned. That thing was a shambles. And those kids were running around in their bare feet, not even their stocking feet, in their bare feet having a ball. Throwing the stuff up
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SECRETin the air.INTERVIEWER: How about a couple of the Senators, Church and Mondale, have emphasized that accountability to the President and to the Congress was needed. And they were referring to the Agency..MR. HALPERN: Yeah, I think you have to have accountability. And we always thought we had accountability. We went and got our money from Congress to do all the convert action that everybody is objecting to now. They didn't object then. I mean, those handful of guys didn't. I mean, the so-called Laos Secret War. They provided every penny. We don't make our own money. We don't print our own money. We might print somebody else's counterfeit money but that is another story. But the Congressional leadership knew. Again, under the ground rules that the Congress laid down we always had oversight. Four oversight committees. We reported to those four oversight committees. If they didn't want to listen, if they didn't want to ask questions and if they didn't want to know more, that's their problem, not ours. We've got a war to fight, kind of. But we keep on going. When they stop us, we stop. And yeah, you've got to have Congressional Oversight. The system we've got, fine. But oversight is oversight. Oversight does not mean management. Not in my opinion anyway. Oversight does not mean daily running of the office. And I am told that there are guys on the Hill, and they've got badges just like the next guy. They've got all the clearances. They've got badges and
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SECRETthey go in. They run around. They have access to everything. And I think that's crazy. That is micro managing. And there is no reason for that. None at all. I just don't believe in mucking up the system. If you want to change systems, say so. All the way around. If you want to run the government, get rid of the President and have it. We always didn't have a President running things. There was something in the old days, the Continental Congress. They ran everything. The President of the Continental Congress was in effect the President. And you had Congressional Committees that ran things. But even they operated in secret when it came to intelligence. Look at the record. And they didn't tell everybody everything in Congress. The Congressional people knew in the Continental Congress that the small committees that they created to handle the confidential and secret stuff were their surrogates. And hell, I think I mentioned to you the other day, Huddleston finally, on a committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, turned to his Congressional colleagues and said, "You have to accept us on your Committee (Intelligence Committee) as your surrogates and you can't know all the things that we know." Well, that's what we have been saying all along. Not everybody can know everything. And you can't have it that way, that's all. And I must say, the Senate Committee, I think which is better even than the House Committee in some things, does not allow its staffers equal access to all papers, even now. They've learned. It's
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SECRETcompartmented. This is the way it should be. Yeah, so talking about Congressional Oversight, yes, if it's oversight. Not management.INTERVIEWER: Bob Woodward in his last book, *Veil* says the Church investigation plus the Carter Administration crushed the spirit of the CIA.MR. HALPERN: Well, not having been inside during the period, it's hard to talk. In terms of being on the outside looking in with some vague idea of what the hell it is like inside, I would say yes. There is no question about that.INTERVIEWER: Did you see it, did you witness any crushing in '75?MR. HALPERN: Well, I was on the outside.INTERVIEWER: Yeah, that's right. You went back.MR. HALPERN: This has to be impressions and gut feelings and that kind of stuff in talking to people. Yeah, it was a bad time, no question about that. Very bad. Including guys who were retired like me who were under the gun for the kinds of things we did. And also I have been talking to people inside who felt that if it wasn't for guys like us, the new guys inside wouldn't be under the gun now. And therefore they turned their venom on us. And I was specifically attacked by a couple of guys, I mean, verbally attacked, for some of the things, in terms of, you know, if you guys hadn't done all those nasty things, we wouldn't be under fire now.INTERVIEWER: And these were Agency officers?MR. HALPERN: Agency officers. Serving officers at the time.
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SECRETAnd that's quite clear. Read Harris Greene's book, *Inference of Guilt*. And if you read that you get a feeling for what some of the insiders felt about us former insiders. I think his last job was Deputy IG before he retired. He'd been around for a long time. He's written a lot of books. All fiction so far. All except for one, he hasn't published it yet. He is trying to find a publisher. But this gave you, this *Inference of Guilt* gives one a very good feeling, I think, of how the insiders, serving officers, male and female, felt about us old-timers who were now out. And it was a very strong feeling that, you know, if they hadn't done it we would be all right. So there wasn't any great love lost between . . .INTERVIEWER: That must have been a miserable time.MR. HALPERN: Yeah, it was pretty rough. And I think for both sides. And a lot of the officers, even the retired guys, as well as the serving guys, who didn't know a lot of the activities. And I didn't know of the activities either. Hell, I didn't know about the MKULTRA, the drug thing at all, even where I sat. We used to have compartmentation in those days because even as the Exec to the DDP, there's lots of things I didn't know about until I read about them in the Church Committee and other places. I just had a better way of putting them into context. But anyway, yeah, there were lots of things that were going on that I didn't particularly like when I read about them. I have a better feeling for why the people had to
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SECRETdo what they were doing at the time. What they did and why some of these things took place. Where that's not true of many of my colleagues and friends who even in a kidding way would say to me things like, "What the hell did you do that for, Sam?" And I pointed out, "Number one, I didn't do it; number two, I didn't even know it was going on; but number three, yeah, I approve now and I know what happened." And I gave them a defense for it. That didn't wash at all. So it's kind of rough even among . . .INTERVIEWER: Was this in the period '75, '76?MR. HALPERN: '75, '76, '77.INTERVIEWER: There is practically none of that feeling now?MR. HALPERN: I don't know what it is now. I know Harris Greene stayed on until the late '70's, I think, maybe even the early '80's. And so Harris' book, *Inference of Guilt*, wasn't even published then. Could you cut that off for a second...*Inference of Guilt* came out in '82, so he probably stayed on until at least '80, something like that.INTERVIEWER: Okay. Good, I'll look at the book.MR. HALPERN: It will give you some idea. I wrote a brief review of that somewhere, I think it appeared in *Periscope* or something. But, you'll get, I think, a feeling for this relationship of the serving officers versus the old hands.INTERVIEWER: All right, the Church Committee believed the overall intelligence budget should be published. Was that
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SECRETviewed as a serious issue in the Agency? By those ...MR. HALPERN: Who were then serving? From what I gather it was. And the Agency even under Turner objected to it. The Carter Administration even objected to it. And even going back into that period, Colby objected to it when he testified. All the Directors have objected to it. You can't do it even with an overall figure. The only budget figure that I know of that is actually published every year is the budget figure for the Intelligence Community Staff. And that doesn't matter whether they have a hundred people or a thousand people. What the hell. That's simple enough because they don't get engaged in any activities. You can't split the CIA budget up into this much for DDI, this much for S&T and this much for so on and so forth. The minute you start mucking around with that, you take the next year and the year after that and the year after that, people start asking lots of questions. And foreign governments try to figure out, why is it going up, why is it going down? And pretty soon there is going to be demands for more and more more and more breakout. And you can't have that kind of stuff if you're going to run an intelligence organization. I remember many years ago the British Parliament use to pass a one penny, a *one penny*, budget for confidential matters. Period. And the British penny, not our penny. But anyway, one penny. That's the best way to do it. The country wants a budget figure, we'll give them a budget figure.
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SECRETINTERVIEWER: That was their solution.MR. HALPERN: Yeah, give them a one cent figure. I don't care. Or a dollar figure. One dollar. No more. But you can't start putting out a bunch of figures like that.INTERVIEWER: I don't know if we touched on it last time or not -- the murder and funeral of Richard Welch and it's impact on the Congressional Committee's work. Some say this lessened the Committee pressure and won public opinion over to the side of the Agency. Did you?MR. HALPERN: Well, being on the outside and having been at Dick's arrival at Andrews field that night when his plane came in, I don't know whether it lessened pressure from Congress. I think it did have an impact on public opinion, and I think that can be checked by looking at the old tapes in the old news broadcasts and looking at the headlines and the stories in the responsible newspapers -- *The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc.* -- and ordinary papers across the country and Walter Cronkite's broadcast and things like that. And I think you will find overall, there was a pulling back from the constant drumbeat of CIA being evil, CIA evil, CIA evil. I'm not sure if it had too much of an impact on Congressional Hill. Particularly the Church Committee and the Pike Committee. Particularly the Pike Committee more than the Church Committee. It had some, but I don't think it really stopped them. They kept going.
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SECRETINTERVIEWER: All right, what about your impressions of Mr.Colby's cooperation with the Church and Pike Committee.MR. HALPERN: I knew you were going to ask that sooner or later. I think Bill was wrong. Dead wrong. Obviously he thinks he was right. Two different approaches, two different men looking at the same problem. I don't think Bill had to go out of his way to, in effect, open up everything without by your leave from the President. It was his way of doing it from the very beginning from January even before the Church Committee began, from January 15th with Stennis. He did it. He carried on that way. Why he did, I don't know. I never asked him. He probably feels if he hadn't, things would have been worse rather than better. But I don't think so. Henry Kissinger held the line on the Pike Committee getting access to a lot of State Department stuff. He gave in some. But there was a big fight about it. And I would have preferred to see a big fight made by Colby on getting access to all the stuff on the Agency rather than just give it away. First of all I would rather have seen a President take this to the Supreme Court. The whole business. And maybe he would have lost. Who knows? Again, we are at a "What if . . ." question. But I think Colby was dead wrong to go as far as he went. Absolutely dead wrong. To this day there are a lot of people who think he was wrong. A lot of people defend him. And I have friends on both sides. And everybody knows where I stand. And I still
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SECRETsee Bill from time to time. We are still friends and all that kind of stuff. We say hello, sit at the same table, and everyting else. We just have a different view on how to run the show, in other words.INTERVIEWER: And it never did go to court, did it?MR. HALPERN: No. No President had the guts. Well, talking about Congress not having the guts to use the power of the purse. The other side, the Presidents don't like to go to the Supreme Court for this kind of stuff. Particularly after Nixon lost on the tapes. It's a tough one. They went to the Court the Pentagon Papers and they lost that one. And they might have lost the next one. I don't know. But that is the only way you find out in this system. And we've got to find out. Otherwise we are just going to keep on this ballet we were involved in forever. And you know, I can ballet with the next guy. But sooner or later you're going to have to . . .INTERVIEWER: The ballet is still on?MR. HALPERN: Oh sure, it's still on. But somewhere, somehow, you're going to have to make a decision someday. And I'm afraid we're going to make a decision only after some great catastrophe. And that's not the way to do it, I don't think. If we have to wait for a catastrophe every time we are going to be really down the tubes. I'll give you another simple one..Lincoln suspened habeas corpus. The Constitution says you can't do this. He did it. And he said, you know, "Sooner or
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SECRETlater, if we lose the war, there won't be any country to worry about anyway. And I'll take my chances with Congress afterwards." He had the guts, the fortitude to be President and make a decision. Nobody stopped him during the war. And after the war it was approved. Don't give a damn and all that kind of stuff, but anyway, it's the same thing here. Somebody has got to decide. You've got to go and find out, otherwise you are going to have this ballet all the time. And I can't see Judge Webster standing up better than Bill Colby on something like this. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong. First of all, I hope we never get to that again. But it's a possibility. You've got to fight it. I'm glad to see, for example, that the Administration and Judge Webster has come forth and objected to the Glenn Bill on putting the GAO, in all of its glory and majesty, right in the middle of CIA's finances. I don't know where that bill is going to go but it is somewhere in committee now. But at least initially the Administration said, "No way." But we'll see what happens.INTERVIEWER: As far as the cooperation by Colby at the time it was going on, in other words, it was going to the committees, you were surprised?MR. HALPERN: I am never surprised at anything that Bill Colby does. Never. I've been around Bill long enough and close enough not to be surprised. I objected to it. I mean, I couldn't go ahead and grab him by the scruff of the neck or
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SECRETanything. I was in no position to do that. But I was loud andvociferous in my statements to the people who were willing tolisten among my colleagues. Some of them said, "Bill had nochoice. He had to do that." And I kept saying, "Not thatway." He may have had to reluctantly and over a period of timegive up a piece of paper and another piece of paper and anotherpiece of paper. But you don't suddenly open the door to thesafe and say, "Go in, fellas, and enjoy yourselves." He tookstuff up there by the bushel barrel full. It was crazy.INTERVIEWER: Now some of the records had been gathered for theRockefeller Commission and then were moved over to the SenateCommission wholesale.MR. HALPERN: That's true. That was by Presidential Order.The President runs the show. It's perfectly okay. It's like Isaid in early '75 when I was trying to collect stuff for BillColby, the DCI, information in answer to all the charges thatwere coming up in the press in those days. I didn't know whathe was going to do with them. And I had the same qualms thatmy buddies had, in terms of, if we give it to Bill, God knowswhat the hell he will do with the stuff. My answer was simply,"He's the boss. You've got to give it to him. And if youdon't, you might ruin your job. Okay the stuff, just give itto the Rockefeller Commission." There was a PresidentialCommission reporting to the President. The documents belong tothe President. It's up to him if he wants to put them on a