Francesco/who-killed-jfk huggingface dataset:
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SECRETwhen he was in Vietnam and she was in Vietnam. So I really don't know. Otherpeople say that Bill was just being a good novice. Some people said he'sgoing to end up in the monastery some day, even though he's got a new wife andall that, new company, and what have you. But, I've had all kinds ofinterpretations, but I don't even know if Bill knows why.INTERVIEWER: And at that time it was as much a mystery as . .?MR. HALPERN: Well, at that time everybody thought it was Schlesinger.INTERVIEWER: Oh, I see.MR. HALPERN: That Schlesinger was the Big Bad Wolf. And sure he was but hewas aided, and abetted, and goaded by one William Colby. And why Bill did it,I just don't know.INTERVIEWER: Was there any sign of that before Schlesinger came in? In otherwords while Helms was still there? Was Colby . . .MR. HALPERN: Not to the same extent. But Bill first came -- when I first gotto know him -- was in 1956.INTERVIEWER: That early?MR. HALPERN: '56, yes. '56. Des Fitzgerald met Bill Colby when Bill was acase officer in the Rome station. And Des came back thinking Colby walked onwater. The greatest thing since little apples. And he wanted him in the FarEast Division right away. Well, he made some arrangements, and he got Billinto the Far East Division and assigned him as Deputy Chief of Station ofSaigon. The Chief then was Nick Natsios. And Bill went out as Deputy Chief.And Vietnam then became his career -- God knows how many years. Ten years ormore. And we in the Far East Division -- we the case officers and theoperators in the Far East Division, the troops -- while Bill was here in56SECRET
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SECRETWashington getting acclimated to what FE was all about, who the people are and what have you and the various talks and the various comments and what have you, and later while he was out in Saigon, we regarded him as a great "nation builder" -- quote unquote. That he was not a clandestine operations officer in terms of espionage or counterintelligence. He never understood counterintelligence. Even to this day I don't think he understands counterintelligence. And I don't think he knew what a recruitment of an agent was -- even the fact that I haven't recruited many myself. But if you look at his book, he says the first agent he recruited in Italy was a member of the Communist Party. He recruited him as a reporting source, as strictly an intelligence agent, not as a propaganda CA officer. And you read his book and he talks there about his, Bill's, problem -- whether this is the right thing to do, and how can he live with himself, and manipulating a human being and all that kind of stuff. And it's very clear that he is not an intelligence operations officer. He is a great boy scout and he is a great guy for quote nation building unquote.INTERVIEWER: When you say nation building, what do you mean by that, Sam?MR. HALPERN: He wants to help other countries become like the United States. He wants, you know, the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson .INTERVIEWER: Democracy.MR. HALPERN: Yes, and everybody vote. One man, one vote. Without any regard at all for the history and the social mores and background and customs of the country. Where votes in most cases don't mean anything. And it's silly. You work by chieftains and what have you and tribal systems and the whole business..INTERVIEWER: Sure.
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SECRETMR. HALPERN: But Bill wants to build nations. And its very laudable andmaybe some government agency ought to build nations. And maybe he ought to bein the AID, or ICA in the old days, or the Red Cross or wherever. But not asa clandestine operations officer, trying to collect intelligence and recruithuman beings to be your agent, your spy. A lot of us in the old FE Divisionon the working level thought, there is going to be trouble with this guy.INTERVIEWER: Did you meet him in '56 then?MR. HALPERN: Yes, sure. Yes I was Des' Exec then too.INTERVIEWER: I see.MR. HALPERN: In FE. So, a lot of us thought this was a problem guy but Deswants him around, and Des is the boss, so what the hell. There's nothing wecan do. You know, maybe he'll learn something under Nick we used to say.Nick was a tough old Greek, old hand and he knew the business. In fact, hewas a poet.INTERVIEWER: So it was thought that maybe he'd change.MR. HALPERN: Yes, but he didn't. Bill never changed. And so a lot of us --well, for example, Bill, when he was Division Chief in FE -- I wasn't even inthe Division at that point -- but Bill had an idea, for example, on how theOCI's Daily Intelligence Report should look. He thought it ought to be like atabloid newspaper and even had a dummy made up for this thing. Well, it waslaughed out of court at the time. Bill kept that dummy until he became DCIand he put it into effect. It became what is now called the NationalIntelligence Daily although I am told it is no longer in the newspaperformat. That was changed as soon as Casey came aboard. But that is Bill foryou. Once he gets something in his head, you don't change him.
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SECRETINTERVIEWER: Tenacious?MR. HALPERN: Oh, very, very.INTERVIEWER: Well did you have much contact with him after '56?MR. HALPERN: Oh, I didn't have too much contact with him in '56 until 1961 when I was shot down by Dick Bissell and Des Fitzgerald. Bissell was then DDP and Des was Chief, FE. I was enjoying life in Tokyo -- my one and only overseas full time tour and I was having a good time in Tokyo. And suddenly I got shot down to a place called Saigon. Which I had known about before during World War II and all that kind of stuff, but anyway, I got shot down on a special operation to work with the ASA teams, which is the Army version of NSA (Army component rather). And this is because Ed Lansdale, who was then in General Erskine's office at the Pentagon, had a bright idea. This was before the US was fully committed. There were 3,000 Americans -- men, women and children from all agencies -- including the military -- in Saigon in the summer of '61 when I got down there. Saigon was still a nice, sleepy, old French town. It was a lovely place. There were parts of Saigon that you couldn't go. And you couldn't go to parts of Chalons because there were VC all over you, but anyway, it was a nice area. But this was a crazy idea that Ed Lansdale had sold the brass in Washington and it didn't make any sense, but anyway, there we were. And I was shot down to work as liaison officer between the station and the ASA teams. I got to make some very good friends, as a matter of fact, as a result of that and Bill Colby was Chief of Station.INTERVIEWER: Oh?MR. HALPERN: And one of the things we did, and the first thing, the first place, I built the first war room, or officer room (if you want) in the
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13-00000SECRETEmbassy. It didn't even have one at the time. The only one that was in town was the one on G-2 under General McGarr. And what the hell was the G-2 officer, Colonel someone, I can't remember. Anyway, so I built a war room for Bill so we could plot and have handy our own operations (we were running into the North at that time and none of them worked but we tried) and at the same time decided to take a look at what the hell the target was, what the enemy was. And I built a second war room or had built rather a second war room in the Embassy where me and my military friends, the head of the ASA team, the SSO in Saigon, I forget his name, Major something or other, and we got sent down to us from Japan, from the Army in Japan, an order of battle specialist whose specialty was actually the Chinese Communist, the PRC army, a military breakdown, and he came down to go over the order of battle aspects of the VC. And I had put up on the wall, all four walls in this room that we built in the Embassy, a 1-50,000 set of maps of South Vietnam only. And then we took all of the information, from any source whatsoever, good, bad, or indifferent, including COMINT, and all the liaison junk we were getting from the South Vietnamese government, any of our own reporting, the US, all agencies and we actually physically plotted every piece of information on maps. And the order of battle specialist made his usual 5X8 order of battle cards and correlated to the maps. So that you could look at the map and go to the card or take the card and go to the map. And we came up with a figure of VC effectives in the field of over 18,000. That doesn't sound like much today, but this was the summer of '61. And the agreed-upon figure was 10,000. Everybody in the US Government used the figure of 10,000. I think they've been using it ever since the war began with the French. But anyway, 10,000 was the figure. And60. SECRET
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SECRETwe came up with almost double. All holy hell broke loose. Bill Colby -- andI was on TDY from Tokyo. Dick Bissell had offered to have my family come withme and all that kind of stuff but I said uh uh. I'll go down from Tokyo, thefamily can go home. And they did. But when this 18,000 figure hit, the G-2in Saigon refused to accept it, General McGarr refused to accept it,Ambassador Nolting (I guess it was) refused to accept it, and Bill Colbyrefused to accept it. And I said to Bill -- and they wouldn't let us send theinformation out. They just refused. They thought it would be best totransmit the information to our respective Headquarters. That is the NSAtype, the SSO type, and back to CINCPAC and so on. And I said to Bill, Isaid, "Bill, this is silly. First of all, I'm here TDY. I've got my ownticket, airplane ticket, I've got my own passport. I can be out of hereunless you shoot me on the way out. I'll be at Tan Son Nhut whenever I wantto. And you know me well enough, Bill. I'll get to the first available CIAstation, which is either Hong Kong, Manila, Bangkok, or Singapore. I get intothe Commo shack, and my message will be in Washington within minutes. And Ithink you know that my relationship with Des is such that he will at leastlisten to me -- he may not accept what I am telling him -- but he will atleast listen. And I know in the meantime you can say, 'Get the guys with thewhite coats and what have you to get Sam. He's gone crazy, he's mad, hedoesn't know what he is talking about, he's gone beyond the veil.' I know allof this, Bill. But I think Des will give me a hearing even wrapped in one ofthose --"INTERVIEWER: Straight jackets.
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SECRETMR. HALPERN: Straight jacket. He looked at me and he knew me well enough and I knew him and he says, "Okay, Sam, what do you want to send?" "I want to send back we got 18,000. You know, and tell them how we got it. And give them the facts. I'm not trying to make policy. I'm just here to get the information. We're the intelligence officers, that's what our job is." He said he can't send 18,000. I said, "What is this? Some kind of a Persian rug merchant bargaining or something? What do you want to send? We can't go with 10 anymore. That's gone. We've got 18." Well, to make a long story short, we ended up, just like Sam Adams later, many years later, but he was in the hundreds of thousands, I was in the tens of thousands, and so we ended up whereby, I think we said something like -- we compromised, no question about that something like 14, 15 effectives, plus support troops, just like Sam, it's exactly the same play as Sam Adams except much smaller figures and much earlier. This was 1961. But the total figure, if you add it all up, you ended up with an 18,000. That much I got through. But again it was a stretched-out thing. So when the message finally went out, it went out in several channels. I mean, to CIA, the military and to State Department. Everybody got it. When it got to CINCPAC I'm told that almost like a bomb hit the place. And the next thing we knew was a message saying, "Colonel so and so from CINCPAC Staff is arriving to discuss this latest nonsense," or something like that. It was just, you know, crazy. And this Colonel had been on the Vietnam desk for CINCPAC, but he served in Vietnam -- with the French when they were there. And he was *the* expert as far as CINCPAC was concerned. So when we were saying 10,000, we were in effect flying in his face. We were becoming idiots. It was off base. We didn't know this guy from Adam. And to
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# SECRETshow you how we felt, me and my buddies, these three other military guys, when the Colonel arrived -- I was the only civilian and these guys were all majors. They were, you know, "There's a colonel coming." So I was the guy chosen to, and I volunteered too. Okay, we meet this guy and we bring him in. And I said, "Colonel, here's the war room, there are the maps, there are the order of battle cards. All the information is cross-indexed, so if you look at the cards you can find it on the map, if you look at the map, you'll find it on the cards. We'll just leave you here. See where we went wrong."We went off and got drunk. And I mean drunk. It was a bad one. But anyway, we said, "The hell with this nonsense." I got my military buddies out of the range of fire. And the four of us went off. We came back, I think it was the next day, but anyway, when we came back the Colonel said something to the effect of, "I wouldn't have believed it." And I said, "We didn't make it up. It's all there. You had it all in Honolulu. Everybody in Washington has had the same information. We didn't make up any new stuff. It's the same stuff everybody is using. We just added it up and you guys didn't. That's all. Everybody was using pieces, using the magic figure it appeared was made up some years ago. Times have changed. The enemy has doubled its strength right under our very noses." That was my one nice big session with Bill Colby. That's what we started out on. And so that's when we finally sent the messages out after this Colonel was here, then we sent the messages which had that 18,000. It was a long total, but anyway. And Bill and I have been on a fighting relationship ever since, I think. I never mentioned it to him and he never mentioned it to me again. It was done and that was it. Then I left.INTERVIEWER: You left?
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SECRETMR. HALPERN: Oh yeah, I left at the end of '61 -- well, not the end because I arrived back in Washington. Well, even after that, Bill Colby made me in effect the third man down in the station because he and his Deputy, Ed Barbier who is now dead, were just swamped with paper -- release of documents, release of cables, relief of dispatches, what have you. They were working 20 hours a day and it was getting crazy. I said, "Bill if it is one thing in the world I can do -- and everybody knows I can do it -- I can move paper for you. Get it out of here. And you know damn well you'll see the ones you are supposed to see. And let me get rid of the junk." And so he gave me releasing authority. And I sat there as a station officer, because I said, "Bill, you know, my job with the military is finished. And, you know, what do I do next?" He wanted me to stay on and I didn't feel like staying on. And so I sent a wire back to Washington, and he agreed. I said, in effect, "My job is done here, I did what you asked me to do. What is my next assignment?" Just like that. And they finally said, "Come on back to Washington." And I came back to Washington and briefed everybody. But anyway, that was my relationship with Bill. I knew him well enough then. He's just a different kind of a guy. A nice guy. Easy to talk to, easy to get along with, but very opinionated, very firm in what opinions he holds, he holds, period. And it's a hell of a job to try and get him to change his mind. I'll give you a simple thing. He was running air operations, dropping agents into North Vietnam. And one night I remember we were in the communications shack (communications room). And he had sent an "Ops immediate" and didn't get an answer. The plane was warming up on the field, waiting to go. And they had to get a "yes" or "no" to go. I said, "Bill, they haven't answered in over an hour, for
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God's sakes, hit them again." He said, "Oh no, you can't do that." "What do you mean you can't do that? Send another message. What the hell, it doesn't cost you anything. It doesn't hurt. Tell them you are still standing by." And he said, "Well, they know that." And I said, "Bill, send them a message. The message could have gotten lost in Manila." He said, "Nothing like that ever happens at Clark Field," actually. He said, "Nothing like that happens." Well, in this case it did, it actually did get lost because of the way they had to handle, "man handle," these tapes in those days. And I've been there and saw the way these guys were working, down to there skin, I mean, they didn't have their shirts on, even undershirts. And it was sweaty and hot even with the air conditioners going in those days (room air conditioners). And these big perforated tapes were around their necks and what have you. One of them got lost and if it happened to be an "Ops M" then, it was too bad.INTERVIEWER: An Ops M?MR. HALPERN: Operational Media was the precedence. You had "Routine," "Priority," "Operational Media slash" something like that.INTERVIEWER: Okay.MR. HALPERN: There were several routing precedences, basically. And we got to call them Op M simply because you didn't want to say Operational media all the time. And one of them got lost. You know, they weren't "Flash" messages, which I hope won't get lost ever. But I finally had to convince Bill just to send another message back saying, "I need an answer." And it took a hell of a long while. It took longer than it should. It took almost two hours for me to tell him, "Get the goddamn message out." And we got a
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SECRETmessage back, and the first thing it says is, "Didn't get your reference.What are you talking about?" So we had to hit them again. You know, explainwhat happened. And, but that's an example of. . . He's reluctant. You know,if he's got a firm view of something, it's tough to get him to change his mind.INTERVIEWER: When did you work with him again after that?MR. HALPERN: Oh, actually --INTERVIEWER: Saigon.MR. HALPERN: That was '61 and I guess the next time I worked with him againvery closely was when I was for three or four months his his Exec. When hecame back from Saigon, and Dick make him the Executive Director Comptroller, Ihad some dealings with him because I was the Exec in DDP and just working withhim. It wasn't that close in terms of the way I did in Saigon, the way I didlater in his own office. . . I just saw him the other day as a matter of factat a meeting. I was in town. We're still friends. We say hello to eachother.INTERVIEWER: And you were his Exec for three or four months.MR. HALPERN: Yeah, he took over from Tom in February of '73 and I wasreassigned out of his office, I think it was May '73. So it's March, April,May -- three months for sure -- and a couple of weeks in February and a coupleof weeks in May. So it's roughly three, three to four months.INTERVIEWER: So you were there when that memo was being prepared?MR. HALPERN: Yeah.INTERVIEWER: Uh huh.MR. HALPERN: That's why I keep saying, I keep telling my friends, "You'reblaming the wrong guy!"
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SECRETINTERVIEWER: You have reason to know.MR. HALPERN: Yeah. And you see part of my problem too was, and this was true later when Bill took over, and even that summer, and later when he took over as the DCI, he was talking in terms about one Agency. He wanted one big Agency. He didn't want this split between DDI and DDP and the DDA and the DDS then and now they have S&T. One big Agency. Everybody know everything. And I said, "What are you going to do, tack all the cables up on the bulletin board? Put all the operations up on the bulletin board so everybody can read all this stuff?" And this lasted for a little while, like a couple of months, I think. And finally it even finally began to sink in on a guy called Bill Colby. Jesus, there have got to be some compartmentations somewhere. And we've got to stop all this, everybody know everything. He wanted one Agency, one Agency. All does not run a. . . That was part of Turner's problem. Read Turner's book. And read my review of Turner's book if you haven't. I'll give you a copy. Turner could never understand it. He couldn't understand why he had all these different Directorates, which he for some crazy reason called branches. And he still talks about it as branches. He didn't understand that they're simply separate activities. Each one of those things, except the DDA, can be its own independent Agency. Literally. And the DDA simply supplies the men, money, material (the three m's) for everybody. And at one time, at least in the early days, 80-85% of what the DDA did for a living, they did for the DDP.INTERVIEWER: That high a percentage?MR. HALPERN: Yeah, and that was before DDS&T came along.INTERVIEWER: Right, yeah.
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SECRETMR. HALPERN: And I said, in those days, I said, "Well, why the hell don't we just absorb them, make them part of us, you know, as part of our command?" And that led to another big hoorah, but we never did get command. But they did. Eighty-five percent of their activity was for us.INTERVIEWER: Did you, at the time Bill Colby was talking about one big Agency.MR. HALPERN: '73, '74.INTERVIEWER: Yeah, why?MR. HALPERN: Well, because of what we were talking about before. The difference of views, the different cultures involved, in both what the collector and the analysts. And then of course you had the new thing called technicians -- technical people -- which is a totally different aspect, even for us in the DDP. Our technicians were our TSD types or the commo types. And we did some SIGINT of our own and that kind of stuff, but with the use of the commo guy, the operators of the machines. We weren't into overhead reconnaissance and things like that, for God's sakes, and other black box activities, except even the black boxes, they asked us to deliver in many parts of the world. We had to do the drops, we had to get them in either by hook or by crook and things like that into the right location and all that kind of stuff. So there was a marriage there. But basically, as I said, each one of these three Directorates could honestly, and you could come up with good rationale for making separate Agencies of each one of them. And so when Bill talks about one Agency, one big family, he was trying to merge us all together and make us, like Turner says in his book, he wanted to make everybody be able to do everybody else's job. Well, that is kind of silly.