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The Special Investigations Group of the CI Staff (CI/SIG)
Its
CI/SIG (the Special Investigations Group) did not exist
prior to the establishment of the CI Staff in early 1955.
major functions as described in CSI No. 70-1 of March 1955 are
much more modest than the functions ascribed to it in a write-up
by the Staff in early 1973. The 1955 description of functions
is as follows:
"Special Investigation Unit
"Major Functions
"Performs the CI investigation and analysis of any
known or potential security leak in the Clandestine
Services organization, whether in headquarters or in
the field, from the standpoint of its effect on (1)
existing operations, and (2) the cover of personnel.
In performing this function, maintains close working
relations with the Security Office, the latter being
primarily concerned in such cases from Agency
security rather than an operational security stand-
point,"
By 1973 the description of tasks which had been assigned
to CI/SIG or which they had absorbed during the course of
events over a period of nearly two decades provides a much
broader range of functions and responsibilities.
as follows:
"CI/Special Investigations Group
They are listed
"1. Conducts research into the long-range validity
of CIA operations in terms of known or potential hostile
capabilities, including penetrations, and of Agency security.
Carries out coordination with the Office of Security
in such cases.
"2.
"3. Maintains and uses sensitive counterintelligence
holdings, including certain Comint and defector materials,
to match these against operational and personality data
and thus to derive operational leads.
"4. Coordinates and cooperates with counterintelligence
and security elements of other departments and agencies of
the USG to detect, tabulate, and take counter-action against
hostile plans or approaches abroad for the recruitment of
American officials (American Targets Program).
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"5. Plays a direct role in sensitive counterintel-
ligence liaison with closely allied foreign intelligence
services on hostile penetration plans and operations.
"6. Reviews compatibility between cover and
assignments of CIA staff members.
"7. Maintains central data on leaks to the news
media and assists the Office of Security, as necessary,
in determining the sources of leaks.
"8. Maintains central data on the nature and
extent of known compromise of Agency staff personnel
to intelligence services, whether liaison or hostile.
"9. Prepares studies of individuals, including
8 [journalists) whose foreign intelligence connections are
a source of concern.
"10. Carries out additional and sensitive tasks as
assigned by the C/CI."
The first chief of the Special Investigation Unit (SIU) (as
it was called in CSI NO. 70-1) was Birch O'Neal, a former FBI
officer who had transferred to CIA after World War II.* In the
mid-fifties SIG had rather slim picking and appears to have spent
most of its time investigating various aspects of the [LCMAYFOWL
6
complex (the Boris Morros case) as it affected US interests based
on information the Agency acquired from foreign sources. Then in
1962 SIG received its biggest shot in the arm with the defection
of Golitsyn who brought with him several dozen leads to American
citizens including some supposedly in CIA. The handling of these
leads was assigned to SIG by Angleton, including the information
emanating from Golitsyn, which related to foreign countries. Thus
O'Neal and his assistant, Jean Evans, played a major role in
directing the handling of the Golitsyn leads (or "Serials" as
Angleton invariably called them). The activity continued through-
out the sixties reaching its apex in the period 1964-65 when the
HONETOL investigations (of CIA staff officers) was at its most
*The term Special Investigations Group (SIG) became common
usage in the sixties but no exact date can be assigned for
this change.
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[Israel,
98
Israel, and a contract agent in New York. In addition to the
Office of the Chief (including two special assistants and a
Secretariat) the Staff was composed of seven "Divisions" and
four "Groups. "
24
24
24
For fiscal year 1958 the CI Staff budget was $1,650,000].
The sum of $1,800,000 was allotted for Fiscal Year 1959, and
$2,060,000] was to be requested for 1960. Specific figures were
quoted in the appropriate sections for projects or support,
such as travel. Otherwise the budget was almost solely for
salaries of Staff personnel.
The survey next gave brief attention to deception, agreeing
that it had to be carefully compartmented and that it best
belonged in the CI Staff. On the subject of the 'Special Investi-
gation Unit, however, the survey took its first serious exception
to the organization and operation of the Staff stating:
"Hence, in order not to contaminate a senior staff
(CI Staff) with Agency employee investigation and/or
exploitation, this should be done by individuals with
CE ability within a special section of the Office of
Security. It is
"Recommended that:
"2. The DD/P release for assignment to the Office
of Security several individuals, as may be appropriate,
of proven CE ability to handle and exploit all cases of
CE aspect involving Agency personnel;
"b. SID and its function be eliminated from CI
Staff; and
"C.
The DCI approve the above recommendations."
The survey team took special note of the Projects Branch of
CI Staff, the section that handled the mail opening project.
How it was operated and viewed in 1959 is not without interest
in view of its subsequent role in the "Family Jewels" issue when.
it was revealed to the Rockefeller and Church Committees. Thus
it is revealing to note the 1959 survey found nothing wrong with
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the mail opening program except they worried about its security
and also thought it would be more effective if expanded. This
is how the survey described the project in 1959:
"3.
The Project Branch conducts a project of
censorship within the US of mail from the USSR which
is called HTLINGUAL. Originally this project was
developed by the Office of Security at the request
of SR Division in 1952. Its purpose was to identify
and to obtain samples of handwriting and basic back-
ground facts on long established correspondence
between persons in the USSR and the United States.
Such information was to be used operationally to
sustain any communications with secret writing,
which would likely pass the Soviet censors and could
be picked up in the U.S.A. The interception is done
at the central Post Office in New York, and the
letters are delivered to the Agency for processing
and return. As the need for Soviet communication
camouflage lessened with the increase of legal
travel to and from the USSR the Project was re-
oriented and expanded toward direct CI and FI goals
in September 1956, and it was taken over by the
CI Staff.
-24
"b. At present this group includes [five]
employees in New York and [fifteen at Headquarters.
Those in New York are under the Office of Security; -
those in Headquarters under the CI Staff. The
yearly cost is the total of the various salaries.
"C.
The primary purposes of this Project are to
produce CE information; operational leads and any
positive intelligence that can be gleaned from the
mail.
"d. The operation in New York photographs
about 50,000 envelopes per month out of a total of
about 200,000 letters coming from the USSR to in-
dividuals in the U.S.A. via New York. These films
are forwarded to Headquarters and examined in the
Projects Branch and some 10,000 of them are selected
on the basis of Agency interest in the areas of
origin in Russia. These 10,000 negatives are then
made into prints, and the names of the addressees
are recorded alphabetically on IBM cards. From the
IBM cards RI makes a continuing record and a copy
of this record of names is returned to the Projects
Branch.
"e.
About 1,000 of these intercepts are opened
per month in New York by the Office of Security,
the letters verifaxed and copies sent to the Projects
Branch at Headquarters. There is a watch list of
some 500 names on file both in the Branch at Head-.
quarters and in the Security Office in New York and
any letters coming from or going to any of the names
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on this list are opened. This watch list is revised
quarterly. It is made up of names of interest princi-
pally to CI, SR Division, and the Security Office,
and includes names listed by the FBI.
At
"f. There are trained linguist-analysts in the
Branch who extract information of interest from the
intercepts, and the disseminability of this information
is determined by the Chief of Projects Branch.
present the rate of dissemination from Projects Branch
runs at an average of about 150 per month and the
number is increasing. Sixty percent of these dissemina-.
tions are positive intelligence. The disseminations ****
are controlled by the Deputy Chief of CI Staff.
"g. SR Division' has obtained valuable operational
leads from this Project, and the FBI wants as much
information as it can get by this means.
"h. There are 40 individuals in CIA who are
officially cleared to know about this Project. These
include members of SR Division, Office of Security,
CI Staff, and RI Machine Records, COPS, DD/P, DD/S,
Director of Personnel (due to his previous service in the
DD/P) and the Chief, FI Staff. The DCI, DDCI and the IG
Staff also have access to the Project.
\"i. It would appear from present results that much
more value could be obtained from this Project if more-
intercepts were opened. Project Branch is at present.
handling four times as much volume as it did in the past
with the same number of personnel and at the same cost.
'Its staff at Headquarters is capable of handling 2,000
per month with the present T/O, but the New York staff
could not supply that number of opened intercepts unless
its personnel was increased. It is felt by the Branch
that a rate of 4,000 intercepts per month would be a
good future goal. It is estimated that this would
require an increase of one interceptor, one secretary
and one letter opener in New York and an addition to
Project Branch at Headquarters of four linguist-analysts,
four clerical personnel and one reports officer.
"j. The Office of Security, which works with
Project Branch, is agreeable to the gradual expansion of
the operation. It would be in favor of expanding at
present to the extent of opening more intercepts, and
taking samples of these intercepts for S. W. This could
be done by the aforementioned increase of Security Office
personnel in New York without an immediate increase in the
Headquarters staff. It would be operationally much more
feasible if a secure room could be obtained in the Post
Office in New York for their sole use. Since the DCI
made the original arrangement for this operation with the
Chief Postal Inspector, any changes in the system of
operation should be made in the same way. This is the
only level at which such arrangements could be accom
plished securely."
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versus area division prerogative in the conduct of operations.
Noting that there might have been some immediate reasons for the
CI Staff to take on operational aspects in its efforts to increase
CI activity, nevertheless it concluded these reasons were not
necessarily based on the best operational and organizational pro-
cedures and methods. The normal staff functions, the survey
opined, could be carried out effectively with a much smaller but
highly experienced staff whose impact and counsel would more
favorably be received by the operating elements of the DD/P. The
team also concluded that there had been insufficient attention
given to penetrating hostile intelligence organizations and
recommended that:
"
"Chief, CI direct the efforts of the CI Staff toward
the development of programs for the aggressive pursuit of
penetration activity against hostile intelligence services."
In a forward to the report, the Inspector General of the day,
Lyman Kirkpatrick, directed special attention to one particular
aspect of CI work.
"The Special Investigation Division assists the
Office of Security in using DD/P assets to trace leads
concerning CIA employees. This is probably a necessary
assist to the Office of Security but should be handled
with the utmost of discretion and security. It would be
very seriously damaging to the efforts of the CI Staff
if it ever became known that it was engaged in any
activities involving CIA employees. An analgous situation
is the stir caused by the occasional misimpression created
abroad that CIA reports on other US Government employees.
Thus within CIA the Office of Security must be the sole
unit to bear the stigma of being concerned with fellow
employees."
Unfortunately this sensible warning was not heeded by CI
Staff management, or by the management of the Clandestine Service
as a whole for that matter. Instead, in the mid-1960s the CI.
Staff, with SIG in the vanguard, hypnotized by the allegations
of Golitsyn, launched HONETOL the active investigation of.
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had written a provocative analysis that found Nosenko bona
fide and challenged as incorrect the Monster Plot
assessments to the contrary. Even more provocative, he had
provided a copy directly to then DDCI Richard Helms when
stymied within the Soviet Division in promoting his view.
Kalaris first learned of this well after McCoy joined the
staff, when McCoy himself told him. Angleton, on the other
hand, was certainly not unaware of this part of McCoy's
background, and it is likely that he and Rocca and Miler
interpreted Kalaris's selection of McCoy as evidence that
Kalaris was out to discredit them.
Kalaris, originally having been summoned home to take
over temporarily until a replacement for Angleton could be
found, had a title in the beginning as "Acting Chief,
CIOPS." In March, Nelson told him, "We haven't found
anybody yet," and as time went on it looked increasingly as
if he and Colby were not going to find anyone. But by this
time Kalaris was becoming intrigued with what he was doing,
and with the potential of the job. He went back to [Brasilia] 10
to see his family in late March, and when he returned he
told Nelson he would take the job on a permanent basis. In
June, the "Acting" was dropped and Kalaris became Chief,
CIOPS.
What Kalaris Found…….
The State of Affairs
-
As he looked around, Kalaris found what struck him as a
desolate situation. Mountains of traffic were coming in to
the staff, but none of it seemed to be of much importance.
The staff had no relationship with the Soviet Division or
6
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any of the other geographic divisions.
If the divisions had
McCoy's
any significant cases, Kalaris was unaware of them because
the divisions were giving him nothing of substance.
arrival in the staff made this picture unmistakably clear
}; since, fresh from SE Division and a position therein that
made him privy to virtually all the division's sensitive
cases,
he was able to tell Kalaris what he was missing on
the SE front.
1
Soviet-East
It also before long became evident that there was an
element of a two-way street in this situation.
European cases were discovered in CI Staff files that the
area divisions had never been informed of or had only
limited information about. These included such cases as
MORINE (a past FBI source of voluminous GRU operational
documents who was known to the Soviet Division but whose
operational leads had been shared neither with that division
nor with the other geographic divisions in whose territory
}
the Soviet agents were working); [KITTYHAWK] (a KGB officer
who had contacted CIA during a visit to the United States
several years back and who figured in a double-agent game
being run by the FBI); (GRIDIRON] (Leslie James Bennett,
former senior officer in Soviet counterespionage in the
Canadian RCMP who had resigned from that service in 1972
under a cloud of suspicion engendered by the Angleton staff
and its guru Anatoliy Golitsyn--a case never briefed to
6,8
either SE or EUR Division); and (MHPIVOT], also known as [OZONE]
Constantin Dumitrachescu, a Romanian Jintelligence officer
who defected in [Is in 1972 and subsequently came to this
"
country and was debriefed by CIOPS officers, but whose
information and leads had not been furnished to the area
divisions).
Many of the people in the staff had been hand-picked by
They had been in their jobs for a number of years
Angleton.
and were well settled into their way of doing things.
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well in fact that most had given up hope of ever going
anywhere else or accomplishing anything new.
Compartmentation was a way of life, and management was
remote from the rank and file. Kalaris was appalled to
learn that his chief of support, who had worked in the staff
for four or five years, had never met Angleton; he had only
seen him from a distance. The overall atmosphere seemed to
Kalaris to be conditioned by doublethink and mirrors.
Compartmentation in the Angleton staff had been carried
to such extremes, however, as to become counterproductive.
With Angleton not disposed to be forthcoming with his
successor, and Rocca and Miler taking their lead from him
(and Hood already having left the staff and the Agency some
months earlier), it was difficult for the Kalaris team to
find out what the staff had been doing. Like the blind men
and the elephant, the personnel below the top leadership had
never been exposed to more than their own narrow slice of
staff activities, and accordingly even with the best of will
they were limited in what they were able to tell the new
management. The MORINE' case (see below) provided a vivid
illustration of this point.
McCoy, with his Soviet Division background, was
particularly struck at the almost total absence of Soviet
expertise in the staff. There was no Russian language
capability and no realistic area knowledge, and what
experience there was in Soviet matters was dated and
limited. This was the case not only in R&A, but in the
Operations Group as well.
One of the first things Kalaris had to do after
assuming office was find out what was in the safes and
vaults in the Angleton premises. This ultimately took
months, as there were several vaults and many safes
containing among them large quantities of paper. All this
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"
had to be reviewed, and not only for the purpose of
determining what it was all about. Significant segments of
this material, it was discovered, were unique to the CI
Staff and had never been integrated into the DO file and
records system. Information from the mail-intercept
program, for example, was indexed inside the CI Staff, but
reflected nowhere outside. other material largely
duplicated files maintained by other elements. Some files
contained mostly press clippings. Decisions had to be made
and action taken, item by item, on indexing, transfer of
files, determinations of what needed to be retained and what
could or should be destroyed, etc. As the magnitude of this
task became evident, arrangements were made for personnel
from IMS to be detailed to the staff on a long-term basis to
go through the material.
1
In a vaulted area across from Angleton's office a
couple of safes were found for which no combination could be
located, and which accordingly had to be drilled by
specialists from the office of Security. Kalaris rejects as
untrue the image conveyed in Mangold's book about Angleton
that has him personally leading SWAT teams of safecrackers
as they went about opening the Angleton safes, * but it is
correct that he was present during the drilling. He had
never seen this operation performed before, and was
interested to observe how it was done.
Some curious and some disquieting things turned up as
the new team gradually made its way through the CI Staff
premises.
1
--On the lighter side, in one safe two Bushman bows and
some arrows were found. Concerned about the possibility
that the arrows might be poisoned, Kalaris had them sent--
* Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior, Simon & Schuster, 1991,
pp. 327-330
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very carefully--to OTS for examination.*
When they were
returned, with a judgment that they were harmless, Kalaris
gave them to Angleton as a personal memento.
CI Staff Memo CI 136-75, 10 July 1975
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--In a more serious vein, files were found on the
assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother
Robert F. Kennedy.
These included autopsy pictures of the
remains of Robert Kennedy. Although Nosenko's account of
the KGB's involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald and his denial
that the KGB had anything to do with the murder of John
Kennedy might reasonably explain an Angleton interest in the
John Kennedy assassination, neither Kalaris nor Blee, with
whom Kalaris consulted on this bizarre finding, had any idea
why Angleton had the pictures. Neither could they think of
any reason why it was appropriate for CI Staff files to
contain them. They were accordingly destroyed.
1
--Angleton's dogged pursuit, inspired by Golitsyn and
his theories, of Soviet intelligence penetration of CIA had
led to secret investigations, stretching over a period of
many years, of over forty serving CIA officers. Known as
the HONETOL cases, and later sometimes referred to in the
popular literature as the Great Molehunt, this activity had
produced extensive files in the CI Staff.* In addition,
several hundred files were found on American citizens who
were not CIA personnel but on whom Golitsyn analysis had
similarly cast some sort of KGB shadow. Among the most
noteworthy of these were files on W. Averell Harriman and
Henry Kissinger. Most of these files were composed entirely
of newspaper reports and a few FBI reports.
--Classified materials, in quantities that ultimately
filled several packing boxes, were eventually found in
10
Golitsyn's possession at his upstate New
[upstate
York farm house.
Some of this material consisted of personnel-type files on
CIA staff officers. Golitsyn, who resisted returning these
documents when Kalaris sent people to retrieve them,
The term "HONETOL," used as an acronym, allegedly derives
from a combination of parts of the last name of FBI Director
John Edgar Hoover and the first name of Soviet KGB defector
and Angleton guru Anatoliy Golitsyn.
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maintained that Angleton and Miler had given these files to
him to review and to keep as long as he needed them, and he
was not finished with them yet. Ultimately, all the files
that were found were retrieved from Golitsyn, though it has
never been possible to be certain that this represented all
the files that he in fact had.
1
It had
--A potentially explosive find surfaced in June: a bag
of mail from the mail-intercept--HTLINGUAL--program.
been the public exposé of HTLINGUAL and the MHCHAOS program,
infiltration of domestic leftist and dissident groups in
search of insidious foreign sponsorship, in a front page
story by Seymour Hersh in The New York Times on 22 December
1974 that had precipitated Colby's decision to force
Angleton's retirement, and led to establishment in 1975 of
the Rockefeller Commission on CIA Activities in the United
States, and the Church (Senate) and Pike (House) committees
to investigate CIA and its activities. Both these programs
had been CI Staff responsibilities. CIA was receiving
letters from citizens who believed CIA had intercepted their
mail, a CI Staff representative had just finished briefing
the Senate Select Committee Staff on the subject, * and Colby
on 10 July would be making a statement on the mail-intercept
program before the Postal Facilities, Mail, and Labor
Management Subcommittee of the House Post Office and Civil
Service Committee. The bag of mail was a hot potato.
Kalaris's memorandum to ADDO Blee dated 3 July 1975 tells
the story.**
2716-7
om[cos
"1. In the course of preparing for a move of CI
Project materials from one vault to another, we found, on
top of a shelf, a dispatch [dated] 27 March 1972 from cos
to Chief Wh. This dispatch forwarded 114 items
mailed from the Soviet Union to various persons in the U.S.
Panama
City] to
3
* Ernest Tsikerdanos CI 088-75, 17 June 1975
** CI 113-75, 3 July 1975
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These had been in a package delivered to a doctor in the
10
16-7
[canal zone], who turned them over to the station which in
turn forwarded them to Headquarters. The dispatch was
passed to CI Staff by WH Division in 1972. A note on the
dispatch indicates that CI Staff took no action other than
to process the materials into its files; but the CI Project
continued to hold the originals. At the time CI Project
29
theorized that a mailing label on a package from Olympus
Corporation] in New Hyde Park, New York, to the [Canal Zone]
10
doctor had fallen off the package for the doctor, and been
erroneously fastened to the package containing the Soviet
mail.
#2.
This is the only case as far as we know in which
the original mail has been held by this Agency. In all
other cases we examined the mail, opened it surreptitiously,
photographed it, and put it back into the mail channels for
delivery to the addressee. Thus, this presents us with a
peculiar problem. The letters have all been opened with a
letter opener. We do not know at what point along the way
the letters were opened.
"3. We solicit your advice. There seems to be at
least two courses which we might pursue. We could send
these items to the people to whom they are addressed, under
cover of a letter explaining how we had acquired the mail
and apologizing for our delay in forwarding it. Another
course of action would be to reinsert the mail into the
postal system by forwarding it under cover of a memorandum
to the U.S. Postal Service. In the memorandum we would
state that the mail came into our hands overseas, and was
inadvertently held. The memorandum would further state that
this Agency does not know at what point the mail was opened.
'
"Attachments: 114 Items
24
2 Hungarian Custom's [sic] Declarations]
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1 U.S. Registered Mail/Return Receipt
65 Post Cards
25 Letters
24
1 [Swedish Custom's [sic] Declaration"]
--The person who brought the letters to Kalaris, the
supervisor of the summer employee who actually found them,
was known to be an Angleton loyalist, and Kalaris could see
a trap unfolding in front of him if he mishandled the
matter. The deliverer could be expected to tell Angleton
just what was done with the letters, and Angleton to find
ways to exploit any ill conceived decisions. After due
deliberation, the staff of the Senate committee was
informed, and on 16 July, not quite two weeks after the
initial memorandum on this subject, the DCI sent the mail to
the Postmaster General under cover of a letter explaining
the situation. The Postmaster General in turn sent a copy
of this letter, along with the actual mail and a letter of
his own, to each addressee. The Postmaster General's letter
referred to "apparent interception and acknowledged
retention of this mail by the CIA," and described the matter
as "a serious violation of your rights" and "abuse of the
mails."*
In due course some of the recipients wrote letters
to the DCI asking whether CIA had dossiers on them.
In April a folder with some MORINE, material was found
in an R&A safe and delivered to McCoy, who, believing that
he had stumbled upon an overlooked vein of
counterintelligence gold, brought the matter to Kalaris's
attention. MORINE in fact had not been overlooked by
Angleton, but this was not apparent at the time. The
discovery of this folder led to a memorandum to Nelson a few
days later, entitled "Skeletons in the CIOPS Closet,"
.
* CI 180-75, 15 August 1975
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the staff, on its own and without coordination with the
24
division, had passed to [foreign liaison] a copy of a FISS
containing division-controlled NOFORN information.
Paper and Records: Disposal and Reintegration
staff.
The paper-and-records problem was high on the agenda of
issues that needed to be addressed. The quantity that the
Angleton vaults and safes contained was almost overwhelming,
and much of this had never been made available outside the
Integration of this unique data into the DO records
system not only made common sense; it was an obvious
prerequisite to the staff rejoining the directorate.
Kalaris had no problem in principle with the concept of
keeping certain information within the staff, as SE did with
its [AESTORAGE system, but the Angleton team had gone
overboard.
Whether for reasons of bureaucratic style or
fear of penetration of the Agency, information of all kinds
and from all kinds of sources had been held privately. All
this had first to be reviewed to identify what was
appropriate to retain and what was not, and the appropriate
then made retrievable.
3
In the wake of the Rockefeller Commission investigation
and the Church and Pike committee hearings, the Agency and
the DO were busy writing regulations and providing
guidelines to operating elements on what was and was not
proper activity, particularly vis-à-vis US persons. For
the CI Staff, this heavily involved definitions of subjects
and activities that merited staff attention. Executive
Orders would later provide a framework, albeit often
maddeningly imprecise, for these questions, but the first of
those addressing US foreign intelligence activitites, E.O.
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11905, was not issued until February 1976.* In the
meanwhile, advice from the Hill and the lawyers supplied the
framework. And there appeared to be hundreds, perhaps
thousands of files in the Angleton staff that had been
created and maintained according to criteria, e.g.,
anticommunism, that did not fit these guidelines.
Establishment of a guideline that counterintelligence
files were not to be established and maintained solely on
the basis of items in the press provided for elimination of
a large percentage of the material that had been collected
by the Angleton staff, prominent among this being files on
Henry Kissinger, W. Averell Harriman, and some 30-40 US
congressmen, among others. Common sense provided other
working guidelines such as, for example, the simplistic role
of thumb: if a file has some linkage to reality, retain it;
if not, destroy it. People from RID were brought in to help
decide what should go into the overall records system, and
what did not belong there. Some of them effectively moved
into the staff. And they were not the only outsiders to do
this. In July 1975 the Department of Justice sent some
lawyers to review the HTLINGUAL material, and when they
discovered that there were 27 boxes of it in one of the
staff vaults it was decided that the best place for them to
do their work would be right there. Three desks were set up
for them in the vault.
1
Some statistics from monthly reports at the time give a
glimpse of the Augean task of dealing with all of this paper
and records.
1
January 1976: Five Branch personnel spent 2-1/2
days reviewing all files held in the branch for a count of
Signed by President Gerald R. Ford, February 18, 1976.
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how many of these files were on US citizens. Total count
was 1,018 files on Americans.
March 1976: All (41 linear feet) Golitsyn file
material held in records center has been recalled and a
'
review begun. In May six more feet were acquired from SE.
--
July:
CI/R&A Index currently contains about 255,000
cards, down over 11,000 in last ten months.
August: Golitsyn material has now been
consolidated; about 15 linear feet have been destroyed.
September: Approximately 40,000 cards were
destroyed; they duplicated a more complete index maintained
by SE/CI.
October:
CI/R&A index has been purged of all cards
duplicated in DO main index--over 12,000 cards were removed
and destroyed.
--
February 1977:
Four ISG analysts were assigned to
R&A to assist in the processing and integration of CI Staff
records into the DO central system.
The "HONETOL" files appalled the new CI staff in their
\ 3 numbers and, as they were read, their scope and the
hollowness of the reeds upon which they had been built.*
HONETOL had not yet become notorious to the outside world,
but inside it was perceived as a problem of major
proportions.
"
If, on the one hand, these files actually
The term "HONETOL" meant Golitsyn leads to a penetration
of the United States--CIA as well as other US institutions.
This led to two kinds of files: the leads themselves, as
Golitsyn provided and described them (e.g., a file on the
lead "Sasha"); and files on suspects, i.e., persons
suspected of being the subject of a lead. Actual leads were
very few; suspects were very many.
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1 F
contained evidence of a penetration of CIA, this clearly was
of vital importance. If, on the other hand, they did not,
it was important that this be recognized and the files and
3
suspicions appropriately dealt with. [Julian Fox] a lawyer
by education who joined the staff in late summer 1975, was
assigned to study these files. A procedure was developed
whereby he reviewed each one by one, and prepared a summary
of its contents. This went forward to Kalaris with, in each
instance, a recommendation on the cover sheet for
disposition. On file after file these cover sheets ended up
saying the same thing: that the file had been reviewed,
that the conclusion had been reached that there was nothing
of merit in it, and the file should be destoyed. The review
of the file on Richard Kovich, for example, which was eight
pages long, was dated 22 December 1975.* Kalaris,
concurring, sent it to ADDO Blee with a handwritten note
that the material in this case would be packaged and held
with instructions that it should be destroyed as soon as the
Senate released CIA from its embargo on destruction, and
that the summary memo and cover sheet would constitute the
only future record. The HONETOL files received steady but
not priority attention. It took somewhat over a year for
to make his way through all of them. Nothing of merit
was found in any of them.
[Fox] to
A special approach was developed to get the MORINE/ data
into central indices. As a result of the compartmentation
applied to MORINE in the Angleton staff, much of the
existing MORINE information was squirreled away and not
immediately appreciated. The rejuvenated exploitation
program produced a flood of [ZRTAPFY] correspondence with
field stations, but this was slow to yield indexable
material. It was not until the end of 1975 that a focused
=
Richard Kovich was one of the three CIA staff officers
most severely affected by the HONETOL witch-hunt.
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analytical effort on MORINE got underway.
29
Beginning then
with the cassette material (CC CPSU) International Department)
trainee names), and later with country summary reports when
1 / analysis and liaison feedback fleshed out an understanding
of GRU residency personnel and operations, MORINE data were
provided by the staff to SE Division, which in turn conveyed
them on to RID under SE Division document (SX) numbers as
AESTORAGE information. Names of GRU officers, code names
and true names (where known) of agents and developmentals,
support assets, etc. were indexed in this fashion.
People Responsibilities
-
The Kalaris staff inherited responsibility for a
handful of defectors and certain contract personnel who had
been working for the Angleton staff. This responsibility
was not particularly welcomed, but it had to be dealt with.
The defectors were Golitsyn, Nosenko, Deryabin, and
6,8
в
Rastvorov, and a former Romanian] intelligence officer by the
name of [Constantin Dumitrachescu.] also known as: CMHCHCERCHIERECTED_L___
The Soviets were well known, at least by reputation, to the
8
SE alumni on the staff, but the [Romanian]
surprise.
They had never heard of him. *
24
was a total
In early 1972 the [Israeli internal service (Shin Bet)]
had approached CIA through Angleton and asked for assistance
in arranging the defection and resettlement of
6
Chief, SE (Blee) had been aware of Dumitrachescu's]
defection at the time, and had deduced, and ultimately
obtained confirmation from the DDO, that Angleton had
arranged to bring him to the United States and had him
squirreled away.
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This would suggest that Angleton may have lacked the
opportunity that others had had to observe the kinds of
behavior Soviet defectors have displayed in sorting out who
the important players are in matters affecting their future,
and figuring out how to deal with them.*
--In the eyes of some who knew him, Angleton viewed
himself more as chief of an operational entity than of a
staff. Few gave him high marks as an effective staff, as
opposed to operations, officer. His secret travels in
Western Europe, not to mention to Israel, to meet with
senior liaison officials with whom he had developed
confidential relationships constituted a form of independent
operational activity. The proposal, ultimately stillborn,
in 1965 for Angleton to develop special counterintelligence
units in Vietnam** displayed certain parallels with his
conduct of counterintelligence abroad as Chief of the CI
Staff in the way in which the local station would be
effectively cut out and command channel and communications
would run direct to counterintelligence headquarters in
The proposed special counterintelligence (SCI)
units for Vietnam were modeled after SCI units employed by
X-2, the counterintelligence arm of the wartime OSS--where
Angleton began his intelligence career. Perhaps those early
experiences shaped in some way Angleton's later preference
for conducting counterintelligence--by himself, without
involvement of the area divisions and stations.
Washington.
1
1
1
_ and What To Do About Iti Game plan
The Plan
In assessing the state of affairs in the staff, it did.
Angleton may have had some exposure, probably during the
1950s, to pre-War (1938) KGB defector Aleksandr Orlov.
**As described in Cleveland C. Cram's history of the CI
Staff (to 1974), [Vol.x, pp. 1004 ff]
24
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streamline our procedures."*
i
1
1
1
By 1976 the office of the Executive Officer of the
Staff included a Privacy Act Section with four positions in
addition to a three-person Records and Registry Section.
(FOIA and Privacy Act requests were handled together.) But
this by no means solved the problem. In the fall of 1977,
as DO ceiling and personnel reductions were being meted out
and the staff was trying to gear itself to getting along
with less, the DDO was advised that the staff's Privacy Act
Section was 60 strained and its personnel under so much
pressure that henceforth it would not accept deadlines
imposed by elements outside the staff. When requirements
were received, the section would advise the requester how
much time would be required to complete the work.
But normal FOIA and Privacy Act requests were not all;
there were also specialty requests that had to be met.
All
had the common denominator of the staff's unique files and
These included such matters as:
records.
--
Oswald.✶✶
FOIA requests for information concerning Lee Harvey
Handling these required the creation of a task
force of 13 operations officers and analysts, plus clerical
personnel, and their full-time efforts for over a month.
--
Requests for interviews and/or information from the
Senate and House Select Intelligence Committees, and the
Department of Justice.
-1
A review of the Rosenberg case by a Federal court,
which caused problems with regard to related VENONA
CI 131-75, 9 July 75
** Nosenko's assertion that he was familiar with the KGB's
assessment of and involvement with Oswald in the Soviet
Union had led to endless debriefing, analysis, and cross-
checking research on this subject.
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United States: "In each case you open a file on there must
be a demonstrable CI interest. Please assure that this
guideline is followed meticulously,"
Double Agent Branch
was charged with the
1 ; conduct of and coordination on double agent operations
abroad. Since the vast majority of DA cases were run by the
US military services, the FBI, or--in some instances--
Foreign-liaison services, the branch was very heavily a
coordinator rather than active runner of operations.
[Area
98
Operations Branch
Was charged with
coordination with the area divisions on matters of CI
interest, and with stimulating CI disciplines and practices
in the area divisions and field stations. The centerpiece
of the branch's activity was management and conduct of the
CI Survey program. Consisting itself only of the branch
chief and two clericals, the branch staffed its survey teams
with detailees from the area divisions and CI Staff officers
borrowed from other branches of the staff, both Ops and R&A.
1
1
1
Counteroperations Branch
Was charged with
operations designed to counter and disrupt the activities
abroad of foreign intelligence services inimical to US
interests. Charles Anderson, an LA Division officer who was
brought in to the staff by Sternfield to head the branch,
had had considerable experience in CA operations, and the
branch's activities reflected this background. Virtually
all had a clear CA character, from promotion of a book about
the Tupamaros and terrorism in Uruguay, to a press campaign
in Europe designed to expose the Curiel apparatus as an
instrument of Soviet intelligence, to a paper on the Cuban
intelligence residency in Chile during the Allende regime.
Primary orientation was toward Latin America, with heavy
focus on terrorist organizations and activities.
operations tended to be highly imaginative, often complex,
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In May 1980 the IMS analyst group detailed to the CI
Staff to deal with the paper inherited from the Angleton
Staff finally completed its work and returned to IMS. In
all, during the preceding four and a half years some 600 feet
of CI Staff files had been reviewed, about 375 feet by IMS
and 225 feet by CI Staff personnel The Analysis Group main
index had been reduced from 500,000 cards in 1975 to 28,000.
DERYABIN RETIRES
(
Peter (Petr) Deryabin retired in January 1981 on the eve
of his 60th birthday,
One of the early group of KGB officers
to come to the West following the death of Stalin in 1953, he
had defected in Vienna in 1954. Since that time he had been
continually associated with, and in effect a ward of the CI
Staff. For a number of years he, along with other defectors,
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