200000
104-10324-10002
2025 RELEASE UNDER THE PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY ASSASSINATION RECORDS ACT OF 1992
Ralph E. Weber
SECRET
INTERVIEW WITH
SAM HALPERN
SECRET
23 October 1987
30 October 1987
13-00000
SECRET
Interview with Sam Halpern
23 and 30 October 1987
INTERVIEWER: As one looks into the background of the Congressional
investigations, what in your mind do you see as the most important factors for
bringing about the Congressional Investigations in 1975? It is an awfully
large area.
The
MR. HALPERN: I think if you look into the history of the background of why
the thing started it began long before the Seymour Hersh articles.
Congress was planning to go into something like this anyway for a whole
variety of reasons. I think Morton Halperin and his group on the outside as
well as the ACLU and liberal Senators (particular Senators) were itching to
get at this for a long time. I am trying to think of the name of the (he is
now a Washington Post reporter) investigative reporter (I'm trying to think of
his name but I can't) who was in Government for a while, didn't like what he
saw largely as a result of the Vietnam War. Oh, Walter Pincus.
INTERVIEWER: Walter Pincus?
MR. HALPERN: Walter Pincus had quite a bit, I think, to do in the background
in organizing this whole effort. And not many people realize that the title
(it is a long winded title) of the Church Committee was actually a title that
was prepared by the staff people months before the Church committee was even
heard of or even Senator Church knew what was going on.
INTERVIEWER:
Is that right?
MR. HALPERN: It will take me some time to look for it but remind me to look
for it. I put together some language on this many years ago in terms of the
inner-workings, what was going on behind the scenes among the staff people in
1
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
the Senate to look into intelligence across the board. CIA was just one of
the targets, I guess one of the main targets, but not the only one. And it
was just a happy (from their point of view), a happy combination of
circumstances. Seymour Hersh was looking at different things and had access
to different sources and wrote those two stories in December of '74, which
just dovetailed beautifully with what they were trying to do and brought
together what they needed and what they wanted. And that is where the title
I came from something the Church group came up with the title. It was the
staffers and the various other committees who had worked this out months
before. And by the summer and early fall of '74 these guys were ready to go
and when views from the Church Committee impetus came, there it was.
They had
the title, they had the paperwork, they had everything done, and they just
pushed it through.
INTERVIEWER: Do you feel their efforts along these lines even pre-date the
Watergate investigation?
MR. HALPERN: Well I don't know if it pre-dates the Watergate or not. I can't
say. I just don't know. I think there were some possibilities of going in
tandem with the Watergate.
But I don't think that the Watergate problem
itself was what these guys were interested in but I wish I could identify them
better. They were targeting against intelligence as such and they succeeded.
INTERVIEWER: And some of it was disillusionment with the
MR HALPERN:
Disillusionment with the Vietnam War. No question about that.
There was another guy. The name was Paul and the reason I say that · the last
name was Paul - because we; in the working of the intelligence officer, we had
a hell of a time with two Congressional teams that used to go out for.
Congressional committees these were staffers.
--
2
SECRET
One was made up of Pincus
13-00000
SECRET
who later became the Washington Post guy.
Pincus and Paul (I am trying to
remember what the first name of Paul was) but we always regarded them Pincus
and Paul: P squared.
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN:
That is P-A-U-L?
P-A-U-L, yes. And they were problem children in terms of having
to advise the field; the State Department had a similar problem advising the
Embassies on how to handle these guys and how to brief them, what to brief
them. We weren't trying to hide anything, or kid them or lie to them or
anything like that, but it was a matter of how you really work with these
people to try to get them to understand what you are trying to do. These guys
were always traveling around Southeast Asia, in particular, and it was mostly
during the Vietnam War problem. And the second team (we called them L&Ms)
first the L stood for - Lowenstein was the L (and I'll be damned if I can
think of what the M was). But I think in looking into The New York Times in
1973 and 1974 long before the Watergate thing and the Church Committee
business began, these guys were always floating around as Congressional
staffers. I forget if they were the Senate or the House but anyway they had
these two teams which were real problems in terms of the Executive branch of
the government having to deal with the Congressional branch of the
government. The old conflict of foreign policy that lives in the
Constitution. I think the Constitution was made that way, to have the
stresses and strains that we still see today.
INTERVIEWER: Were these teams looking at the domestic?
MR. HALPERN: No, no. This was all foreign.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, all foreign.
MR. HALPERN: They were all looking at foreign at that point. They had
3
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
nothing with the Church nonsense and MHCHAOS. It was all in the foreign
affairs field. And they were mucking around all over the place trying to get
into stuff which we held as classified both we the State Department, the
Defense Department, what have you. Including the use of the Meo tribes in
Laos, it came out some money was involved, people were using Air America was
used, all that kind of stuff. These people were not representatives of the
then Intelligence Oversight Committees and with the advice of the then
Oversight Committees (the four of them we had) we had to be careful as to what
we told these people from different committees of the Congress. The four
oversight committees were jealous of their prerogatives you could imagine
particularly in the days when you had real strong men running the Congress and
they did not want all of these other committees, in terms of jurisdictional
fights, mucking around in what they were supposed to be handling it. And so
somehow we were caught in the middle of the jurisdictional fights in the
+
Congress at the same time we were handling classified stuff we didn't know how
far you can go with these people. They weren't cleared for a lot of stuff.
So they were real problem children. And these two teams were the precursors
to what later became the Church and Pike Committees.
INTERVIEWER: Well, were these teams attached to particular committees or
subcommittees?
MR. HALPERN: Yes, well they were representatives of particular committees. I
just can't remember what the committees' names were.
INTERVIEWER: OK, right.
MR. HALPERN: It didn't really matter to us. They were not part of the four
oversight committees.
INTERVIEWER: They were not?
4
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR.
HALPERN: They were not.
INTERVIEWER:
OK.
MR. HALPERN: And the oversight committees, maybe that was one of the
problems, didn't do much oversight as you well know. And as a matter of fact
I remember these reports from DCI's coming back saying, "I got nobody to talk
to up on the Hill. They won't listen. All they want to do is give me money
and personnel. And they say, you know, "Go do your job." And so this is
true. I have heard that from senior officers in the jobs I have held at staff
meetings over and over again. The Director came back again and he doesn't
have anybody to talk to. Nobody wants to listen. Nobody wants to know.
there is Senator Stennis and Saltonstall and all of those others.
INTERVIEWER: And Russell?
And
MR. HALPERN: And Russell who sat on the floor of the Senate. You know there
are certain things you have to just accept and not know about. Or Goldwater
even today, when he was chairman of the Senate Committee said, "This Committee
shouldn't exist." So the four oversight committees never gave us any trouble
really except toward the end, they were very clear about one thing. I think
it was Russell who told I think Dick Helms, DCI -- and you can check the
record on this one I'm sure who told him, "this is the last year," (I
--
forget what year it was, I guess it must have been '71 or something like
that.) This is the last year we are going to fund those Meo tribes for you.
It's getting too big. Turn it over to the military," you know, "and lose it
in the Defense budget." Because it got to over a hundred million dollars and
I all that kind of stuff, I guess in those days that was a little big.
INTERVIEWER: Well did you have the impression besides Pincus that Paul and
L&M were also Vietnam veterans or.
.?
.
5
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: I don't know if they were Vietnam veterans as such. I think
they did not like what was going on in Southeast Asia. And the so-called
Secret War wasn't a secret in Laos. It wasn't a secret war, for God's
sakes. How could it be secret if the press was writing about it?
INTERVIEW: Sure.
MR. HALPERN: It was the press that gave it the name Secret War. The Senators
and the Representatives, they knew what the hell they were appropriating. I
mean, at least the committee members did when they put down money into the
budget, and all the budgets and all that money was cleared by Congress. The
CIA doesn't print its own money for God's sakes. Somebody had to appropriate
the money, and it was there. And as a matter of fact it was (what the heck is
his name) Saltonstall, I think.
INTERVIEWER: Symington?
MR. HALPERN: Symington. I'm sorry. Symington was the guy who later got Dick
Helms in trouble in '73 in front of the Church Multinational Corporation
Subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs Committee and not his own committee. It
was Symington, Christ, he reviewed the troops out in Laos. Bob Jantzen who
was then Chief of Station, Bangkok, arranged for (I forget who the heck was
Chief in Laos and Vietnam), but anyway, he went up to the Meo tribes and
reviewed them and then he goes, "I never heard of things like this." What are
you going to do with them when they do when they do that? So, but that is
much later. I mean, earlier than the Church Committee itself, the one we all
know about. But this was all background in terms of, I think, it was the
Vietnam war basically that got people upset, the problem of the war.
INTERVIEWER: Did you also have the feeling that there was a different
6
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
attitude that threat of the Soviet Union wasn't as great. Not necessarily
seen that way in the Agency but outside the Agency?
MR. HALPERN: Oh. By that time people were looking at Vietnam. They weren't
looking at the Soviets. There is no question. I am talking '73, 174. There
was no question about that. The spirit of Detente may have something to do
with that. The spirit of Glassboro, do you remember Glassboro, NJ?
INTERVIEWER: Sure, yes.
MR. HALPERN:
Johnson, which began even before Henry and Nixon and what have
you. But I think that all, I think, was totally overshadowed by Vietnam. I
think that was one of the big problems, the Vietnam War.
INTERVIEWER:
And you saw this not only in the public but also in the Congress.
MR. HALPERN: Uh huh. No question. No question. I don't think Congress ever
really understood
well, I know they never understood what Jim Angleton was
talking about on counterintelligence.
Hell, for that matter very few people
in the Agency I think really understood that one. And I didn't have any
appreciation of it either until I got into the job as the Exec for the DDP.
Because unless you see an overall world picture it is hard to imagine this big
thing happening around you when you are worrying in one little area. But
anyway, I honestly think it was Vietnam that upset the apple cart. Watergate
just added to it.
INTERVIEWER: Just added to it.
MR. HALPERN: The frosting on the cake I suppose or the whip cream on the
Whatever you want to call it. But I think with Vietnam that
banana split.
hurt most of all.
INTERVIEWER: So even if Watergate hadn't occurred, it was moving toward
investigation.
7
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: It would have been. No question. No question. Because if I
remember it correctly, the P&P and L&M teams were concentrating on Southeast
Asia and looking into what the US Government as a whole was doing, not just
CIA, but they didn't like anything that was going on in that area and I think
that is what began gnawing away at the thing and broke it apart.
INTERVIEWER: OK.
MR. HALPERN: You know in terms of an operation these guys did a magnificent
job in terms of their objectives. They, in effect, were able to stop the
whole machinery of government and wreck the intelligence system in the entire
community, not just CIA. And it is going to take of couple of generations to
rebuild it. If we ever can. You can't go home again. That is for sure. But
to rebuild what we had at one time is going to take at least a couple of
generations. Hell, it took us 25-30 years, that's a whole generation to get
the thing organized and then it came apart. It really came apart. And a lot
of this, because of the Vietnam, also had an effect not just inside the
government but it had the effect of the recruits you got. Even as early or
late, whichever way you want to look at it, from about 1970 on, we had been in
the war in Vietnam, for five years by then. The recruits, the new people
coming in, who passed all the tests and what have you, and been through the
first training courses and what have you, and they were on their first
assignments from the desks or some of them even going overseas for instance.
The ones that I saw, and I made it my practice sitting in the DDP's office as
the Exec, to talk to as many young officers as I could. Always had an
excuse: a cable who was coming up for release by the DDP, or going up to the
DCI coming through the channels, I always was able to call the guy who wrote
the thing. I didn't care about the guy who coordinated, I was interested in
8
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
who wrote it. And to talk to them.
INTERVIEWER:
If you have to stop let me know.'
No, we are fine, keep going.
MR HALPERN: Anyway, I used to talk to these fellows and women to see what
made them tick and it was a very difficult job listening to them many times
when they had all these bright ideas about intelligence, how you could do this
and how you could do that. And I had to bite my tongue and say, "Well, wait a
minute. You know, we tried that 25 years ago or 20 years ago and it didn't
work." And you couldn't just dampen their spirits by pouring cold water every
time they would come up with an idea, and yet somehow you had to try to get
them interested enough to look into the history of what happened and how you
did this and how you couldn't do this and how, why certain things would seem
beautiful when you dream them up and write them down on a piece of paper. In
the real world it just don't work. And we learned the hard way. All of us.
Trial and error. But you hope that the next group coming up didn't have to go
through that same torture if they would look at the record. And my concern
was that very few people were borrowing stuff out of the registry. Very few
people were interested in going back into the history of what took place and
certain activities. And you can't get it all out of a classroom.
INTERVIEWER: Right.
MR. HALPERN: And this was one of the things that bothered me while I was in
that job for those last few years is that: how do you pass on the experiences
so that people understand and learn without feeling that they are being pushed
down, without feeling that they are being squashed? Because you want
initiative. Half the business in dealing with human beings is initiative and
I don't know enough about the technical side but I know enough about the human
side. But you have to stop them. Why spin wheels?
Why push a lot of paper
9
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
through if they're going to be disapproved anyway? And yet keep them
interested enough. And that's a tough job.
INTERVIEWER: And were these recruits, say, '70's
were they much different
from those that you would have had in the '60's?
MR. HALPERN: Yes, the early '60's.
INTERVIEWER: The early '60's?
And
MR. HALPERN: Before the Vietnam war. A lot of people were coming in, and I
blame the educational system for this, in terms of the teachers they had.
I discovered this to my horror, as I mentioned earlier, about the Colorado
business the teachers there were worse than the students. Facts don't mean
anything to them. For example in Colorado it seemed to be, it was perfectly
all right for the students and the faculty to use the Church Committee
documents to prove one of their points about how bad CIA was or how bad DIA
was or what have you. But when I tried to use the same documents quoting
different pages, that was wrong. I wasn't allowed to do that. "That's just
junk. That doesn't mean anything." And I looked at them and I said, "I
thought I was at a university where you are supposed to be able to argue from
text." No, it was all right for them to do it but not all right for me to do
it.
INTERVIEWER: It fit in their pattern.
MR. HALPERN:
Yea, and so, you know, what do you do?
INTERVIEWER: Were these recruits coming in in the early '70's and so on
MR. HALPERN: The early '70's.
INTERVIEWER: Are they more questioning, are they
?
MR. HALPERN: No, that was one of the things that bothered me. One of the
things that struck me, both male and female, when they came in most of them,
10
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
when we got into discussions about operations or what have you, they seemed to
be more concerned about when they were going to become a division chief, a
station chief, and when they were going to become DDP and then eventually,
"how do I get to be DCI?" And finally after all of that is over, "What about
my pension rights?"
INTERVIEWER:
That's already coming?
MR. HALPERN: Yea, in the very beginning in '71, '72, 173, and at least '70,
'71 and '72 when I was more concerned about talking to them because by '73 we
were having difficulties with the Schlesinger turnover and what have you. But
this was one of the things that struck me very strong, and I was bothered by
it, and these were the best of the applicants. They had already been through
all of the machinery and all the screening processes and what have you and
these were the shining stars from the academe, and I was concerned about
that. But again, what do you do?
INTERVIEWER: Were others troubled as well?
MR. HALPERN: Yea, some of my colleagues were. They picked it up the same way
I did except on a different level. They were doing it in the branches or in
the staffs, most in the branches, or in the area units and I was looking from
across the board. But it was the same idea. We used to kick this around at
lunch. How do you get instilled into the new group, the upcoming generation,
the guys who are going to take over from us, that there is more to this
business than worrying about your pension? I tried to tell some of them, look
some of us are going to be in this business their whole career and never see·
the DCI's office let alone be the DCI. And so I said, "In all organizations
not everybody can be the field marshall.
Some of them have to be privates and
stay as privates our whole career." And that didn't go down at all.
11
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER: It didn't go down?
MR. HALPERN: No way. No way. You know it was frightening then and I guess
it is even more frightening now. I don't know what the situation is now but
its a bad show. I don't know. Maybe we were brought up in a totally
different generation. I don't know different backgrounds. I don't know
whether it was things like the Depression or World War II or what, but we all
had a different we all wanted to get promotions; sure, we all wanted more
money; sure, we all wanted honors and titles and God knows what else and
medals but.
--
INTERVIEWER: I wondered the same thing.
MR. HALPERN: You didn't sort of aim what the hell you were doing. "Hey, if I
do this right I'll get a medal." Or again, you may have thought maybe a
couple of these good things I do I'll get a promotion or something like that.
Yea, but that's normal. But you didn't do it for the purpose of the
promotion. And here these people are talking to me about: how do I get to
this and how do I get to that. I guess it's called career planning or
something. I have been through a lot of that, by the way, on career planning
from a personnel point of view, trying to chart out people's whole careers,
and I thought that was for the birds. How do you sit there and say in 25
years from now he is going to be in X, Y, and Z. Maybe you can do it.
INTERVIEWER:
That will come in with Schlesinger?
MR. HALPERN: That came in with Bill Colby. Management by Objective and all
of that kind of nonsense.
INTERVIEWER:
I've got some questions on that coming up.
MR. HALPERN: But I remember specifically, and you had better cut and paste
this tape I think, but I remember, for example, when Colby's Management by
12
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
11
Objective started coming out, one of the articles that was given to us,
written by a Britisher I believe, had a whole series of things things not
to do if you are going to go into Management by Objective. And we all looked
at this thing
every single one of these
points, things not to do before you go into Management by Objective, we had
already done. So how can we go into this thing? We went into it anyway.
INTERVIEWER:
--
we, I mean, all of my colleagues
Damn the torpedoes.
--
MR. HALPERN:
Oh yea.
It was great stuff.
INTERVIEWER:
And was their a feeling again when you talk about these new,
these young officers coming on in the early '70's
•
--
was there still a feeling
of family or is that a term that really. .?
MR. HALPERN: Yes, that is a good old term. "Band of Brothers" is a better
term. We really felt, all of us did, we were a Band of Brothers. Oh, sure,
we had arguments and fights and all of that kind of stuff, competition on who
was going to get what job, who was gonna be chief of station or who was gonna
do this, but we still felt ourselves a band of brothers. I like that term
better than family. Maybe other people use family but we were different. We
were guys who had gone through the war and had started from scratch, building
an organization and building a concept which was mainly an intelligence
service. And particularly us in the Clandestine Service, long before we got
into this covert action nonsense but anyway we were interested in how you
collect intelligence using human sources and with technical support, but
anyway, we were building a service. We thought we were. An important one.
And even though it only produces a very small percentage of the total take of
the US Government, we thought it was an important take. It was never going to
match something like Ultra or this overhead reconnaissance. You couldn't
13
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
possibly. But we were zeroing in what we called the hard targets and the
intentions and plans more than anything else. And as that kind of a group we
were all, "We came up the hard way" kind of thing. And we felt closer
together as a result of that.
INTERVIEWER:
was it
--
?
MR. HALPERN:
And did the Band of Brothers include everyone in the Agency or
No, it was just the Clandestine Services.
INTERVIEWER: Just the Clandestine Services.
We
MR. HALPERN: And as a matter of fact a lot of us in the Clandestine Services,
I wasn't one of them, a lot of us felt that we should not be part of CIA.
should be separate. Totally separate and not be involved with anybody else.
And that was one of the fights that went on for a long time between the DDI
and the DDP in that most of the DDI people felt (and the top brass
particularly felt) that the DDP should be an adjunct of the DDI, responding
only to DDI requests for information and in effect be the DDI's library and
research staff. You know, find out if the bridge is still standing between
"x" and "y" in the middle of Uganda or something like that. And we felt
differently. The DDI felt that they were the national intelligence analyst
group and we felt that we were the national intelligence collector's group
human sources.
INTERVIEWER: Sure.
We thought
MR. HALPERN: And drew big arguments on that. Big fights. And DDI always
felt that we (DDP) should disseminate intelligence that we collect only to the
DDI. They would decide who else was going to get the information.
that was a farce. We were everybody's collector from the President on down
and it was up to the President to tell us who else to give the information
14
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
to. And sometimes they did, like the Cuban missile crisis. And the President
stopped the distribution all across.
INTERVIEWER: Was there any feeling
in Clandestine Service
-
--
Completely.
you talked about the Band of Brothers
was there any similar feeling in the DDI?
MR. HALPERN: I don't know. You'd have to ask somebody there that could tell
you. Because I am in effect the Johnny-come-lately to the DDP because IJ
started out in OSS and R&A, and then moved from R&A over into the SSU, the SI
side the Secret Intelligence side. And I know when I was in R&A our
--
1
feeling then was we were part of OSS, the whole thing, and even though the SI
people didn't always tell us what they were doing, we found out later that we
shouldn't know. At least I found out later. There was a good reason why we
shouldn't know. We could work with them and we worked very well with them in
terms of providing intelligence support for their operations in the field in
Southeast Asia, which was my beat, and we would sit and work with the officers
who were going out (not the agents) but the officers going out to do the job,
and when I was in Ceylon (again R&A) we worked very closely together with them
in terms of planned operations against various parts of Japanese held
territory. And we wrote all kinds of papers for them and pulled together all
kinds of stuff, and the question was in those days we felt more like we were
all part of OSS and OSS was a brand new thing. At least that is the attitude
I felt from talking to my friends about it, even as a part of R&A. But later
when it became a bigger outfit (a peacetime outfit) it was more well, we
were part of CIA in DDP but we felt for good and sufficient reasons that it
would be better if we could work out some decent cover so we'd be on the
outside totally devoid and divorced from the government. I don't know, the
number of times we had study groups planning on how to do this, to have a real
--
15
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
clandestine outfit working outside the government, with proper communications
obviously and clearances and what have you. We talked about Colorado before
go out to Colorado somewhere. You know, way out in
--
in one of the papers
nowhere. This was in the '40's the late '40's
--
or go to some other part
of the country and get hooked up by telephone or wire or what have you long
before all of this computer nonsense. Or even get buried in New York City,
Wall Street, or one of those huge monstrosities that existed even then as a
private company somewhere. And do actual company business be a real
business, but also run your operation. Well, this has been tried so many
times in terms of study groups and nothing has ever come of it. Nothing.
INTERVIEWER: Didn't even come close.
--
MR. HALPERN: No. You couldn't get people willing to provide you the money,
the material, work out all of the legal aspects and it was really a hell of a
job when you consider you have the salaries and social security and workman's
compensation and how do you work out decent pensions for people and making a
career out of it and all that kind of stuff. You could do it for a few (as we
have done over the past years). We used to do anyway. We'd have decent
proprietaries. We'd run our own insurance companies and all that kind of
stuff and provide lifetime pensions for people and work on a system that would
work. But you could do it for a few and we did.
I don't know what they are
--
But to do it for a mass, it
doing today, and I am not interested in knowing.
would be tough very, very, very tough. So when you talk about brothers or
family, as we got bigger the DDP-DDI split was very evident and, as a matter
of fact, at one time, believe it or not, in the very early days DDP case
officers on the desks were not even allowed to talk to DDI analysts because we
thought, in those days, we thought the DDI analyst would be able to convince
16
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
རྞ་
the clandestine operator enough so that pretty soon the clandestine operator
was captive of the analyst and would be doing his research for him.
And we
had plenty of calls from DDI analysts which in effect, the answers were in the
Library of Congress, for God's sake go get them. We are not going down there
and get them for you and we are not going to burden the field people with
going to get those kind of figures for you. They are right there. Go get
them. And we had lots of fights about that.
Oh yea.
INTERVIEWER: I suppose there must have been a lot of tension?
MR. HALPERN: There was. There was. Because we kept saying the DDI analyst
was supposed to do their own research; do your own job. And I said in the
first place, and I remember I got into some arguments with some of them, and I
am sure my colleagues did too, that collecting intelligence via a clandestine
mechanism is the most expensive, time-consuming way of collecting a piece of
information. You have to have long lead time, you don't have a whole bunch of
agents in various departments of foreign governments so that you can just
press buttons and get answers out of them. And it takes time to identify what
you are looking for. And our job is a selected job and you have to go for the
hard targets. I am not interested in finding out the railway statistics for
you or the tonnage of wheat that goes through ports, for God's sakes.
get that from the Department of Agriculture or Commerce or something.
a very, very expensive way to do business. This is why we had to set up
actually a requirements staff which screened requirements so that we wouldn't
get flooded with this nonsensical stuff that should be done by somebody in the
US Government, don't get me wrong, but not the Clandestine Service. The
collector has got to be so fine-tuned that it is only after you've tried
everything else that you go for this particular thing. And don't expect the
17
SECRET
We can
This is
13-00000
SECRET
answer tomorrow morning. So we had a whole mechanism just in the screening
process. As a result the orders went out, "Don't talk to each other." Well,
over a number of years we finally broke that down which I thought we should
.have.
INTERVIEWER: When would you say what point of time was it pretty well broken
down?
--
One
--
MR. HALPERN: It began to be broken down let me give you two examples.
in 1957 and '58 when I was involved as the Exec then for Far East Division of
the DDP. We were involved in an operation in Indonesia with the Colonel from
Sumatra and later the Colonel from Celebes. I told my boss I was going to do
this and he said fine. I personally knew from the war from the OSS days
the analyst in the DDI, and I think it was OCI, who was on the Indonesian
desk. And I kept her very well clued on important developments in the
operation as it was going along so that she wouldn't be caught short by things
and would be able to watch what went into the President's Daily Brief and went
into the daily stuff and I mean it worked fine. But that was on a one-to-one
basis. And how much she told the DDDI personally, that was up to her. I
wasn't going to tell her how to run the show. But it never was on a DDP-DDI
basis, you see, the two got together and said, "Here's the operation." No
way. The second time we were breaking it even more was after the Cuban
Missile Crisis. After the Cuban Missile Crisis. 1963 now
about five or six years.
we have moved
INTERVIEWER:
Right.
MR. HALPERN: Des Fitzgerald was transferred from Chief of the Far East
Division to take over from Bill Harvey on the Cuban operation. Under Bill it
was called TFW (Task Force W) and under Des Fitzgerald it was called Special
18
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
Affairs Staff. This was after Operation Mongoose and Des had an uneasy
feeling that the intelligence we were collecting on Cuba was just not being
accepted by the analysts. And it wasn't. Well, it wasn't a picture and it
wasn't COMINT. The analyst only believed pictures and COMINT.
And maybe
today they believe telemetry or something, I don't know, maybe if it's not a
picture it is something else. Anyhow, if it wasn't technical in one way or
another, Cuban sources, the hell with them. And they were just being washed
out. And Des took it upon himself (and he was the kind of guy who would do
these things without getting approval or clearances). He decided he would ask
the DDI to send a senior officer down to (I say down because we were in the
basement of the building) to come to us on SAS, and Des would make available
to this one man (a very senior guy I don't remember who%; my memory has gone
--
bad), would make available true identities of all sources, and that created
holy hell within the DDP because, obviously, it went up and down the line and
Des' colleagues (as division staff chiefs) thought he was crazy, and it was
just a really big battle royal on this thing, but Des being Des said, "The
hell with it, I'm going to do it. They're my sources, I'm responsible, it's
my operation, and goddamnit, you have to give credit where it is due." "Dick
Helms supported him against the argumentation by all the other senior
officers. Nobody else wanted to go along with this.
INTERVIEWER: Is that right?
MR. HALPERN: So this guy came down and he sat for days, weeks, I don't know,
and he had access, believe it or not. I thought he was crazy. I thought Des
had lost his marbles. The one thing you protect is sources. Allen Dulles is
supposed to have said, he would even lie to the President if necessary to
You don't tell anybody your
protect a source. And that was sacrosanct.
19
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
sources, for God's sakes. You don't even tell the guy who's sitting and
working next to you who your source is. But anyway this was done and after (I
wish I could remember his name), anyway, after this fellow had gone through
all this nonsense and all the information, he came up with a report that
simply, in effect, said to the DDI people involved, "You don't know what you
are missing. These are honest, bona fide sources by and large and," he said,
"I think you are crazy for not using them." So from that point of view it
starts to break down. The animosity, the differences of approach on how you
work this thing, and it was a good thing from that point of view, and I must
say not one of our sources was ever revealed by this man. He kept it, you
know
-
integrity.
Sure.
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN: And he became one of us, in effect. OK, he knew the sources.
He knew more than I did and I was the Exec. I never asked for sources. But
Des also had another thing as part of this program. Des started to expand
what is called the source description on the disseminations.
We used to have
And we
just a one liner or something like that, the guy had access on it.
ended up by writing a short paragraph about the source, without identifying
the source, which in effect gave the reader some idea of the source's
reliability, his access to this particular type of information, how long he
had been around with us, and, in effect, we're telling you this is good, bad
or indifferent.
INTERVIEWER: They were a tested source.
MR. HALPERN: Yes. And without going into that numbering system or the
grading system which is hard to work with. And this was a departure. And
this was a test again. And only on the task force we began that before it
20
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
became DDP-wide and the DDP hierarchy was opposed to that too.
Because if you
work with us long enough and you don't change these by-lines often enough,
somebody can sit and pretty much zero in on who the source is. And it is a
hell of a lot of extra work. Believe me, a hell of a lot of extra work. But
Des insisted. Again being Des, and then when he became DDP, he put that
system in effect throughout the DDP. And unfortunately he was in the DDP only
a short period before he died in July of '67. So when you're talking about
the time frame of breakdown, it began in '63. Des took that system into WH
when he became the Division Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, as it's
called now LA. And then he took it into the DDP when he became DDP in '65.
My goodness.
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN: And he remained there until 1967.
INTERVIEWER: Gee. That's good background.
MR. HALPERN: So best when you are talking about breakdown of the dispute, or
the fight between the two, there were very valid reasons for both sides to
maintain the position that they had at the time. I can see their side.
Having been from R&A, I can understand what their problem was, like I
understand our problem on the collecting side. And so, but gradually, I don't
know what the system is today and how it works, but anyway we began to break
it down, but it took, well, it began in '47 and took until '67. 20 years.
What you've got is two different worlds. And this is one of the reasons I
keep telling journalists who talk to me, we're both in the same business. You
are collecting information, and you want to protect sources. That's what we
are doing. You do it to get a Pulitzer Prize and we do it to protect the
United States.
21
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
It took all this time because of the very firm positions held by both sides.
It took all this time to get a better approach, a more reasoned approach, to
talk to each other, and both sides still maintained their respective jobs.
And Des was a key figure.
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN:
Des was a very key figure in this and he was doing this mostly
on his own. He had a hell of a lot of opposition. And, as I say, even his
closest allies, and I was his Exec, and I thought he was crazy. And I told
him so. I said you know you are giving away the store.
INTERVIEWER: And Helms backed him?
MR. HALPERN:
Finally. It took a lot of doing, but Helms backed him. Helms
said, "All right, let Des try as an experiment. He'll be the guinea pig.
Let's see what happens." And I must say if the DDI man who was chosen (it was
a very senior, goddammit), he'd been around a long time and had a marvelous
reputation. And a man of integrity and all of that, and boy he proved it.
But if he had broken, if he had slipped even just telling the DDI himself the
identities of some of the sources, the thing would have fallen right flat on
its face. But simply because of this one individual being who he was in terms
of an honest man, knew what the job was, he knew what had to be done and he
kept it all to himself.
INTERVIEWER: Great.
MR. HALPERN:
than Des did.
He knew more about our sources when he was finished with the job
INTERVIEWER: Is that right?
MR. HALPERN: Well, Des didn't know what the sources were. He knew them by.
cryptonyms. You know, "Radiator," yea he is the guy from the army. You
know.
Or "Lamb," he's the guy that gives the stuff on the Mig-22 or 21.
You
22
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
know, that's all you needed to know. But this guy knew who the sources were.
He knew them by name, rank and serial number. And it was an unbelievable
thing that was done.
INTERVIEWER:
And no leaks.
MR. HALPERN: Not a bit. That was the most important thing. And I guess he
knew what he was up to and he knew what the consequences of leaking were. The
experiment would have dropped dead in its tracks and nobody would have ever
tried it again. Ever. So it worked. But that's what finally broke it. So,
as I say, you were up to '65, '66, '67 when Des was DDP.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. Earlier we were just touching on Congressional committees
and there are some critics who say the Congressional committees overseeing the
Agency before 1975 were "blind and toothless watchdogs; that members of
What are your
Congress were unaware or unconcerned about Agency excesses."
views with regard to Congressional oversight of the Agency?
MR. HALPERN: Well, in those days the four committees were not blind, were not
toothless and they were not whatever the other phrase you had there. The four
groups were largely controlled by senior members of Congress who really ran
the Congress in those days. And their concern was: a) not themselves
getting to know too much of the secrets that went on; and b) they felt
largely, you pick good people%B you give them a job to do, you give them the
tools to do it and don't muck around with them.
Particularly, in this
particular field. Maybe it was ignorance. I don't know. But that was the
general attitude. As I say and as I have said before, I have had enough
reports from my bosses. The DCI was dying to talk substance with some of
these leaders on the Hill, and they did not want to listen. And that, I
think, was wrong. Maybe they could have helped. Maybe it would have been
23
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
different. I don't know. But they weren't blind and they weren't toothless.
They were deliberate on that part. And they didn't deliberately blind.
themselves. They were taken in a little, I think, sometimes when we used to
show them all kinds of little goodies and fancy gidgets and gadgets and secret
devices and what have you, just like show and tell. And I used to have to
prepare some of these things or get the stuff from the agent or from rest of
the DDP for the goodies and we called them goodies to show the Hill.
Well, they weren't always interested in seeing even those things.
--
INTERVIEWER: Is that right?
--
MR. HALPERN: Well, "We know you're doing a good job. Go. Go. Go."
These goodies might be radios or. . .?
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN:
Could be radios, could be concealment devices, secret writing
devices all kinds of gadgets with different kinds of bugs in them. And
obviously they got smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller they got
more and more heisted into looking at them, but it also meant goodies in terms
of good intelligence we picked up. I differ completely with Admiral Turner
who said that the years he was a DCI he never saw a piece of intelligence that
was worth the life of anybody. I differ with him about that. There was some
intelligence which I think was worth more than the life of a person.
I can
give you an example of that later. But, the committees, I think, deliberately
didn't want to get involved. They weren't lined up or held us for fools. I
don't think they were fooled a bit. They knew what they were doing. They
wanted it that way. And they kept it that way. And even in the staffs in
those days of those committee people were limited staffs who were cleared for
all this kind of stuff, and they were not interested in jogging, or pushing,
or goading their bosses into unnecessary mucking around of what the hell was
24
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
"
going on. They just weren't.
Usually the staff directors of each of the
small units were the only ones cleared for most of things and sat in on the
meetings.
INTERVIEWER: They were cleared by the Agency?
MR. HALPERN: Oh sure.
INTERVIEWER:
They went through the whole, the background. .?
MR. HALPERN: I don't know if
.
They weren't given polygraphs. That's
How they did the clearances I never
So that, people say they were taken
for sure. At least I don't think so.
asked. But anyway, they were cleared.
into camp.
I don't think that is the proper phrase. My own feeling is there
was a different attitude. They weren't out to do investigative reporting, in
effect, for themselves.
They weren't looking for titles, they weren't looking
for television headlines.
quietly, peacefully and get enough information to know about the budget then
they got all the budgetary information they wanted, all the budgets went
through them without an exception. No question about that, they knew exactly
where every penny was and approved it and what have you and all these
so-called covert operations were always cleared with the proper committee.
The committees had to alert the OMB in those days, the BOB really, the Bureau
of the Budget. The BOB wouldn't release money for some of our activities
until they got the word from the committees on the Hill.
They were just trying to do an honest day's work,
INTERVIEWER: Is that right?
MR. HALPERN: Yes, the four committees. So we didn't have a pot full of money
that we could just willy nilly use.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have a contingency fund? Modest.
MR. HALPERN: Well, the contingency fund was up on the Hill. I mean, it was
25
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
controlled by the Hill. And it is today, I believe.
But before you get money
released by the BOB, somebody up there had to say OK. And that happened on
every one of the operations I know about. In the Far East, I don't know about
the European ones, I am sure the system is the same. It was a well-oiled
machine. Sure, they didn't ask the kind of questions that are asked today,
but they knew what the operation was.
INTERVIEWER: There was a feeling between the Agency and the Congress that
there was good liaison?
MR. HALPERN: Oh yes.
It was overt. Completely. Always.
It worked very
well indeed. And the system worked so that the Legislative Counsel, whether
it was Pforzheimer or John Warner or anybody else, they knew who to call
within the DDP, for example. If they were sitting up on the Hill and one of
the members could be a Senator or Representative of the committees
wanted to know something, they knew who to call, and when I had the job they
usually called me for the DDP because I was able to get them the answer and it
I worked very well. In case someone didn't know everything, they knew where to
get the information. And when Congress asked you gave it to them.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think this was also a reflection of the view that the
Agency and the Congress both saw the Soviet threat as a real threat?
MR. HALPERN: I am not sure that was part of it. It may have been. But
that's a conjecture on my part. I think it was more the people we were
dealing with on the Hill had also been through the same things most of us had
been through. They are all part of the same generation. We were all working
together in terms of protecting the country. At least we thought we were
protecting the country. The business where some of this falls down is when we
started, because we had to, start working operations more in the United States
26
SECRET
13-00000.
SECRET
in order to get assets to go abroad, and once you start that you're touching a
very sensitive area and we all knew that. And we'll talk about that later.
We'll talk about MHCHAOS.
INTERVIEWER:
Yes.
And I
MR. HALPERN: But until then the consensus was, you know, we've got to have a
united front, we've got to find out what's going on in the world, we're
getting more involved in the world, and we all need to help each other.
don't think yeah, the Soviet threat was there but it was different, I
think, it was a different I mean, we weren't expecting the Soviets to march
:
--
--
over the border except very early in the late right after the war in the
'40's when you had the Berlin blockade and that kind of stuff. Yeah, at that
time people were expecting the Soviet troops to come marching not only into
Bonn but also into Paris. But that didn't last into the '50's. It was a
totally, sure there was a Soviet threat abroad and later a Chinese Communist
threat in Southeast Asia, no question of that. And there was a matter of, I
guess when Dean Rusk said many years later in the '60's, something about,
there is a dirty war going on in the alleys of the world in which we don't
see, but he said it's important, and, yeah, we were there.
INTERVIEWER:
Was there much more cooperation?
MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah, it was total. What broke it down was the Vietnam war
again and I guess Watergate. When '74 came around, I mean the Congressional
elections of '74 came, and you had a totally different bunch of guys coming
in, and Congress became 435 on one side and 100 on another side. Totally
independent kingdoms and principalities. And you had no cohesion and no
control. I think that's when it all broke. You couldn't go to two or three
guys on the Congressional Hill and say, "Here are the facts, this is what we
27
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
think 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.
couldn't control it.
couldn't control it.
Even Tip O'Neill
In all what, he had 30 years up there or more, and he
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
28
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
Committee, I remember, for example, Senator Huddleston, who was on the Church
Committtee and later was on the Intelligence Committee. During the days of
the Church Committee he was talking about, "You can't just have CIA or the
intelligence 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 Intelligence
Committee for a while, and I've got his clippings somewhere in my stack of
clippings, Huddleston said, "The Congress, the members of Congress."
he was
addressing his own buddies
--
"the members of Congress have to accept us on
the Intelligence Committee as your surrogates."
And that is all we were
trying to do. In an intelligence community to have an intelligence committee
be the surrogate and there was four of them
whole Congress.
--
--
be the surrogate for the
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 out
personally.
INTERVIEWER: He finally changed.
MR. HALPERN: He changed his mind.
INTERVIEWER:
That's neat.
MR. HALPERN: So you know, that's all they were saying. And it finally, it
took him a long while to get around to it, but he finally did it.
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN:
Some get educated faster than others.
That's right. So when you talk about. : The 74 break, I
think, was a big thing, a big thing. And I think if the election of Congress
in '74 had gone a little bit differently, and there hadn't been that total
break and disorder up on the Hill, the disarray I call it, which all began
with the Vietnam business and aided by the Watergate
INTERVIEWER:
And Nixon resigning in '74.
29
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
MR. 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
I'm just
"
Committee might have been prepared a little better. I don't know.
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.
Were you aware of these tensions?
INTERVIEWER:
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)
30
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
who 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. .?
;
31
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. 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
services.
--
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
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?
32
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. 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.
got to pick some of the hard ones too.
INTERVIEWER:
You've
Where was it thought that these orders came from, relative
to
.?
Oh, no
MR. HALPERN: Oh, they knew, people knew where the orders came from. They
knew it was a Presidential directive. Nothing was hidden from them.
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
33
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
going to do it, there would be a new DCI in 24 hours
INTERVIEWER:
younger.
--
or thereabouts.
And I think your point that it went up and down wasn't just the
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.
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
We
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!"
34
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
I 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.
ahead." They had half a million men.
11
It's crazy! You can't plan five years
Five year plan. This wasn't out in
not
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
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
35
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger
--
it was crazy. We even had what
was called a Vietnam levy. Des Fitzgerald decided, when he became DDP, he was
going 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 and
you 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 that
kind of stuff. And so, we were putting our assets into one little place and
it was the most important thing, sure, I understand, but that wasn't the main
target or what the hell CIA was in business for. We weren't, at least the
clandestine 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 to
the Vietnam levy. On top of that comes CHAOS and CHAOS really takes us away
from more of our normal activity and who the hell is going to worry about the
Soviet target in terms of intelligence collection. And by that time, more
than just Soviet targets, a lot of other targets too. So yeah, there was a
lot of opposition.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. Do have any feeling about the Presidents. Do you feel.
that 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't
normally ask that kind of stuff. They just want to know, they want to see a
piece of paper. They want to know what is going on. And if he is bringing in
something hot, he might ask, "Hey, how'd you get this?" But, let me give you
36
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
another 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
37
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
themselves for God's sake, not the mail opening but the wire tapping, and
bugging 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 the
.:
Agency?
MR. HALPERN: No. I'll give you an example. I didn't know it.
INTERVIEWER: You did not know it?
information.
MR. HALPERN: I did not know it and even when I was Exec to the DDP I knew
some operational cryptonyms, and all I know was that they were good sources of
I never asked beyond that. And nobody ever told me beyond that
and I had no reason to know. I didn't. As a matter of fact, to give you an
example of how naive I was, when I was called back, right after I retired in
early '75 to help on getting ready for the Congressional investigations, which
we didn't even know was going on at the time (this was January of '75), the
newspaper 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 was
dealing with the security officer (the Office of Security ran HTLINGUAL)
that what we were doing was in support of trying to get information about how
the Chinese or the Russians were operating and what it took to get
--
documentation and all that kind of stuff what you needed.
--
Hell, perfectly
honest. I didn't know what the hell was going on. And all I know is that the
security guy said, "Yeah Sam yeah yeah that's a good idea. We'll think about
that yeah Sam that's a good idea yeah yeah we'll think about that." They
never said anything at that point that they were running a real mail coverage
and 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,
38
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
obviously. 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:
MR. HALPERN:
Never heard the cryptonymn. Okay.
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?
39
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
MR. 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
40
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
the Ops Center and he had one machine up in his Ops Center in the White House,
and at first we were standing at the machines separately waiting for the piece
of paper (nobody else was allowed to see the paper). So, you know, we worked
together as a team. And the Agency, I mean at least the Clandestine Service
side of it worked very closely with them. And I remember right after Nixon
was sworn in in January of '69.
INTERVIEWER: '69 when he came in?
MR. HALPERN: Yeah, he came in in '69.
--
There was a meeting Nixon,
Mitchell, Kissinger, Helms, and Tom Karamessines in the White House.
INTERVIEWER: Was Rogers there?
MR. HALPERN: No.
INTERVIEWER: No, Rogers?
MR. HALPERN: You mean the Secretary of State? No. Who is he? He didn't
NO,
count. You know that. I mean the history books are full of that now.
Mitchell was there. I don't know why but he was the Attorney General but I
don't know why he, at least, the Attorney General nominee. But anyway, he was
there. I got this from Tom. As Tom's Exec, Tom came back and reported on the
meeting. And there was a very close bond right there established. Nixon then
Kissinger asked a lot of questions as to our capabilities, our assets and what
we could do to help and what have you on different aspects, and Tom was asked
to give the details. Dick knew some but he didn't know all the details
because he was out of the job for a number of years. When they came back,
they had marching orders. It worked.
INTERVIEWER: So that in '73 when Helms is out, that's the big big change?
41
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: Yes.
As I say that began in '72 right after the election.
Nixon had his own raid but that is another story. But there was when
Schlesinger came in it was just a traumatic, really traumatic, experience….
INTERVIEWER: Was Schlesinger known to the Agency?
MR. HALPERN: No, just by reputation.
INTERVIEWER:
Just by reputation. And that was?
MR. HALPERN: . Bad. Because of the things he had done in the Atomic Energy
Commission and the Bureau of Budget. And his whole approach. Totally
impersonal. The new "machine man" kind of thing, you know, the mathematical
brain or whatever oh, I guess machine is a better stated cause.
INTERVIEWER: So that reputation was known and therefore.
--
•
--
MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah, not only known but it was, you know immediately the
phone calls went out all over town asking, "What about this, who is this guy,
what's he like?" And everything we got back was bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad,
bad.
INTERVIEWER: And then Colby will support Schlesinger while.
.
MR. HALPERN: Oh, he not only supported him but he was one of the guys who
made inputs of the information for whatever attitude Schlesinger had on the
whole thing. Now Schlesinger's attitude about what he did totally changed
since he's out of government, since Helms' out of government, and everybody
else. It was 180 degree switch.
INTERVIEWER:
For Colby?
MR. HALPERN: No, for Schlesinger.
INTERVIEWER: Schlesinger.
42
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER:
Yeah. And I tried to tell them.
See I was Exec to Colby for
who wouldn't believe it
about 3 months, and I tried to tell my friends
don't blame Schlesinger for what is happening to the DDP. Blame Colby. It
was all Colby. He's the guy who was pushing this. And in effect even says so
in the book, if you read the book, where he says he told Schlesinger he'd take
care of cleaning up the DDP. You know, he knows that function. Well, yeah
that's true.
INTERVIEWER: What three months were you serving Colby?
MR. HALPERN: February, March, April and part of May of '73. When I was his
Executive.
INTERVIEWER:
working away.
And did the tensions simply grow after Schlesinger and Colby are
MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah. It lasted until. . . Well, Schlesinger left early.
He left in June of '73. And it lasted even afterward. The thing didn't get
settled down for a long while.
INTERVIEWER: Continuing on?
MR. HALPERN: Yeah, it continued.
Became public.
INTERVIEWER: And then people being separated from the Agency?
MR. HALPERN: And I saw how some of those separations of some senior officers
were done. And believe me, it was brutal. Brutal and awful.
INTERVIEWER:
Brutal in the context of?
MR. HALPERN: No sense of personalities.
No sense of humanity. No sense of
the dealing with individual problems. We used to be a Band of Brothers.
INTERVIEWER: Right.
MR. HALPERN: I think I said that before.
43
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER: Yes.
MR. HALPERN: That stopped with Schlesinger and Colby.
INTERVIEWER: Now that stopped throughout the Agency or
MR. HALPERN: I don't know about the rest of the Agency.
INTERVIEWER: But it stopped in the clandestine
MR. HALPERN:
•
Let me talk about what I know about.
INTERVIEWER:
Sure.
MR. HALPERN: I can conjecture about that other
INTERVIEWER:
Right, yes.
MR. HALPERN: My conjecture is almost as good as yours. Maybe a little bit
better having lived there all these years.
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN:
Sure.
But, no, I am talking basically what I know about clandestine
subjects. It was awful. I mean, even old friends were just, you know,
ignored, looked down upon. Given no consideration whatsoever.
days we took care of each other as a Band of Brothers does. We helped each
other.
INTERVIEWER: And this included what sorts of things?
MR. HALPERN: You mean the helping?
INTERVIEWER: Uh huh.
In the old
MR. HALPERN: Oh, if a guy had a family problem, we'd worry about his next
assignment so that the family problem was taken care of. If a guy had a
medical problem he didn't want people to know about, talk about, we helped him
with that. People with husband and wife problems, we'd help on that. There
I were even problems with kids. We'd help with that. Drugs, somebody
44
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
impregnating somebody
--
what do you do about that kind of thing. We'd try to
look out after each other. That didn't mean we didn't have professional
rivalry and all of that. There was a lot of that, believe me. Who got what
But basically, when the chips were down, we
job and who got what promotion.
were helpful to each other. We tried to find interpretations of rules and
regulations to assist each other, even financially, so that you weren't so
out-of-pocket on a lot things and the government might be able to help. If
somebody had a problem, you know, if he was abroad for example, and something
happened to a family member back here, we'd suddenly call the guy back on TDY
we had a big important problem to worry about and discuss with him.
You
know, that kind of stuff.
INTERVIEWER:
Yes.
MR. HALPERN: All perfectly legal, and it was all, we used to, as a matter of
fact, we in the DDP used to look at some of our support officers and
administrators and what have you in terms of how well they were able to
interpret the regulation in order to help us out with a job, whether it was a
personal thing, or a professional, or an operation or what have you, and I
remember one of them. I'd pick up the phone and say, "Charlie, here's my
problem: I've got to get from point A to point B and I've got to do it
fast." "Jesus Christ. All right. I'll call you back." And within the hour,
or whatever it took him, he'd say, "You go from A, to A Prime, to A Prime 2,
to A Prime 3, and then you end up in B over there, and you'll get there and
You'll just go.
you'll be fine and it won't take you any time.
way." I said, "Fine. You prepare the papers.
Just do it my
I'll sign them." And that's
the way it worked. You know, a Band of Brothers. We knew what we were doing
45
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
in terms of trying to get the job done and stay within the bounds of the
Agency.
INTERVIEWER: And if somebody came up for retirement, and they might need
some.
MR. HALPERN: I think, we'd try to, well, in the early days when you didn't
have the bulk of people suddenly coming out, you'd even try to help them find
a job. Pick up the phone, call friends, connections, what have you. And it
was done.
Now later, when it came into the hundreds, you couldn't do it,
obviously. And then everybody fell by the wayside. But it was a totally
different attitude; instilled right away when Schlesinger came along. Some of
his language is even being quoted in the newspapers and magazines. I don't
know if he said the words that way but anyway things like: "I am not
interested in people, I am interested in the United States taxpayer." Well,
we were interested in the taxpayer too, but that didn't come first. Maybe
that was wrong but at least we didn't think so. Considering the time and
effort most of us put into that place, I don't think Uncle Sam was ever on the
short end of the stick.
INTERVIEWER: And so someone being separated might not know he was being
separated until
MR. HALPERN:
•
Until it hit him.
INTERVIEWER: Until it hit him.
MR. HALPERN: Yeah. I remember Colby, for example, taking home with him,
which he shouldn't have done but he did, stacks of personnel folders to, you
know, be the great decider. This guy goes, this guy stays.
INTERVIEWER: So the morale was not very good?
46
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: Oh, it was nonexistent. Nonexistent, less than nonexistent.
INTERVIEWER:
Gee.
MR. HALPERN: '73 was a bad year. A very bad year.
INTERVIEWER: '74?
MR. HALPERN: Well, I don't know. In '74 it probably got a little bit
better. Things were settling down a little bit under Colby. And we weren't
quite so much under the gun. About that time most of the people had been
separated.
INTERVIEWER: And was that harshly, that separation issue, is that Agency
officers were coming back from Vietnam.
--
MR. HALPERN: Partly that. But only partly. We had a program under Tom
Karamessines and under Helms. We knew that we were going to have to bring
back a lot of people from Vietnam gradually, and we started actually, believe
it or not, we started earlier than most people give us credit for to plan for
this kind of reduction in force in Vietnam, the Far East Division, and
gradually try to sort of spread the officers back to their proper divisions
and areas, and we knew it was going to take a long time. And we knew we were
going to have to reduce the total strength we were getting cut budget wise
anyway and personnel slot wise. But it was a long range program.
We were
going to do it over a period of time. We weren't going to do it in a day.
And it was a totally different approach. One with humanity, one totally
without humanity. And I think we were right in feeling that we owed the guys,
after all of their years and effort, some consideration. And, you know, there
are perfectly legal ways and means of using the personnel rules and
regulations and financial rules and regulations to ease the passage.
47
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER: And make it more gradual.
MR. HALPERN: Yeah, and make it more gradual and make it easier on people, and
what have you. And, look, even Schlesinger had to go to Congress to get the
number of retirees' positions opened under the CIA Retirement Act. He had to
get those numbers raised to take care of the mass of people he was suddenly
getting rid of. And he didn't even know that initially. And that was finally
brought to his attention, that a lot of these people could take us to court if
you just throw them out without giving them the CIRA benefits. And so they
went to Congress, and Congress upped the figures (with a little bit of
doing). I mean, that was one of the things, you know, just sheer humanity.
INTERVIEWER:
Sure.
MR. HALPERN: You know..
INTERVIEWER: The Ramparts article on the Agency and the National Student's.
Association.
MR. HALPERN: 167.
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN:
INTERVIEWER:
Yeah. Was that very harmful to the Agency?
Yes. Very much so.
The flap was?
MR. HALPERN: It was a big flap obviously. We had to cut back on a lot of
operations.
INTERVIEWER:
Involving students?
MR. HALPERN: Well, the students was only one of it because if you remember
the Ramparts exposure went far beyond student activity.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah.
MR. HALPERN: It covered all kinds of things labor unions, women's
organizations, religous groups
--
--
you name them and we were involved in some
48
SECRET.
13-00000
SECRET
way or another. And practically all of those had to be dismantled.
The DDP,
then Des Fitzgerald, just before he died as a matter of fact, came up with a
term call "Surge Funding." S-U-R-G-E funding. And what we were able to do,
all legal and all checked out with Katzenbach and the Attorney General and
everybody else, was in order to ease the way for a lot of these activities
that we were involved with, we gave them extra money, a pile of money kind of
thing, you know you are on your own from now on. Here, get going. Start up.
And so we really did a big dismantling job. And it was very, very painful.
Not only for the people involved in the activities, and including the officers
who were the case officers running the thing from inside, but it hurt the
overall effort. And one of the things, for example, even Congress finally
recognized the need and picked up the RFE and Radio Liberty or Radio Free
Europe and Radio Liberty and is now run by the government instead of CIA
funding it. It's still the same money from Congress, except they now call it
something else and they have a broadcasting committee that oversees it. You
know, no difference except it doesn't have those nasty letters
involved.
INTERVIEWER:
Right.
MR. HALPERN: So that's the running of it.
--
--
CIA
--
And that used to be one of the
biggest costs of our covert action operations.
Those and the any paramilitary
activity you get into. That's where the money goes.
INTERVIEWER: Sure.
MR. HALPERN: Intelligence operations don't cost much, propaganda operations
don't cost much and so on. So it did have a tremendous impact, no question.
'67 Ramparts.
INTERVIEWER: And this was fairly new in Helms' term of office wasn't it?
49
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: Yes, Helms was the DCI then. Yes, '67.
:
INTERVIEWER: Okay. How about, the question is raised sometimes:
how are
reforms and real or potential abuses processed within the Agency in the
decades before 1975?
MR. HALPERN: In practically every case that I know of, at least it went
through the entire chain of command. Usually the IG was involved, and then
the Legal Counsel got involved. And people were demoted, people were fired,
people were reassigned. It all depended on what the gravity of the situation
was and there were all kinds of different activities including some people who
did nothing more than try to swipe a few bucks. And some of those went to
court actually.
INTERVIEWER: Is that right?
MR. HALPERN: And, in those days, we could do, with the help of the judge,
have the trial in camera so it didn't get a lot of publicity. But we went
through all the ins and outs on a lot of this stuff and depending on what the
situation was, the General Counsel would take it over the Attorney General if
necessary. It all depended on what happened. But there was every effort made
first to try to clean it up inside the organization, inside CIA if possible.
And if not you went outside and got whatever help you needed and invoked
whatever laws were necessary to make sure something like this didn't happen
again, and people were told. Usually you didn't get the names of the
individuals involved, we always tried to protect that. And it wasn't just
because of privacy or anything like that, it's the nature of the business.
You don't talk about names. But the kind of activity were usually well
publicized at staff meetings and passed down the line. So you tell people so
these things don't happen again. You can't always be sure they don't, but you
try.
50
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER:
And how about the comment I had read earlier that Helms was
betrayed by Nixon, that if Helms had gone along on Watergate and all that type
"of thing he would have kept his job?
MR. HALPERN: Well, that sounds, it's a plausible theory, but I don't think
So. I don't think it was in the cards because my own feeling is that Nixon
was ready for a change, and he was ready to just cleạn house. Because look at
the rest of his changes on personnel throughout the government after the '72
election. I mean, it was just all those crazy things. He just felt he wanted
to have a new team. I personally don't think that that would have made much
difference with Helms. I mean, Nixon and Helms in terms of keeping him on the
job. I think he was ready for a new guy anyway.
INTERVIEWER:
Did you ever hear how Schlesinger happened to be chosen?
MR. HALPERN: No, I don't know, except that in '70 or '71 he was the deputy in
OMB and he wrote a directive, well, he wrote a study and not a directive,
changing the intelligence community relationships and the Director's
relationships to the intelligence community and therefore I think he was
considered an expert on the intelligence community and national security
policy and so on. And when they were looking for a new boss, I would think
that there he was sitting over at Atomic Energy which Nixon probably didn't
know what he was doing over there anyway. And so he did in 1970 or 171, I
think it was '71, a study and a report and moved him over.
INTERVIEWER:
Had it ever been mentioned that maybe he was Kissinger's choice?
MR. HALPERN: I haven't heard that. I would doubt it. I would doubt it.
Very much. I just hadn't heard that one before..
INTERVIEWER: Okay. All right.
MR. HALPERN: That's a new one. I presume some of your other sources
51
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
mentioned that to you.
INTERVIEWER: I don't know. There was simply speculation.
MR. HALPERN: No, I don't think so. I would be very surprised if that turned
out to be the fact.
INTERVIEWER: Okay.
MR. HALPERN: Henry doesn't take credit for it in his books.
INTERVIEWER: And he would.
That's for sure.
MR. HALPERN: And those are nice, big, two heavy tomes. If you forgot, I've
got them right down here.
INTERVIEWER: I haven't worked my way through all of them yet.
MR. HALPERN: He was supposed to have written a third one you know. But he
never has.
INTERVIEWER: Is that right? A third one is coming?
MR. HALPERN: The third one is going to be on intelligence and national
security.
INTERVIEWER: Oh really.
MR. HALPERN: But he never did it.
INTERVIEWER: It has not been written? Not yet anyway.
MR.HALPERN: Not yet.
INTERVIEWER: How about the Schlesinger memo of May 1973 regarding improper
practices in the Agency?
MR. HALPERN: That's Colby's memo. Schlesinger put his name to it, but it's
Colby's memo.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. So, written by Colby?
MR. HALPERN: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: And signed by Schlesinger?
52
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: And the results of the memo are sometimes called the "Family
Jewels" or "693 List"?
MR. HALPERN:
That's right.
That's right.
INTERVIEWER: How was that memo received?
MR. HALPERN: Well, I think in several ways. One of the ways was some people
were shocked and surprised that anybody would put it all on a piece of paper.
Number 1. Some accepted it as just another order and filled out all kinds of
stuff. I accepted it in terms of reading the words that were in there. I
never responded to it. Because it didn't apply to me, as far as I was
concerned, because none of the things that I had ever done were, as far as I
was concerned, beyond the pale, beyond the law, beyond interpretation of the
law or anything like that. And so it depended on how you wanted to read and
interpret the language. Because if I remember correctly it said something
about things that you did that you thought were beyond the charter or outside
the regulations or something like that. But I don't remember anything I ever
did beyond that, so I didn't respond to the thing. I never answered it. And
I'm sure that I wasn't the only one who didn't answer it.
INTERVIEWER:
Was there much talk about it at the time?
MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah, a lot of talk. Obviously. What's this all about?
Why? All that kind of stuff.
INTERVIEWER: Was it thought that it was related to a management style or
related to Watergate or related to .?
MR. HALPERN: No, I think it was written in terms of the Watergate business,
in terms of a CYA-type activity
"Cover Your Ass" Activity. I heard, again
obviously, I talked about it to a lot of people, and they talked to me about
53
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
it.
And I told them what I was doing. I told them I wasn't going to reply to
the thing, I didn't need to as far as I was concerned, but I left it up to
each individual that talked to me to make it up in his own mind. I don't know
how many did or didn't, but I think it was in terms of a CYA thing, in terms
of:
here's a new man on the block, Schlesinger, and he wants to know what
happened since Genesis. You know, doesn't he have anything else to do? He's
got a whole Agency and a whole new world to conquer. What the hell is worried
about all that stuff for? So, I think it was basically in terms of, at least
the guys I talked to or talked to me, it was a CYA activity on the part of
Schlesinger who didn't want to get blind sided by something that might have
happened that CIA would be accused of. But the attitude was, what the hell is
he worried about, it is not on his watch. If there is something is wrong, and
even if CIA is accused of it, it's not on his watch. Nobody can hold him
responsible for it. If it happened, even two years ago, what the hell. I
mean, so. It might have happened under somebody elses aegis, and CIA takes
the heat, but he could say, you know, it wasn't me. I wasn't around. So that
was the general attitude. And as I say, a lot of people responded like good
soldiers and wrote all kinds of tomes about things they thought were wrong,
and not all of them were accepted. I mean that 690 whatever thing. . .
INTERVIEWER: Yes, it's a list which is simply the number of pages that.
MR. HALPERN: Yes, and these things were each on a page if I remember
correctly. And these were the ones that Bill Colby finally accepted as going
quote beyond the pale unquote.
But even then when Bill issued his kind of
after action directives, there were a whole bunch of stuff. He said, you
know, these don't count. Even though I've got them, these don't count because
they are not beyond anything
--
they are perfectly legal and all that kind of
stuff and perfectly proper.
In some of these he said, we are going to stop
54
13-00000
SECRET
these completely, some of these we are going to modify (and CHAOS was one of
them). He didn't stop it completely. At least not initially. And these, he
said, have no bearing. So his own orders, later after he got all this stuff
together, when he finally tallied them all up, they were just, you know, "no,"
"maybe," "yes."
INTERVIEWER: At the time the memo came out, was it known that Colby was the
author or the drafter of it? Do you recall by chance?
MR. HALPERN: My friends wouldn't believe me. I knew. But .
INTERVIEWER: You knew that he drafted it?
MR. HALPERN:
•
His hand was there all the way. Now maybe he didn't do all the
drafting, but it was his initiative or what have you.
INTERVIEWER:
And your friends thought it was Schlesinger?
MR. HALPERN: Yes. Oh, Schlesinger was getting all of the rap, which I
thought was all wrong. All wrong.
--
From the firing of everybody
or a lot
of people to this kind of stuff. And it was Bill who was the guy who was
pushing Schlesinger into this kind of stuff. And Schlesinger was willing to
be pushed, don't get me wrong, and he wanted to do a house cleaning and a
sweep, and all that kind of stuff, but without Bill it wouldn't have gotten
half as far.
I'm sure.
INTERVIEWER: Why was Bill doing that?
MR. HALPERN:
That's a good question. People have asked me that continuously
and I don't know. Some people have said that partly it was because of his
daughter's problem. And you know she died very early on when he was DDP
DDO; sorry: I get my terminology confused by the dates. And I don't believe
that because his daughter's psychological problem was there long before, even
55
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
when he was in Vietnam and she was in Vietnam. So I really don't know. Other
people say that Bill was just being a good novice. Some people said he's
going to end up in the monastery some day, even though he's got a new wife and
all that, new company, and what have you. But, I've had all kinds of
interpretations, 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 he
.
was 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 other
words while Helms was still there? Was Colby.
MR. HALPERN: Not to the same extent. But Bill first came when I first got
to know himė
INTERVIEWER:
--
was in 1956.
That early?
--
MR. HALPERN: '56, yes. '56. Des Fitzgerald met Bill Colby when Bill was a
case officer in the Rome station. And Des came back thinking Colby walked on
water. The greatest thing since little apples. And he wanted him in the Far
East Division right away. Well, he made some arrangements, and he got Bill
into the Far East Division and assigned him as Deputy Chief of Station of
Saigon. 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 or
more. And we in the Far East Division we the case officers and the
--
--
operators in the Far East Division, the troops while Bill was here in
--
56
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
Washington 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
quote unquote. That he was not a clandestine operations officer
builder"
--
in terms of espionage or counterintelligence.
counterintelligence.
counterintelligence.
was
--
He never understood
Even to this day I don't think he understands
And I don't think he knew what a recruitment of an agent
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.
57
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: But Bill wants to build nations. And its very laudable and
maybe some government agency ought to build nations. And maybe he ought to be
in the AID, or ICA in the old days, or the Red Cross or wherever. But not as
a clandestine operations officer, trying to collect intelligence and recruit
human beings to be your agent, your spy. A lot of us in the old FE Division
on 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 Des
wants him around, and Des is the boss, so what the hell. There's nothing we
can 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, he
was 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 in
the Division at that point but Bill had an idea, for example, on how the
OCI's Daily Intelligence Report should look. He thought it ought to be like a
tabloid newspaper and even had a dummy made up for this thing. Well, it was
laughed out of court at the time. Bill kept that dummy until he became DCI
and he put it into effect. It became what is now called the National
Intelligence Daily although I am told it is no longer in the newspaper
format. That was changed as soon as Casey came aboard. But that is Bill for -
Once he gets something in his head, you don't change him.
you.
58
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER:
Tenacious?
MR. HALPERN: Oh, very, very.
INTERVIEWER:
Well did you have much contact with him after '56?
--
my one and only
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
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
children from all agencies
men, women and
including the military -- in Saigon in the
summer of '61 when I got down there. Saigon was still a nice, sleepy, old
It was a lovely place. There were parts of Saigon that you
French town.
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, built the first war room, or officer room (if you want) in the
59
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
Embassy. 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. And ⠀
60.
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
we came up with almost double. All holy hell broke loose. Bill Colby -- and
I was on TDY from Tokyo. Dick Bissell had offered to have my family come with
me and all that kind of stuff but I said uh uh. I'll go down from Tokyo, the
family can go home. And they did. But when this 18,000 figure hit, the G-2
in Saigon refused to accept it, General McGarr refused to accept it,
Ambassador Nolting (I guess it was) refused to accept it, and Bill Colby
refused to accept it. And I said to Bill and they wouldn't let us send the
information out. They just refused. They thought it would be best to
transmit the information to our respective Headquarters. That is the NSA
type, the SSO type, and back to CINCPAC and so on. And I said to Bill, I
said, "Bill, this is silly. First of all, I'm here TDY. I've got my own
ticket, airplane ticket, I've got my own passport. I can be out of here
unless you shoot me on the way out. I'll be at Tan Son Nhut whenever I want
to. And you know me well enough, Bill. I'll get to the first available CIA
station, which is either Hong Kong, Manila, Bangkok, or Singapore. I get into
the Commo shack, and my message will be in Washington within minutes. And I
think you know that my relationship with Des is such that he will at least
listen to me he may not accept what I am telling him but he will at
least listen. And I know in the meantime you can say, 'Get the guys with the
white coats and what have you to get Sam. He's gone crazy, he's mad, he
doesn't know what he is talking about, he's gone beyond the veil.' I know all
of this, Bill. But I think Des will give me a hearing even wrapped in one of
those
11
--
INTERVIEWER: Straight jackets.
--
61
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. 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
that
:
--
we compromised, no question about
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
"
62
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
show 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?
63
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. 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
of cables, relief of dispatches, what have you.
release of documents, release
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
64
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
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
One of them got lost and if it happened to be an "Ops M" then,
what have you.
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
65
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
message 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, explain
what 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 again
very closely was when I was for three or four months his his Exec. When he
came back from Saigon, and Dick make him the Executive Director Comptroller, I
had some dealings with him because I was the Exec in DDP and just working with
him. It wasn't that close in terms of the way I did in Saigon, the way I did
later in his own office.
I just saw him the other day as a matter of fact
at a meeting. I was in town. We're still friends. We say hello to each
other.
•
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 was
reassigned out of his office, I think it was May '73. So it's March, April,
and a couple of weeks in February and a couple
May
--
three months for sure
--
of 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're
blaming the wrong guy!"
66
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
1
INTERVIEWER: 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,
Literally. And the DDA simply supplies
.
can be its own independent Agency.
•
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.
67
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. 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?"
But they
And that led to another big hoorah, but we never did get command.
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 I 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.
68
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
And as I point out in my review of his book, I said, "You don't take an
artillery officer and make a submarine captain out of him. Or vice versa.
Sure, you can do it over a period of training, but if a guy wants to be a sub
captain, he goes into the sub service. He doesn't join the artillery. And
vice versa." And I said, "You know, people are not that changeable."
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN:
wants to do.
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN:
Were you surprised when Colby tried to do this?
No. Not really. I am never surprised at anything Bill Colby
Never.
And that dates back to '56?
Yeah. That dates back to '56.
And I wasn't the only FE officer
who saw it in '56. Believe me.
INTERVIEWER:
Is that right? That early on?
MR. HALPERN:
You could spot it. We did. I am not unique in this. Talk to
some of the old FE hands and see what they tell you. Just don't take it from
me.
INTERVIEWER:
How about the, we will come back to that later, how about, did
you have much of anything to do with the Rockefeller Commission?
MR. HALPERN: No. I didn't have anything at all. None of it. I read their
report. I'll show you my copy. It's all marked up. They've got so much
misinformation in there, it's not even funny. I mean, even they're screwed
up. I mean the nature of the business. It's like Robin Winks, he's got a lot
of misinformation in there, Ranelagh got a lot of misinformation. People just
can't get . . . If I wrote a book, I'd have a lot of things wrong if I
started to go outside of things I personally know about. You know, all you
can do is conjecture. And how do you sort the wheat from the chaff? You are
going to have a hell of a job.
69
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER: I think so. Okay.
How about moving towards the Hearings. One
writer said about Mr. Colby that Mr. Colby believed salvation for the Agency
lay in cooperation with the investigations, while other intelligence
professionals thought intelligence secrets were forever.
MR. HALPERN: I'm with the second group.
INTERVIEWER: You are with the second group.
MR. HALPERN: Yeah. And I will refer you to Colby's own book in which he says
--
this is before the Church Committee was created January the 15th, 1975.
Colby went to testify in public before the, I think it was the Armed Services,
it might have been Appropriations. I forget now. I think it was Russell or
Vinson, I forget the exact person. But anyway, and he says in his book after
he testified, after he testified in which he exposed for the first time, even
though the law didn't require him to do that, by the law, as a matter of fact,
you're supposed keep secret the organizational structure and breakdown of
CIA. Colby blew it for the first time, exposed the whole organizational
structure in public and went far beyond even that for the first time in public
testimony. And he says in his book, on the way back from the Hill going to
his office in Langley, it suddenly dawned on him that he might stop off at the
White House and alert them to what he has just done so that the news doesn't
hit them cold. And in my book, that in effect damned the hell out of Bill
Colby. Because as a serving officer, as a serving DCI, his first port of call
even before he went near the Hill would have been to go into the President's
office, I don't care who the President is, his boss and say, "Boss, this is
what I've been asked to do, this is what I intend to do. Is it okay with
you?" He never did. By the time it got to the White House, it was too late
70
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
to do any kind of damage control or approach it a totally different way, and
the President may not have wanted to, because Ford wasn't the strongest guy in
the world, may not have wanted him to say anything. He may have wanted him to
invoke Executive immunity or whatever. But Colby by doing what he did, by
The President
had no choice except to continue. And after that Colby just went on and on
and on and on and on. And never held back.
testifying first, cut the feet out from under the President.
And he had every reason to hold
back, particularly in the public hearings. Executive hearings, it might have
been different. But in public hearings, you know, in my book he went far far
beyond what he needed to do.
INTERVIEWER: Was there ever any talk when these.
MR. HALPERN: And I was out of the Agency by then.
INTERVIEWER: You were out?
MR. HALPERN: By 175.
INTERVIEWER:
When the materials were gathered, "Family Jewels," ever any talk
about why that didn't get over to the White House or apparently he had
briefed, he Colby, had briefed some committee, but did not fill the White
House in.
MR. HALPERN: I don't know. I don't know. I was back in the Agency in
January '75, because I retired December 31, '74. My sidekick and buddy,
Seymour Bolton, who is now dead, unfortunately, may he rest in peace, also
retired December 31, '74, but he went back to work right after the new year.
To start, we didn't know that a Church Committee and he didn't know that a
Church Committee was being created and what have you, but he knew that there
71
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
was going to be problems in terms of the two Hersh articles. And Seymour
convinced several of the powers that be in the Agency, including Bill, and
then he finally convinced me to come on back to the Agency to help out,
pulling together the stuff, because they kind of felt that I knew where the
poop was. I knew roughly where it was hidden, perhaps even what safe it was
in, and maybe what the hell the color of the paper was. And so I agreed to
come back, and so I was in there in January of '75 and stayed on until about
March, I think, maybe April '75 when it dawned on me, that this is silly, a
waste of time on my part because I was getting responses to my queries from
all the Directorates, I mean, I was getting substantive responses from all the
Directorates except one the DDO. And I knew damn well where the hell the
--
information was, that they had the information.
In most cases I did. And I
wasn't getting it. And the rationale I was given by several of the officers
in the DDO was that, "We're not sure" or roughly like this "We're not
sure what Bill Colby is going to do with this information. We don't trust
him. What do you want comment for?" So I mentioned this a couple of times to
Bill and he kind of said, "Okay, okay." I thought, "This is crazy." And I
finally wrote him a letter, and I sent it to his home, not to the office,
because I know what the hell happens with paper shuffling. Because I've done
enough of it in my day. And I said to Bill, "I quit for a very simple
reason. You are no longer the DCI." I said, "I agree with the guys in the
DDO in that nobody knows what you are going to do with this information.
in my book you are still the commanding officer. And it is up to us as troops
But
to give you the information you ask for. What you do with it is up to you.
It is your conscience, not ours. So since you are not acting as the DCI and
72
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
insisting that you get the information you need or you want, there's no point
in me hanging around. I'm retired and I'm going out of your life." And I
walked out.
INTERVIEWER: My goodness. Was it Scotty Miler also, didn't he retire in
December?
MR. HALPERN: 31, 1974, and Bill Hood did too and Ray Rocca did too.
Well a
lot of guys went out. I think there were over 200 of us from the DDO that
went out December 31, 1974. Largely, there was a lot of reasons, but one of
the big reasons was the fact of the numbers, the retirement numbers. Just
turned out to be right because there was a big increase coming up and if you
left by that date you got a little bit extra and that kind of stuff. So
everybody walked out at the same time. I was surprised when I got the figures.
from the retirement people what the hell I would be getting. So I figured I
might as well go out in December then, too. And this was long before the
Hersh articles appeared that we put our papers in.
INTERVIEWER: That you had made your decision?
MR. HALPERN: Yes, we all did. Of course, you had to have your papers in at a
certain time anyway. And in my case, see, I wasn't on the CIARDS initially.
And I had to write a special memorandum to try to convince the powers that be
in DDO and in personnel and in the Director's office that the things I had
done which were not overseas I didn't have enough to qualify.
--
I had to explain and get their approval for the activities I had done earlier
done a lot of it in the States, even while serving in Washington -- to equate
✗ number of years abroad that I needed. And I forget the exact figures. But
anyway, and that paper had to be put in long before the Hersh article
appeared. And low and behold, they wanted to get rid of people and I was a
73
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
super grade. I was a GS-17. They figured they would get another slot, and so
they let me go. They made me a member of CIARDS. And as a result of being
CIARDS, when I told the retirement people what would happen if I was CIARDS,
.
then they gave me a new figure on my retirement which went up by a goodly
proportion. I said, "I have no idea."
INTERVIEWER: What is CIARDS?
MR. HALPERN: CIARDS is that Central Intelligence Agency Retirement and
Disability System.
INTERVIEWER: Okay.
MR. HALPERN:
C-I-A-R-D-S. It's the name of the bill in 1964 which set up
this earlier retirement for certain people with certain qualifying service.
And so it's called CIARDS. And I can take it right out of the title of the
act. It has been amended a number of times since then.
INTERVIEWER:
What would you say the most difficult demands were in conducting
the Congressional investigations in '75 as you may have sensed at the time?
MR. HALPERN: Sensed is a good word and also when I testified. I always felt
that when proper people in Congress ask questions, you gave them the answers.
That's why I'm opposed to this Ollie North/Pointexter nonsense and what they
did was wrong in the way they, you know, handled the Congress. And Bill Casey
was wrong on that. Congress, for good or bad, for good or evil, they are the
ones who set it up. They are the ones who make the rules. You've got to live
by the rules. Otherwise, you'd have chaos. And so the biggest problem I
felt, and still feel today, and felt at the time that I was testifying, is
that yeah, I am giving you the truth and it is up to you, Mr. Congress, to
keep that information privileged. I don't want it all over the street. And
one of the worst things that I thought that Frank Church did was after every
74
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
single executive session up on the Hill, including the one I was at, he had a
television show right after the meeting broke up. They were waiting for him
outside the door with cameras and lights. And we, you and I, as American
citizens paid for all of the electricity involved because they were all
plugged into the walls. But I saw it there as I came out.
was.
Fortunately,
nobody ever stopped me going out. I don't know what the hell, what it was,
but maybe it was because I looked so nondescript or so ignorant or whatever,
because when I left that meeting, I thought there they were in the hall and
walked right by them. And they were waiting for some big shot and I wasn't a
big shot. A little shot, or a little punk anyway. And I walked in, walked
right by them, stepping over all the wires and all their legs because they
were sitting there leaning against the wall like this, you know, and snoring
some of them. And I went into the men's room, and I didn't have on my award
Ipin from the Agency and had just an ordinary dumb old blue suit, I think it
And I went right by them, went into the john, did my business, came out,
walked by them the other way, and got out of there. And that night I see
Frank Church on television telling about all this stuff they had just heard.
Not once, he never mentioned my name. My name was never mentioned except, I
was told later, in the late edition, a late city edition of The New York Times
in New York, in one of the stories my name appeared. And I was in the
executive session. Nobody should have known my name.
somebody inside gave somebody outside, my name. And it was there on one
line. Except I have gone to look at The New York Times index a couple of
times and they've got my name listed in that year, '75, but the page number is
all wrong.
So it's one of those historical things that you will never find.
You'll never find it unless you know exactly where to look. The index will
Somebody gave somebody,
75
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
not lead you to my name, even though it says that you should find it there.
It's not the only time I have had trouble with The New York Times index. So
when you talk about the biggest problem, the biggest problem is security and
leaks. That is the biggest problem on the Hill. And the Hill, I think, is
beginning to realize that, maybe they havė, and I think the more they talk
about the joint committee with a small professional staff, they will be going
in the right direction. I've argued for it and have written about that, too,
about a single committee, a joint committee, for years now, and maybe they'll
get to it. It's going to be tough but maybe they'll get to it..
INTERVIEWER:
What was your feeling in the executive session in which you were
being questioned?
MR. HALPERN: I felt that I was dealing with a bunch of nincompoops and idiots.
INTERVIEWER: On the part of the staff?
MR. HALPERN:
Staff and the Senators present. Goldwater was the only one that
Schweiker was an ass.
I thought had a feeling for what was going on.
Huddleston and Mondale were totally incompetent on this particular subject,
maybe because he was new. I testified in June of '75. I would have thought
by that time they would have gotten some briefings from their own staff as to
what the hell was going on. About what was going on. I'll give you an
example. I mentioned somewhere along the way, I forget what the specific was,
but I mentioned something about female case officers. And I was interrupted.
by Mondale and Huddleston with kind of a learing kind of a question. "And
what do female officers do?" I just looked at him and I said, "What any other
case officer does. They do exactly the same thing. No more, no less.
They're Chiefs of Station, they're Deputy Chiefs of Station, they're ordinary
Case Officers, they pound the street, they write reports, they handle paper,
76
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
they do everything everybody else does. They recruit people. They handle
people, they manipulate people. What else did you expect them to do?" You
know, the whole approach was, "Female case officers?"
That really set me off
and if I hadn't been constrained to where I was, I would have really let go in
my better language, and I didn't. I tried to hold off.
INTERVIEWER:
How did they happen to have you come and testify?
That's
MR. HALPERN: I don't know for sure. I think it was because Helms was being
called back so many times for the various committees, that he was almost like
a yo-yo from Teheran as Ambassador. And I think he practically had a commuter
ticket on some of the airlines the way he was coming back and forth.
And on
one of his trips, he asked me to brief him, and Tom Karamessines, a matter of
fact, about the background on the Cuban Missile Crisis and some of the
activities during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The whole Operation MONGOOSE
thing. Particularly MONGOOSE which was very hot at that particular point.
And a few other details. The brass isn't suppose to remember details.
what they got guys like me around for. That's what I get paid for. So I
talked to Dick and talked to Tom and gave them as much as I could. And I just
guessed that somewhere along the way in their private discussion or private
testimony the stuff that wasn't the public stuff, before you get in front of
the public television and what have you, Dick must have said or Tom must have
said, "and if you want any more detail get a hold of Sam." Or something like
that, I guess. And so sure enough, I get the call. I didn't care.
I got
nothing to hide. Because I'm proud of what I did all these years. And so if
they don't like it, that's tough. Change the system. And that's how I think
I got picked. And I remember when the Church Committee began, one of my
retired colleagues, and his wife who is also a retired colleague, his wife was
77
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
on the Committee staff. She arranged a dinner party with several of the new
staff types - this is the Church Committee not the Pike Committee. Seymour
Bolton called the Pike Committee guys a bunch of young whippersnapper,
snot-nosed kids. Really. The staff on the Church Committee was a little bit
better. Anyway, at this dinner party, my wife came along too. But anyway, I
was the target of the night, obviously, and everybody zeroed in on me, before
dinner and after dinner and everything else. In terms to the approach to this
whole business, where do we go from here and how. And I pointed out that
they were in a totally different environment than they've ever been before,
telling them this was a different kind of a game, and I said, "You are going
to be surprised at the fact that you are not going to find very much paper
around. And you are not going to find whole treatises like you do in law
cases and what have you." And I said, "You are going to see my name and my
initials on literally thousands of pieces of paper. But I'd be willing to bet
you're not going to find more than a smattering of any substance before that
initial or before that name. You are going to find all kinds of references to
'as we discussed' and 'why don't we talk about this' and, you know,' let's see
what we can do about this', 'why don't we talk about this sometime in the
future'. You are going to find very meaningless comments." And the guy said,
"Don't you guys ever put anything in writing?" I said, "We can, but if we can
avoid it, no." And he said, "Well, how do you get approvals for projects?"
. And I said, "You write a project, and that you'll find. You'll find lots of
stuff, lots of projects that we did. Some of them are one pagers, some of them
are ten pages. But that's not what makes the whole place operate." And the
whole purpose was to try to get me, I suppose, to tell them how to find things
and what to look for. You know, I don't have to tell them. First of all, I
78
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
wasn't witting there under oath, in the first place. And when I got under
oath, yeah I told them the truth. They didn't like to hear it. I got into a
big shouting contest with a guy called Gary Hart. He was sitting in the
--
background. He wasn't even he was sitting with the staff, as a matter of
fact. I guess that was part of his popularism or something. And he made some
remark in the back there and I shouted back at him. I didn't give a damn. I
made some remark about the Operation MONGOOSE we were talking about at the
time and I said this was, as far as I was concerned, this was American foreign
policy made by the President. And this voice in the back, I later found out
it was Gary Hart, said something about, "Hey, well that doesn't make American
foreign policy." I said, "As far as I'm concerned if the President says that
is what we are doing and the Attorney General agrees, that's what we are
doing. That's foreign policy." You know, and Church cut off.
INTERVIEWER: Was Mathias there, do you remember at all?
MR. HALPERN: Yes, yes he was there. He didn't bother me much. I think it
was Mac that was there. I know Schweiker was there and I know Goldwater was
there.
INTERVIEWER: Tower?
MR. HALPERN: Yes, Tower was there. He didn't say much.
INTERVIEWER: No.
MR. HALPERN: It was mostly Church and, of course, F.A.O. Schwarz as the Staff.
Director. Yeah, that was a funny one too. I'd been called to talk to Schwarz
on the Staff first in the morning, a crack of dawn kind of thing. And I got
down there. And this was in the old, oh, what the hell is the building, the
Senate building, not the Rayburn Building, the other one.
INTERVIEWER: Cannon?
79
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: No. No. The one next to the
--
it's on the corner. Big
--
but
building, before they built the Hart Building. Well, I forget. It was the
from Indiana, I think it was, or Illinois -
guy who came up with that
anyway, they had taken over the auditorium in that building and they were a
so-called secure area. They had safes and what have you all over the place
and they had taken the seats out and what have you. And I was in there, I
went in there, talking to Schwarz and some of his cohorts, then suddenly out
of the clear blue sky he says, "Well, let's walk over to the Capitol
Building. The Committee is going to go into session and they want to talk to
you." And I said, "You mean just like that?" He said, "Yeah, you got nothing
to hide, have you?" And I said, "No, I got nothing to hide." He said, "Yeah,
I was thinking you might as well go and talk to them directly.". So after
spending a couple of hours with Schwarz and company, I was ushered across the
street and we walked all the way over to the Capitol Building and went up to
the fourth floor or whatever it was and testified that night. I was told to
stand up, and sworn in, and we went to town.
INTERVIEWER:
my.
And you didn't know that you were going to do that before? Oh
MR. HALPERN: I had no chance to talk to a lawyer or anything like that. Not
that I cared. It didn't bother me. But it was a lousy way to do business,
and it wasn't according to the rules at the time, because I had the rule book,
procedures, and what have you and it wasn't what I was supposed to be able to
do. And they were supposed to give me a notice for that and that kind of
stuff. But I didn't want to stop the proceedings.
INTERVIEWER: Was it a very long session that you were in?
MR. HALPERN: Yeah, it was all day.
80
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER: The executive?
MR. HALPERN: Yeah, it was the executive session. I think it was, I don't
know, several hours. I mean, I got out late in the afternoon.
o'clock or later.
INTERVIEWER: Was Bill Miller involved at all?
After five
And Schwarz was
MR. HALPERN: Yes, Bill was there, yeah Bill was there.
there, and a lot of the other staffers were in the back. That's why I thought
Gary Hart was a member of the staff. He was sitting with the staffers. And
it should have dawned on me that a staffer wouldn't have dared shout that way
across the heads of the guys in front of him the Senators. And Schwarz was
at the table, too. But the rest of the guys were in the back. Why Gary Hart
sat in the back I'll never know to this day.
--
INTERVIEWER: Did you have any impression that what you had said in that
session went beyond that session?
MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah. Because I started to open up on MONGOOSE, on Ed
Lansdale's connection, and the fact that this was not a CIA operation,
regardless of what anybody might want to tell them, that it was a
government-wide operation and it was run right out of Robert Kennedy's office,
by Robert Kennedy, and even Landsdale was not in charge. He was the chief of
staff to Kennedy, Robert Kennedy. It was run right out of Kennedy's office
and Robert and Jack Kennedy were one practically, and that McCone, McNamara
' and Rusk had each refused to go along with one of Landsdale's ideas that even
Kennedy couldn't force on them. And that was, originally, Landsdale's idea
for MONGOOSE was for each of the agencies in town to detail men, money, and
material out of the Agency to what amounts to a new MONGOOSE agency under
Landsdale and Kennedy. And McCone was the first to have said, "Hell no." He
81
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
said, "That money was appropriated by Congress under my command, my
responsibility.
It stays with me. We'll work with you and we'll help you and
we'll be part of your team kind of thing. But I can't relinquish control over
men, money, and material as appropriated to me." And McNamara said the same
thing and Rusk said the same thing so that they didn't achieve creating a
brand new Agency in effect. And this was all brand new to the guys sitting
around that table. It might not have been new to Schwarz, who seemed to
understand something about Landsdale's role, because when I started to talk
about Landsdale being in command and being in direct communication with us and
issuing orders directly in the name of Kennedy, etc., etc., I remember Church
saying to Schwarz, "Is General Landsdale available anywhere?" And Schwarz
saying something, "Yes sir. We have tracked him down, he lives in..." I think
he said Falls Church or something. He lives in Virginia anyway, "and we're
trying to get in touch with him to have him come here." And a little later on
he did come and testify. But this was seen like brand new stuff to them.
This was June, mind you. And one of the things they were after was Rogue
Elephant running operations against Cuba. And it had been written about quite
a bit and all that kind of stuff. And they didn't have a clue. And they
didn't like the idea that, as far as I was concerned, the Kennedy boys were in
charge. And they were running the war. And we were fighting a war against
Cuba, undeclared or otherwise, but we were fighting a war. I said if we were
sending people in to create sabotage activities inside Cuba, we were blowing
things up, people got killed on both sides, on their side and our side. And I
said that's when I got into a fight with Hart. I remember that now.
--
that was foreign policy as far as I was concerned.
And
And that's Hart said, "It
wasn't, the Congressman is involved." I said, "The hell with that." I said
82
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
Congress was providing the money. And we didn't create our own money. We
didn't create our own weapons. And they knew what we were doing. And so,
that was, I remember now, that was the fight with Hart.
INTERVIEWER: And did they push the issue whether John F. Kennedy knew about
all these activities?
MR. HALPERN: Yeah, with me as far as I was concerned. Yeah, I said I assume
that the Attorney General reported to the President and Landsdale reported and
Landsdale did not leave his office. He was in General Erskine's office in the
Pentagon. And he didn't leave his office. He stayed there physically and in
that office but he directed activities from there in the name of the President
and the Attorney General. That was MONGOOSE, I said. And it is all written
up now in the Church Report. They finally got all the stuff straight, pretty
much straight. There are some errors in it. But I try to correct them. It
doesn't always work. But that was one of the things that bothered me, the
Senators themselves were being led around as they usually are, I think, by the
staff. They don't have enough time in the day I suppose to do all of these
things. And the staff, even by June, is just beginning to get their feet wet
on something like this. And they were looking into other operations. One was
an Indonesian operation which was brought under Eisenhower's aegis. And I
think they were hoping to use that again as another example of a Rogue
Elephant. But my own feeling, and they never talked to me about that,
although they should have. They talked to a lot of other people and I guess
they figured by the time they talked to enough people they didn't have to talk
to me, because the record on that is so complete. You talk about paper. Now
that one we had plenty of paper on, because everything was done by cables and
memos. And it was so complete and so accurate, in terms of starting with the
83
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
President's approval, Eisenhower's approval, and all the things that we did
through the then 5412 Committee, and the papers on that were clear, and all
the cable traffic was clear, that they figured there was no way they were
going to pin that on CIA as a CIA operation because that was again, State, CIA
and Defense all working as a team. We were carrying the main load at that
level, but everybody was involved. No question. And all the record was
there, so I guess they couldn't use that as a Rogue Elephant operation. The
reason they hit the MONGOOSE one, I think, was because, Cuba being Cuba, the
assassination efforts and that kind of stuff, they had to keep it back.
INTERVIEWER: And it seemed to me that there was some mention along the way
that the Agency was not going to call back people from retirement to
participate in the investigations.
MR. HALPERN: That's correct. And the Agency did nothing to help anybody,
even serving officers without giving them any legal assistance. They were
told to go get their own lawyers.
INTERVIEWER:
They didn't get support?
MR. HALPERN: And that also broke the Band of Brothers, and there wasn't
anything left by then. This was 75 now. But the Agency made it very clear
in their memoranda and the Notices, the Headquarters Notices they issue to all
employees that you are on your own, you get your own lawyers, etc., etc. You
got no help from the Agency. Which was not true in the old days. Not true at
all. There was a completely adversarial relationship that was developed.
INTERVIEWER: So no legal support.
Not
MR. HALPERN: None whatsoever. You can, hell, go ask Paul to get you the old _
Notices that was put out on the Committee. No legal support whatsoever.
even advice. Colby released everybody from their oaths by the way from
--
84
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
their secrecy oaths in terms of testifying to Congress. Well, hell, first of
all I think that was a silly thing to do because when you, even the oath
itself that you sign, the secrecy oath, look at the one you signed. It
doesn't say anyting about withholding anything from Congress. In addition to
which Congress has made it very crystal clear in the laws they passed since
then that nothing in here is to imply in any way you were to withhold any
information from Congress, through duly authorized Congressional requests.
Correct.
INTERVIEWER: Sure.
MR. HALPERN: So he shouldn't have issued that one about releasing you from
your oath when testifying before Congress. That's nonsense, utter nonsense.
And I imagine the people were really, I suppose, surprised that
INTERVIEWER:
they didn't get any legal . . .
MR. HALPERN: Oh, very much surprised. Particularly the retirees. Every time
a retiree, you know, tried to get in touch with the Agency to get some kind of
help or guidance, what do I say, what do I don't say. You got nothing. You
were on your own.
INTERVIEWER:
Were there any lawsuits that you were involved in?
MR. HALPERN: No. There were lots of lawsuits that other people were in. I
think Tom K's estate is still involved in several and I think Dick Helms is
involved in several. So on, there goes it. I called them the kook cases, but
they are legal cases.
INTERVIEWER:
And they are real.
MR. HALPERN: And they are real. And they are going through courts and what
have you, no question about that. The courts have not thrown them out. But,
in terms of testifying before the Congress, a lot of the people were called
85
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
in.
Like me, I'd never testified before Congress.
INTERVIEWER: It was your first time.
MR. HALPERN: Yeah. First time. And so far my only time thank the Lord. But
I don't care about going before them again. They walk on water, they don't
walk on water any more than I do. And the old story about they put on their
pants one leg at a time like I do. Well, what the hell.
INTERVIEWER:
Did they contact you at all after the Hearing relative to any of
the testimony?
MR. HALPERN: No. No. You are given copies of the testimony and then you are
allowed to make corrections on it because:
a. the tape doesn't always work,
and b. the guy who is listening and talks into it doesn't always get it. And
sometimes the repartee is so fast nothing can catch it. And that happened
with my argument with Gary Hart. That is totally missing from the written
record. But you know, so, life goes on. But that is what you get and then
you are allowed to adjust it and send it back or you can take it back and
argue with them, or what have you.
INTERVIEWER: They didn't give any indication that you might have to come to a
public hearing?
MR. HALPERN: No. I'm not big enough for that. I'm all over the Church
Committee Report. I'm listed as the "Executive Officer to" or the "Executive
Assistant to" or whatever phraseology. And that has been blown by Tom Powers
and God knows how many other people. I didn't blow it but a lot of other
people did. So, it doesn't take long to put two and two together.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. How about some people say that the intelligence
collection and analysis were seriously impaired during the year of
investigation because of the man hours spent in preparing and transmitting
86
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
responses to the committees. Did you .
MR. HALPERN: I wasn't in there so I can't say. But I would say based upon
what I know about the bureaucracy, it had to have a bad impact, a very adverse
impact on: a. the morale of the people, b. the initiative of the people,
which goes to zero or less than zero, you know, why should I stick my neck out
kind of thing. It's got to then badly impact on any prospective agent you
might want to recruit. A foreigner's got to have rocks in his head to be
willing to work for the US Government these days in a clandestine capacity.
And if I were a Case Officer today, I'd have to think about the sanity of the
guy I am trying to recruit. Doesn't he read the newspapers? Doesn't he watch
television? In my day, we were able to protect the identities of a source.
Really protect the identity of a source. And there were really, literally, no
more than a handful of people who knew the true name of an individual. They
might know something about the guy's background, his capabilities, his access,
that kind of stuff. A person might never ask but even if they did it would go
in one ear and out the other. We usually referred to sources by their
cryptonyms. And that was good enough for us. And that goes all the way up to
Director. True names were things that you just don't talk about. And so in
this day and age though, I'm not sure they can protect the true name of an
individual. I was told, this is all hearsay, I was told that during the
Carter administration that true names of agents were requested by and given to
staff members of the White House staff. They obviously had the authority to
ask for it and somebody gave it to them. I don't know how often that was
done, but it was done enough. The mere fact that the cryptonym, mind you the =
cryptonym, of Hussein, King Hussein, from Jordan was front page of The
Washington Post and that scared the pants off them. And that was early on in
87
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
the Carter administration.
hell was his name
--
That scared the pants off Carter and, what the
--
Jody Powell, who was the press officer and Brzezinski
to the point where they even made public statements about, you know, you've
got to protect all this kind of relationships and what have you and what have
you. Where Senator Moynihan said Jimmy Carter suddenly discovered CIA, which
he campaigned against. You remember his litany about Watergate, Vietnam, and
CIA were part of Jimmy Carter's campaign litany. Then Moynihan said something
to the effect of: "Jimmy Carter, despite the campaign, has suddenly
discovered that the CIA is now his." You know.
INTERVIEWER: Sure.
MR. HALPERN: But, I think, so when you are talking about the impact inside
and the impact on operations, let alone what you do in terms of the amount of
paperwork that had to be generated to supply the requests from the Hill.
God,
well, Scott Breckinridge, I guess you want to talk to him about that?
INTERVIEWER: Yes I will.
MR. HALPERN: Scott and Seymour Bolton were the team and they had a staff.
And it was created by Walt Elder, was part of that, to help funnel papers to
and from the Hill. And that became an industry all of its own. I'm sure, I
mean, just without even having been there, I know enough about the bureaucracy
as to how it works. And it had to be. And it was a continuing operation.
And it creates a hell of a lot of trouble among the troops and the secretaries
and the clerks and everybody else involved. You don't have time to do
anything else. So how do you carry on the job of collecting intelligence?
INTERVIEWER: Was there any, in your last year or two with the Agency, that
you knew of, comments by intelligence services of other countries? Any
indication that they were becoming anxious or apprehensive about .
88
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: Just the bare beginnings of that because, you see, the Freedom
of Information Act wasn't actually amended until '74 and didn't go into effect
until, I think it was, December of '74. Just as I was getting ready to
leave. And we all knew that was going to be a problem. A real problem. And
it became a problem. All you've got to do is read the testimony of George
Cary, John McMahon, Admiral Inman. Well, you can go through the old great
hearings. The amount of bad impact, adverse impact, it had with various
intelligence services around the world. Particularly our old friends. And
I'm sure it's gotten worse rather than better. With books like Woodward's
book and so on and the continuing leaks. But I must say from where I sit on
the outside, and I am only guessing, most of the leaks seem to come from the
Executive Branch of government. I'm not just talking the White House but I'm
talking the whole slew at all levels rather than the Hill. The Hill has got
its problems but the Hill is doing more in terms of protecting itself, and
protecting the information that's given than the Executive Branch has been
able to do.
INTERVIEWER: More recently?
You can
MR. HALPERN: Yeah. And over the last ten years. It's quite clear. You
just, you know, you do this with a sixth sense and a gut feeling.
tell what's right and what's wrong and what's true and what's false.
More or
less. You can't be totally right but you get a pretty good estimate or a feel
on this thing. And so help me, the Executive Branch is a rotten sieve all
over the place. Much worse than in my day.
INTERVIEWER:
Is that right?
89
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah. It's not just me or my guys, it's all the way through
the government. The Executive Branch everybody talks, that's all. On all
kinds of stuff. It's not just. . .
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, we're going to come back to that.
MR. HALPERN: All right. It's not just one Agency. By a long shot. And I
think the Hill is making better strides on this and think they are beginning
to realize and have for a number of years, a number of them anyway. Even what
I told you about Huddleston. You know, you Members the Congress, trust us as
your surrogates. Well, okay, that's a step forward. Instead of trusting 535
guys, you gonna trust 135. Well, that's a big step forward. And I say 135
because I am adding up staffs as well as members of Houses and both
committees. And don't forget, and people most of them
--
――
do forget, that
in addition to the two intelligence committees, you still have Appropriations
in both Houses, you have Armed Services in both houses, and they still
jurisdictionally ain't going to give up. But they get clued in about what's
going on, but it's far more than just a two bit leak. Remember that.
INTERVIEWER: In practice.
MR. HALPERN: In practice. Don't kid yourself. Far more people know and they
are better, they are beginning to learn, they are handling themselves much
better, they have control of the stuff. Look at the Iran/Contra stuff. Very
little stuff leaked from the Hill. What you've got is what they want you to
get. They are controlling that stuff. Very well indeed. They are
controlling the pieces of paper, they are controlling the reproduction
machines, the xeroxes and all that kind of stuff. Much better than the
Executive Branch is doing. Yeah, sure, they are a smaller group. You know,
90
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
they've only got 18 or 19 thousand people on the Hill to begin with and it's a
hell of a lot better than what CIA must have: at least 16,000 probably.
Alone. So look at the Pentagon, look at the State Department.
INTERVIEWER:
Isn't it interesting that time after time when one talks about
leaks or when one reads about it, frequently an article in newspaper stories,
the Congress is oftentimes the bad guy, the executive department is not very
bad.
MR. HALPERN: Well, that's why I'd take another look at that article and it
leaked the information in it and read it again. And sometimes you wonder,
hey, it probably didn't come from the Congress, because they are tightening
up. Not every staff member, for example, on the committees has access to all
the information anymore. That's been true for quite a while. Not every
Senator or Congressman can come and well, they better not take anything
away from the Hill. None of them can take even their notes away. They're not
supposed to make notes of what the hell they are reading. So the days of
looseness up on the Hill have long since gone on this kind of stuff.
INTERVIEWER: There have been some real improvements on it.
MR. HALPERN: They have learned the hard way. And they really mean it. And
they realize that their own reputations are at stake. Which I think has a big
thing going for it. And I hope they get to a joint committee someday, and
remember that the House committee staff is, in effect, a small professional
staff now. It's not run the way the Senate committee is run. It's a smaller
group, they've been there a longer time and the staff director, Latimer, Tom
Latimer, has been there from the beginning. It's his second career. I knew
Tom when he was one of the guys up on the seventh floor in the Agency and over
1
91
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
at the White House with Kissinger. And he worked his way up, but anyway, that
is another story. But he's been there as a pro, minding his P's and Q's. He
has a very small staff. I think there are a total of a dozen people, all
told. They are all pros. I mean, former professionals from one agency or
another. Which is unlike the Senate committee which is still more or less
beholden to each Senator and the staff guy really is a Senator's appointee.
☐ And the staff director doesn't have much control over him. It's a different
story. So it will give you something to watch. And maybe as a result of the
Iran/Contra stuff, they must be having a hell of a time coming up with their
report. Oh God, they must be fighting like cats and dogs!
INTERVIEWER:
That's the impression I get from snippits in the newspaper
column.
MR. HALPERN: The reports now are at least three weeks overdue. And you know,
they could have had a minority or majority report. They must be having a real
go through on that one.
INTERVIEWER: I just happened to think when you were mentioning the earlier
and, I'm not sure that it may be coming up a little bit later, were you
surprised when Mr. Colby agonized for a time over Mr. Helms' testimony and the
decision to turn the testimony over? Were you surprised at that?
MR. HALPERN: Uh huh. Really something.
INTERVIEWER: You didn't think he would?
MR. HALPERN: I didn't think he would. I didn't think he should. But I'm
told by one of the principals involved, namely John Warner, who was then Legal
Counsel or General Counsel : .
•
INTERVIEWER:
Yeah, General.
92
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: ... that Bill had no choice at that point. I've talked to John
about this, I listened to his argumentation.
I'm no lawyer. And I still find
it hard that something couldn't have been done about that.
INTERVIEWER: Yes, he spoke about that to me and put it on tape.
MR. HALPERN: Yes, John is an honest man. I'm not saying anything about
that. John said by the time it got to that point he couldn't advise Colby in
any other way from a legal point of view. He had to tell him to go. And that
I find very hard to accept. Although again, as we said before, times have
changed. And times change and poor Dick was caught in the middle. Absolutely
I caught in the middle.
INTERVIEWER: He sure was. What about certain issues raised by the Church and
What are your thoughts about certain of them such as mail
Pike Committees?
opening?
MR. HALPERN:
Well, I think they did not prove the case, that it was
illegal. And take as my text the fact that the Justice Department, in looking
into this after the Church Committee and after spending God knows how many
months and years looking into this thing, had to decide even under the Carter
administration there wasn't anything we could do. There wasn't enough.
evidence one way or the other and when you had Postmasters General who
testify. Some testified it was totally illegal. But some say it was
perfectly legal. Nothing wrong with it. We knew what was going on and we
agreed. And that's got nothing to do with whether the President is approved
When you have a difference of view from postmasters themselves, how
the hell can you go to court on that? So, oh sure, it was another one of
or not.
those headline grabbing things. And as somebody said, I don't know of anybody
93
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
who was hurt by the fact that the mail was opened.
Either physically, or
legally, financially or any other way. And in most cases, we didn't even know
it happened until years afterwards.
And in some cases I think they had
perfectly good justification to go look at somebody's mail.
INTERVIEWER: All right. And how about the drug experimentation. Did that
come as a surprise to you?
MR. HALPERN: That was a surprise to me and it was a surprise to a lot of
people. And a lot of people, I think, took very great personal affront in the
fact that they, because they were a part of CIA, were now and forever more
tarred with this kind of thing. I don't like it. I didn't like it when I
heard about it for the first time. Particularly some of the nasty details
about the two-way glass and getting a drunk in a bar and giving him something
and following him to see what he did and that kind of stuff. But I also know
the people involved in some of it and I know Sid Gottleib very well and I know
Knoche very well and I can't imagine them doing this because they are a bunch
of sadist or a bunch of Dr. Frankensteins who like to pull wings off of flies
and watch the flies flop around. Nothing like that at all and I think if you
look at Sid's testimony, at Gottleib's testimony, before the Kennedy Health
Committee a couple of years after all this nonsense, in which he pointed out
that we were really trying to find out what the hell the Soviets might have
been up to when they used drugs. LSD was a completely new and untried
substance. We didn't know what the hell it was. All we knew was that the
Soviet were buying up a hell of a lot of it out of the Swiss drug houses,
pharmaceutical houses. We didn't know what the hell it was going to do. We
didn't know what the hell it was going to do to anybody. And we had to find
94
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
out. Sid's example of American diplomats being disoriented when they were in
Moscow coming out and not knowing what the hell hit them. And I think that
what we were trying to do, or what they were trying to do rather, was to find
out what the hell it was all about. And what was this new weapon that was
going to be possibly used against us: a. How could we defend ourselves, and
b. how would we use it if it was a proper weapon. And yeah, I was surprised.
But I didn't take it the way a lot of guys took it. I remember during those
several months when I was in there in early '75 in the building trying to get
some answers for Colby, which he kind of didn't want, when some friends of.
mine stopped me in the hall and started to berate the living hell out of me,
because since I worked in the DDP's office, therefore, I knew everything. But
obviously I didn't. They didn't know that. But anyway, and therefore, I was
part of this thing. And how could I and how dare you and all that kind of
stuff. And really a shouting match in the hall.
INTERVIEWER:
And they figured you knew.
MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah. Well, that didn't bother me. But I knew I didn't
know. And they were also attacking Sid through me and they knew I was a good
friend of Sid's. And I was trying to defend the point as I did just a few
minutes ago with you. They wouldn't listen. And these were old friends. Go
way back.
I mean, a part of my generation. It was just something that they
felt was beyond the pale. And maybe they are right, but I don't think so. I
was asked once without knowing it at the time, I was asked by Sid if I would
partake in a drug experiment where I would be given something and I would not
know what I was given or when I was going to be given it. And I said, "Sid,
I've got other things to do with my time. I've got to be responsible for the
95
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
forces, the people who are down there. I can't be out of action. I don't
know what's going to happen. Maybe nothing will happen. But I can't take a
chance."
INTERVIEWER: And he was talking about you taking the drug at work then?
MR. HALPERN: He didn't say.
INTERVIEWER: Oh that's right.
MR. HALPERN: He didn't. All he said was, "If you are willing to take part in
the experiment, you will be given a drug. You won't know what it is and won't
know when you get it. I said, "Sid, I can't take a chance. I've got too many
important things here. Not that the world is on my shoulder or anything like
that. But I've got a job to do and I can't take that chance."
INTERVIEWER: Was the Olson case new to you?
MR. HALPERN:
Totally, absolutely totally.
INTERVIEWER: You knew nothing about that earlier?
MR. HALPERN: All I know is what I have read. It was quite clear. Olson had
agreed to do exactly what I had agreed not to do. He was a scientist for
God's sakes. He was a medical guy or something. At least he knew drugs and
he knew what the hell he was getting into. He let himself in. He was going
in as a guinea pig in an experiment. And sure, I'm sorry that something
happened to him but he knew what he was letting himself in for.
INTERVIEWER: But you had heard nothing about it until the case broke?
MR. HALPERN: No. This was one of those things that everybody assumed because
I was in the job I held for seven years that I knew everything in the
Clandestine Service. And it was the furthest thing from the truth. Quite
often, you can ask my wife about this, quite often I'd be held in the office
96
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
long after, without even being able to do my own paperwork, because my door
was always open, everybody knew it. And people would come in at all hours,
particularly after hours, and they'd want to sit and talk. And I was told
more things about things I should never have known about. Had no reason to
know. Didn't want to know. Had plenty on my mind. And I couldn't do
anything about it. But they wanted to talk. And in a way they were letting
off steam. And in a way they expected me to screen whatever their problem was
to give to the DDP. And little did they know that very little of what they
told me ever got to the DDP. He had plenty of things on his plate, too. But
in any case, it is the kind of a job where you have got to be available to
everybody. At least the way I ran it. And you learn a lot of stuff. Very
unofficially, you know. But it never went anywhere. And so my head was full
of a lot of stuff but not everything. And I remember once my boss came down
from the Hill
--
this was Fitzgerald. And this was that time that Colonel
Grogan who was the public affairs officer had written a letter in Helms' name
attacking Senator Fulbright. Remember that crazy thing?
INTERVIEWER:
Yeah.
MR. HALPERN: Well anyway. Dick had signed it or Grogan had signed it or
something like that. All hell broke loose and Helms had to apologize and Des
I came down from the morning staff meeting and he called in me and he called in
the secretary and he said, "I don't want to ever see a piece of paper that Sam
hasn't seen first." And I said, "That's crazy, Des." He said, "What's the
matter, can't you take the work?" And I said, "Yeah, you know better than
that.
But that's wrong." I said, "Your staff chiefs and your division chiefs _
have got to know that they've got a private line to you personally without my
97
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
Oh sure,
kibitzing. After you've seen a piece of paper if you want to give it to me to
staff out I'll do whatever you want me to do with it. Fine. But they've got
to be able to talk to you privately." And he looked at me and he said, "Yeah,
yeah." And he never said anything about it again. So, I didn't know
everything. But I didn't need to know everything. That's crazy.
while Des was there I ran operations for Des as his case officer and case
officer for him. He didn't tell his deputy, Tom Karamessines, who didn't know
anything about it. It was up to me after Des died to go in and brief Tom on a
bunch of activities that Tom may have known about but not officially and to
clue him in. And then he had to do the same thing in turn to Cord Meyer when
Cord became the deputy. So no, I didn't know everything that went on. And I
never claimed that I did. The only thing I couldn't do was that I couldn't
stop people from unloading on me. They had to have somebody to talk to so I
let them talk.
INTERVIEWER: Nice to have somebody. How about the assassination. Did that
business surprise you when it came out?
MR. HALPERN: No, because I was involved with one. Some of the others that I
hadn't known about, yeah sure, it wasn't in my area. So I wasn't involved and
I didn't know. The one I was involved in was the one, I guess the (I'm
forgetting the crypts for these), the one against Castro. One of the ones
against Castro. I did not know about the use of the Mafia by Bill Harvey.
INTERVIEWER: You didn't know about
MR. HALPERN: No, Bill, you think I was tight lipped. He could run rings
around me.
INTERVIEWER: I can imagine.
98
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: He'll teach you lessons in how to keep your mouth shut. Oh
brother, that guy was great. No, but I wasn't the only one personally.
I was
the one who testified on that to the Church Committee. I was one of the guys
that testified about that to the Church Committee. AMLASH. And I know the
case officer involved, the doctor involved who prepared the hypodermic pen,
etc. So, you know, yeah, that didn't surprise me at all. And the fact that
there were other attempts on other people around the world, that didn't
surprise me what had happened.
system was all about and I remember that one of the reasons I was even less
surprised is in those several months that I came back in early '75, I saw the
original papers about the ZR/RIFLE activity and the fact that one of the first
things that John Kennedy, John, not Robert, asked Dick Bissell for in January
'61 after he had gotten inaugurated, one of the first things was an
assassination capability. Nobody in particular in mind.
assassination capability. "Create one please." And that's when Bissell got
ahold of Bill Harvey and ZR/RIFLE was created. I didn't know, I'd never heard
of it until after the thing hit in '75. But I had seen the original paper, so
by the time the Church Committee had announced it all, yeah, I was aware of it.
INTERVIEWER: And LASH. You got involved in that one?
Because I knew enough about what the hell the
Just an
MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah. I remember that one. 'I didn't see, I didn't know
LASH. I don't speak Spanish. But I know the case officer, and I was the one
who took the case officer to see the doctor and there was another thing the
Committee, the Church Committtee guys, when I was talking to them, couldn't
understand a medical doctor getting involved in the preparation of a
hypodermic to kill somebody. And they wondered, was he a medical doctor? I
99
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
forget which one of the guys said that. But I said, "Yeah, he was an MD."
His job was to help us in operations from a medical point of view. He wasn't
a Ph.D, he was a medical doctor. "Oh really." You know, they just had signs
of and visions of Buchenwald and Auschwitz and God knows what else.
But yeah,
I took the case officer to see the doctor because I knew the doctor pretty
well. A lot of activity. A lot of assassination activity. We needed medical
support of all kinds. You'd be surprised how much you need medical support in
operations. And it was the doctor who came up with idea of the Black
Leaf-40. I don't think the Church Committee should have published that.
it was I don't know whether it's still available but it was a publicly
available poison that you could buy in any drug store. And to tell the whole
world how to use it to kill somebody I thought was crazy. Totally unnecessary
to get their point across. They did not have to reveal that. I thought that
was ill advised on their part. But yeah, I took the case officer there and
the doctor who spent, I think he was up all night making that damn acid, which
LASH didn't take anyway to begin with. He thought it was crazy. It may have
been. But you know, the assassination didn't surprise me.
As
INTERVIEWER: Had there been any of that kind of talk before Kennedy, in other
words, the Eisenhower Administration?
MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah, sure. If you look at the Church Committee report
you'll see it's there.
INTERVIEWER: Last time we were talking about, just as we were winding up, we
were talking about assassinations and LASH, and so on, and wondering at that
time, that time being discussing. LASH, was there much of a sense of anxiety
about this kind of approach?
100
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
* MR. HALPERN: Oh, if by anxiety you mean concern that the thing
might leak
INTERVIEWER:
Yeah.
MR. HALPERN: Yeah. There always was and this is why it was so
tightly held. If you are thinking about using anxiety in terms
of morality, no. Because as far as we were concerned, I think
most of the guys on the Task Force, we were at a war with
Cuba. I mean, when you start sending in people to shoot up
somebody else's country and blow up parts of somebody else's
country and they take losses, I mean human losses, and we take
human losses, that's war as far as I am concerned. I don't
care what you call it, call it police action, call it something
else, but anyway, we were at war. And of course, some people
could even call it by today's terminology, terrorism.
International t4rrorism. We weren't targeting market places,
though, and bus stations and things like that obviously. We
were going after industrial plants, power plants, sugar
plants. Things like that. But people did get hurt on both
sides. So yes, there was that kind of an anxiety in terms of
keeping our hand out of the assassination plots as much as
possible. Having been involved in only one of them, I have no
idea, for example, if Bill Harvey was mucking around with
Rosselli of the Mafia. Bill knew how to keep a secret. And
even though I was his Exec, I had no idea and I know his deputy
had no idea at all. And as a matter of fact the deputy didn't
have any idea of the AMLASH operation.
101
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER: Did not?
MR. HALPERN: Did not. There were four people that I knew of.
Oh, I think the deputy knew that the case officer involved was
meeting with AMLASH sure. But that was strictly as an
intelligence operation. And maybe as a political action
operation. But not assassination.
There were four people who
knew about the assassination aspects. I think I mentioned to
you. The case officer, me, the doctor to whom I introduced the
case officer to prepare the pen, and my boss, Fitzgerald.
Those were the four.
Helms about the pen.
And I don't even think that Des told
That's a technical detail. How much else
he told him, I have no idea. I never asked him, he never
mentioned, so we went on ahead and did our business. But yeah,
there was anxiety in terms of trying to maintain a secure
operation, a sensitive operation, and that was it. I mean, we
were really trying to hang onto what the heck we were doing.
INTERVIEWER: How about when the Hearings occurred. Suppose
those Hearings, this is an iffy question
MR. HALPERN: Go ahead.
--
INTERVIEWER: Had occurred back in '62 or '63.
MR. HALPERN: Well, it would be into '63 because that's when we
started.
INTERVIEWER: Okay, '63, '64. You think the quote outrage
unquote would have been different?
MR. HALPERN: It's hard to say. It would depend upon the
circumstances in which the Hearings were held. And what kind
102
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
of a circus atmosphere there was. If it were a simple
executive session kind of look-see and the Senators or the
Representatives involved were not running for President
of them like Church did, and others
--
--
depends on a whole
atmosphere. It's hard to say. I think, and if our own
some.
President hadn't been assassinated, with or without attribution
to Cuba or Oswald or KGB or God knows what else. If it were
just simply an operation gone bad and Congress was looking into
it, I just doubt in the '60's, the early '60's I'm talking
about '60-'65, whether there would have been quite as much
brouhaha about the whole thing. People wouldn't have liked it
when you talk about assassination, obviously, but remember when
it took place in '75, ten years later, you've got to remember
there is a whole Watergate, ten years worth of Vietnam, and a
couple of years worth of Watergate involved. The Vietnam thing
worst of all changed the attitudes completely.
Because we only
went in with Marines in '65. Sure we were in Vietnam long
before that; we've been there ever since '54, for God's sake,
but actually before that, from '45 on until the end of the
war. But I think it would have been a totally different
atmosphere. You know, conjecture.
INTERVIEWER:
Sure, yeah.
MR. HALPERN: A "What if
"
.
•
kind of thing.
INTERVIEWER: But I think your point about the assassination of
Kennendy is
.
•
MR. HALPERN:
Made a big difference.
103
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER: Yes.
MR. HALPERN: And Vietnam made a big difference.
INTERVIEWER: Yes.
MR. HALPERN: After 10 years of that stuff, people were fed
up.
INTERVIEWER: Were you surprised in '75, '76 about the
Congressional reaction to this topic - the assassination?
MR. HALPERN: Oh yes, yes, yes. But only surprised in the
sense of its vehemence more than anything else. And not all of
the Senators and not all the Representatives involved had that
same attitude. There were some of them, like Barry Goldwater,
for example, for good or for bad, and others. You know, I
understand that this is what sometimes has to happen with
governments. And even when, well, take it up to today when you
have Metzenbaum, this great liberal that prides himself as
being a liberal of the liberal. And he says, "You know, it
might not be a bad idea to knock off Qadhaafi." Where the hell
is he coming from? You know. And who the hell is going to do
it if not something like CIA? But you talk to him about the
morality aspects of it, it's like Church being pro-covert
action and anti-covert action. So is Metzenbaum for
assassinations or isn't he for assassinations?
If he is going.
to pick and choose then that isn't all right. I mean, this is
silly. But that kind of attitude has always bugged the hell
out of me.
INTERVIEWER:
Me too.
104
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: I don't mind, like Hersh, you're against using
human spys? Fine, stay that way all the way through.
INTERVIEWER: Right, be consistent.
MR. HALPERN:
Yeah, that's right. But don't go saying it's all
right to shoot somebody, but not shoot somebody else. Or
whatever, however the hell else you want to do. And I remember
we were arguing even at the time of '75 and '76 when we were
discussing, how do you think Admiral Yamamoto died during World
War II? We picked up, using COMINT, where the hell Yamamoto
was going to be. And we deliberately sent out P-38s at extreme
ranges of the P-38s with just enough gas maybe to come back on,
if they were lucky enough with no maneuverability really. They
had to know the exact spot to go get them. And the orders were
"Get Yamamoto." That's killing a guy. That's deliberate
murder. Sure, we were in the middle of a war where people get
killed all the time. Well, as far as we were concerned on
Cuba, we were at war. Castro was a target. I don't see no
difference, I don't see any difference between going after and
specifically killing the leader of a country, or killing some
poor Joe private at the end of the line and I don't even know
his name.
And I'm shooting at him and he is shooting at me. I
mean, that's ridiculous. I mean, what the hell, you are going
out there the kill somebody. I don't care what you call it.
INTERVIEWER: They keep looking for a declaration of war.
MR. HALPERN: Well, that went out with the Indians, a thousand
years ago. The Japanese didn't use it against the Russians in
105
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
(
1905, they didn't use it against us in 1941. I mean, this is,
you know, archaic that's all. Life doesn't work that way. And
the Germans didn't do it against Poland in 1939 either. And
the British and the French did it against Germany after that,
but that was silly. People are, you know . . . You asked
about, was I surprised? Yeah, I was surprised because I
INTERVIEWER:
You didn't expect that?
MR. HALPERN: I didn't expect that kind of hypocrisy. That's
all. On the part of so-called leaders of a country. And these
guys claimed to be leaders of a country. And that's being
sheer hypocrites.
INTERVIEWER:
That theme continues on.
MR. HALPERN: As I say, Metzenbaum, what was it, 1985 when we
hit Lybia, or '86, whatever? And Metzenbaum suddenly, of all
people, to suddenly say, "It'd be a good idea to knock off
Qadhaafi."
INTERVIEWER:
topic . .
MR. HALPERN:
Okay. How about employing journalists. Did that
Journalists to us are the same as any other human
being. They are a source. Or an access to the source. And if
the guy wants to work for you, why stop him?
I think any
American citizen or non-American citizen, I don't care who he
is, if they want to help the United States Government, more
power to them. I don't care whether he wears a collar turned
around or whether it's a woman or a child or anybody. If you
start breaking up and defining certain groups of people that
106
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
you don't touch, pretty soon you can fine-tune that to the
point where there isn't anybody in the world you are allowed to
go talk to, do any work for you. And that is crazy. From the
very beginning, we always had rules against using Peace Corps,
Ford Foundation, Red Cross, I don't know, a whole bunch of
humanitarian organizations. And that we understood. So we
didn't. You know, we followed orders. No problem with that.
Because certain activities were just off limits. But we never
sorted journalists. Journalists and clandestine operators are
in the same business. We're trying to get information. We
protect sources. That's the whole purpose. You know, that's
the first thing the journalist says
-
protect the source.
That's what we do. Except we don't use the terms, you know,
talk on background and all that kind of stuff.
INTERVIEWER: What about the reaction to that? Did that
surprise you?
MR. HALPERN: No that didn't surprise me. I knew the hypocrisy
on that was going to be quite clear and always was. It's like
academics. I mean, that's crazy.
INTERVIEWER:
Same thing.
That was the next one I was going to bring up.
MR. HALPERN: Same thing..
INTERVIEWER:
Sure.
MR. HALPERN: I mean, an academic.
We're not forcing people to
do these things. No point in forcing anybody. If you get an
agent that you are forcing to do something, I'd question the
107
SECRET
:
13-00000
SECRET
value of the information that he gives you. But if somebody
volunteers and wants to work for you, I don't care what he does
for a living. Except if you are keeping him we are staying
away from the humanitarian, eleemosynary organizations. Okay,
that's a ground rule. We'll live with it. And we stay away.
And we've had people from those kinds of organizations come and
offer help and we tell them, "Sorry, we can't do it.
If you
want to go give the State Department whatever information you
pick up, go ahead. They will be glad to have it. But we can't
do it."
INTERVIEWER:
Good.
MR. HALPERN: You know the thing that the whole '75, '76 circus
era, and I call it circus era, confirmed to me is that maybe I
am just being a cynic. It just confirmed to me the hypocrisy
of the political world. It's just unbelievable.
Unbelievable. They hold executive sessions
executive session
--
--
they mean
they're supposed to. And Frank Church
comes out after every single one of them for the cameras and
gives a brief summary of what took place. That's not, in my
opinion, that's not executive session. Executive session is,
you know, no comment. You walk away from the cameras. You
don't go near the cameras if it's executive session.
If not,
what the hell, make it a public session. He's doing it
anyway.
INTERVIEWER: What about the Church Committee and its focus on
covert action? One view that was expressed is that there was a
108
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
worldwide network of offices engaged largely in what this
again was a critic's view
--
largely excessive, self-defeating
busy work.
MR. HALPERN: Oh, that's nonsense.
INTERVIEWER:
Nonsense?
MR. HALPERN: Utter nonsense. Most people didn't go near
covert action in any sense of the word. Not even political
action. Most people were trying to do a simple job of
intelligence collection basically. A few were trying to do
counterintelligence, but it was a tougher job, much tougher
job. And these others who were involved in covert action in
terms of planting editorials or news stories or working with.
political parties in foreign countries and what have you. It
wasn't busy work. None of this stuff was made up by anybody.
These are all approved activities up and down the line. Sure,
not all the nitty-gritty, the details of everything were
approved up on an upper level then what are you going to even
approve back here in Washington by a desk officer. The guy in
the field has got to have some leeway in what he does and how
he does it. You can't tell him where to meet an agent and you
can't tell him how many drinks to have when he goes out to
dinner with him and things like that. Although some people
tried. And it pretty soon backfired. Particularly it
backfired if the guy who was on the desk before was trying to
tell somebody what to do or not to do when he got out in the
field. He found out soon enough on his first tour of duty that
109
SECRET

13-00000
:
SECRET
you don't do that.
INTERVIEWER: Memory was there.
MR. HALPERN: But boy, I'll tell you. But on the other hand I
don't think it was busy work any more than it was busy work to
try to collect intelligence. Most of the stuff was done
against requirements. Somebody wanted some information,
somebody wanted something done. And the guy in the field had
to figure out how to do it. And some of it was very wasteful.
It's like a war. War is a wasteful business. And this is a
wasteful business. As I think I mentioned the other day,
collecting intelligence by clandestine means is the toughest,
most expensive, most time-consuming way to collect
intelligence. But it has got to be done. And you are going to
make a lot of mistakes. And you are going to loose a lot in
the way.
And you are going to waste a lot of time and effort
and money, no question about that, to collect the little bit of
information. And a lot of the information you are going to
collect is going to be useless, totally useless. But there is
going to be a few nuggets somewhere along the way. I think we
--
have figured out, people have estimated God knows he can't
do it for the non-denied area countries, I think it was
estimated that clandestine collection produces no more than
5-10 percent of the total take. That's a small percentage when
you consider the amount of information that rolls into this
government. And particularly with overhead reconnaissance and
That's a hell of a lot of stuff that's pouring
with SIGINT.
110
SECRET
13-00000
:
SECRET
in.
And maybe Seymour Hersh is right. Maybe you can do
without that 5 percent. I don't know.
But I don't want to
try. He is willing to try. But a lot of it is wasteful. No
question about that. You got an Army, you got a Navy, you got
an Air Force. If that ain't waste, my God. But when you need
them, oh, you need them.
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN:
It takes time.
You've got to have lead time. And this is why I
remember we were talking in terms of clandestine collection.
Why we try so damn hard, particularly in the beginning, being
purists to not even talk to the DDI analysts because we might
get captured by them and become their researchers or their
legmen, running around in the middle of Africa finding out
where the hell the wheat fields were or the bridges were up or
down or the railways weren't operating or what. And you can go
to the Library of Congress and spend two or three months and
dig it all out. So we'd try to keep away from those guys for
years. And the whole requirements mechanism was created to
screen all these requests. And from all over the government
for information on things happening abroad. And I'm sure the
analysts thought we were a bunch of nuts not wanting all these
things to do. But we didn't. You know clandestine collection
is a tough goddamn job if you are going after hard targets.
It's not cocktail gossip. In fact, the Russians used to say,
get me a piece of paper, get me a document. That's what you
want. You want some foreign government's document. You don't
1111
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
want somebody's opinion or ideas of what the hell he thinks is
happening in a cabinet meeting. You want the minutes of the
cabinet meeting. And we are theoretically in business for
strategic intelligence, not even tactical stuff. We left that
for the military and the State Department.
INTERVIEWER: So just strategic?
MR. HALPERN: We were designed as a collection of strategic
That means the top stuff. That means
intelligence.
intentions. Much more so than counting trucks or counting
airplanes. And we did both. We pulled the overhead
reconnaissance. And it's the worst kind of way to collect
information. That's all I keep saying. So, this so-called
busy work, I think is a misinterpretation of the fact that a
lot of the work that was done was utterly useless. But that's
the nature of this business. And it still is to this day.
INTERVIEWER: Very good.
MR. HALPERN:
Sorry.
INTERVIEWER: No, very good. What about any reflections on the
competence of the Senate members on the Church Committee?
MR. HALPERN: Of the Committee members themselves?
INTERVIEWER: Uh huh.
MR. HALPERN: Well, I don't remember all the Committee members.
INTERVIEWER:
Church, and we've got Mondale .
MR. HALPERN: Yeah, go ahead.
INTERVIEWER: And Goldwater, and Philip Hart, and Gary Hart,
Huddleston, Mathias, Schweiker, and Morgan and I think I
112
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
mentioned Mondale. Howard Baker.
MR. HALPERN: Yeah, Baker.
INTERVIEWER: Any of those at the time strike you as
MR. HALPERN:
Well, I can't talk from personal knowledge except
that one time that I testified before them. I think I
mentioned to you, Huddleston and, this was in June of '75,
maybe they were just new guys on the block for all I know, but
they theoretically were on business since the end of January or
early February at least. And maybe they didn't have decent
staff officer to brief them. But the impression I got was that
this was being done by these guys solely on gut feeling, pure
emotion, thinking in terms of James Bond, and no real knowledge
or feeling, even, for an appreciation of what the business was
all about. It was all out of books. In terms of Ashenden, the
secret agent, goes way back. But it was that kind of fiction
stories, and movie impressions that these guys were using in
terms of asking the questions and in terms of what they thought
intelligence was all about. They had no concept. I would have
thought by June, at least, they would have had some chance to
have talked to people knowledgeable people and fair people
--
--
to just learn what the hell the business is all about. What
are we talking about, including covert action. But it was all
in terms of a circus atmosphere, I think. I mean, it was just
I was appalled. I shouldn't have been. I should have known
better. Basically, in terms of some of the guys who never even
bothered to find out what they could, or even the few members
113
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
who were on the four committees that were, or theoretically,
doing oversight. And it wasn't there. No appreciation at
all. And every time something came up, it was always "OH,
REALLY!" You know, great astonishment when you were trying to
tell them a fact. Like when I mentioned the fact, you know,
we've got female case officers as deputy chiefs of station and
chiefs of station. And that came as a great shock and surprise
to them. I don't know what they thought. I wasn't able to get
into their brains and find out. But this was not true of
Mathias, though. Not true of Barry Goldwater.
INTERVIEWER: Tower?
MR. HALPERN: I don't know. Tower didn't sit in the day I was
sitting there. This is based with the guys around the table.
I mean, they were in kind of a horseshoe and I was in a long
table facing the horseshoe. And I was alone. And here were
all of these guys with their staffers and what have you around
them, behind them, mutterings and what have you. Schweiker,
oddly enough, Schweiker made some sense. He seemed to have a
better appreciation than Huddleston or Mondale. Gary Hart was
just a fly flitting in and out, kind of. He didn't really know
what the hell it was all about. Phil Hart, again, was very
moralistic about the whole thing, including collecting
intelligence using human sources. He was quite sure that that
was the way to go. At least that was the impression I haḍ.
Maybe I am wrong, but that was what I felt. Mondale was the
worst, I thought, in terms of his approach to the thing. Then
1.14
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
again, I don't know who his staff officer was or who was
briefing him beforehand.
INTERVIEWER: When you say worst, you mean; informed or not
informed?
MR. HALPERN: It seemed to me ill informed.
INTERVIEWER: Ill informed.
MR. HALPERN: Ill informed. And by the time they were talking
to me, as I say, I think it was June of '75, hell, I'm a junior ·
officer of all of the brass that went up to that place for
debriefings or testimony or what have you. I would have
thought by that time they would have had a better appreciation
of what the hell the world is all about. And how foreign
policy is made and conducted. And what international relations
is all about. And just, I'd send them back to International
Relations 101 in Political Science 101 or some junior college
somewhere. It was just pathetic. I'm no great brain. But at
least I went through City College in New York where I had some
decent professors who taught me what the hell the world was
like.
INTERVIEWER: What about the Pike Committee?
MR. HALPERN: I had nothing to do with the Pike Committee.
INTERVIEWER: Nothing at all?
MR. HALPERN: Thank the Lord! Nothing. All I know is what I
heard from friends of mine, including Seymour Bolton who had a
lot to do with them because he was the Agency contact with
them. And both committees as a matter of fact. He and Scott
115
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
Breckinridge and, I guess, Walt Elder were involved, too.
INTERVIEWER:
Yeah.
MR. HALPERN: And just to listen to the kinds of
--
well, the
Representatives themselves were bad enough but on top of that
they hired, I think Seymour used the phrase something like
“kids with drippy noses who weren't even out of their swaddling
clothes." And these were the staffers who were running around
like crazy.
You know, they were having fun in their bare feet
trying to upset all the apple carts and what have you. And it
was just, he said it was impossible to talk to any of them.
You know, intelligence officers, my God, they were worse than
the devil. Which was not quite true of the guys on the Senate
staff. The Senate staffers were deliberately involved, I
think, in wrecking the intelligence community. I think for
whatever reason political or whatever but I think, as I
said before, in terms of the buildup as to what was happening,
including in December of '74 even before the Hersh stories,
having a bill to create the same committee that the Church
Committee finally turned into with the same title, they were
doing this deliberate work. And so the Senate staffers always
seemed to be better read, better educated, better organized.
They were deliberately doing something. They knew what they
were after. And I must say they ran a very good operation. A
good covert operation. They go to the head of the class.
Whereas the House staffers, the Pike Committee, they were just
a bunch of kids mucking around causing trouble. Didn't know
116
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
what the hell they were doing.
INTERVIEWER:
And the motivation of the Church staff members?
MR. HALPERN: I wish I could prove one way or the other. I
just don't know. It all seemed to end up at one point, which
was destroy, destroy, destroy. Muck up, muck up, muck up. And
they did. They were very effective at it. And all I say is,
you know, if it looks like a duck, acts like a duck, squawks
like a duck, it's got to be a duck. And I don't know whether
they were involved with the far left or the far right or what
have you, but there sure looked like some political motivation
there somewhere. I can't prove what I am saying. It is just a
conjecture. It is a theory.
INTERVIEWER: And you felt that at the time?
MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah. Yeah. Felt that very much at the
time. And since, I have never gotten that out of my head.
They were deliberately active in destroying something. And I
think my theory, and it is a theory, in reference back is
probably correct because it's quite clear that after the circus
and after the Senate and the House both created their
respective committees, the Senate in '76 and the House in 177,
in very short order, wiser heads prevailed among the Senators
and the Representatives. I don't know about the staffers. But
the staff, some of it changed.
There's some of them still
there. And if you take a look and you'll see that even under
the later years of the Carter administration, talking about '79
and '80, the Committees started to give the Intelligence
117
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
Community more and more and more budget and personnel slots.
--
finally when
More money and more people. I think they were trying in some
way repair the damages that they saw themselves
they saw and new faces that had been done and I think they were
kind of feeling guilty about the whole thing. As a body.
INTERVIEWER: You think the hostage situation in Teheran?
MR. HALPERN: I think that helped. That helped in terms of
getting concerned. But it was more than that and it happened
before the hostages began. They started to come around in
terms of, and I know just from friends, in terms of the
Intelligence Community as a Community was starting to get more
money and slots than they could handle than they really
--
needed. Congress was just "Use it, use it, use it." And so by
the time Casey comes along in '81 and he gets lots of credit
for more money for the community. Baloney. Well maybe he
Not
did. He did. But the momentum was there beforehand. You
know. And Congress was pushing stuff into the Community.
just CIA, but the whole Community. Look, the Pike Committee.
and the Church Committee, I think both of them, maybe just the
Church Committee recommended abolishing DIA. Well, take a look
at DIA today with a brand new building and everything else. I
mean, Congress insisted to keep it that way after the circus
period. And so there is a whole new attitude that came after
this '75/'76 circus era. And it was just a bloody mess. But
the damage was done. And you don't build intelligence
organizations overnight. Again, you need time. It took us in
118
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
my generation a whole generation. And we had a war to start
with to help us go and get off the mark a make connections and
contacts and friends and all that kind of stuff abroad. And
that one was destroyed. Whether it's ever, I don't know, maybe
it will take another generation to rebuild. Who knows. Or
more. So the attitude, I think, was that maybe we in Congress
went too far. And we've got to redress to balance. Which is
what they were doing for a good long while.
INTERVIEWER: You sense any role of President Carter in this?
MR. HALPERN: I'm not sure. I don't know. All I know is the
end result was the money started to come and the slots started
to come. Well, for example, I think it was in '77, Congress
refused to give the FBI additional slots for
counterintelligence officers. And that is public's
information.
and you've got to be a nut to read all that crud.
get interested in a subject, you browse through it.
some. I haven't got anywhere near what Walter's got.
It was brought out in hearings and what have you
But when you
I've got
I may
have 1 percent of what he's got. But you read it in the
newspapers. You know, you don't have to go very far. And
Congress deliberately and literally said "no" to the request
from the Bureau for more personnel to watch all these Soviets
and satellite countries and their offices in this country.
INTERVIEWER: In 1977?
MR. HALPERN: I think it was '77. And later on, of course,
they were part of the Intelligence Community, they got their
119
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
Just like CIA did, DIA did,
NSA did, everybody.
slots, they got their money.
every..
But now I guess with everybody
tightening up the belt they will suffer too. And maybe it is
about time. You can do just so much. It takes, for example,
you talk about rebuilding. I have estimated, and I think other
people have estimated similar figures, it takes about seven
years before a clandestine service officer in intelligence
collection, let alone counterintelligence, can be considered to
have been around long enough to be a decent officer.
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN:
Seven years?
Well, look at it. You come in. You got about a
year, off hand, about a year of training. You've got a first
tour of duty on a desk or maybe overseas. But anyway, and
that's a two or three year hitch. That gives you four years.
You ought to have a little bit more training somewhere along
Like another half year, at least. That isn't much.
Your second tour,
whether on a desk or overseas. You can't do both at the same
time. So one has to be here and one has to be abroad. Another
the way.
Preferably another year. That's five years.
two or three year hitch. Have I got my seven?
INTERVIEWER:
Sure.
MR. HALPERN: And then some. So it doesn't happen overnight.
And you can't expect, particularly in this day and age, you.
can't expect a guy you bring in, I don't care if he's got a
Ph.D. and he's got Phi Beta Kappa and he's got everything else
under the sun. And he's a great academician. He's been
120
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
through everything. He knows it all. And he knows all the
sixteen languages you need to have before you bring him in.
You don't have to waste time teaching him a language. You
can't suddenly throw him overseas and say, "Okay aboard
operations, collect me the intelligence on what the hell the
Saudi's are going to do about oil prices tomorrow." It won't
work. It just won't work. You've got to have a feel for what
the hell is going on. They've got people on the desk now, I'm
told, who've never been in the country that they are assigned
to. They don't even know what the hell is going on there.
They may know it from books. But that is not good enough.
You have to build up your contacts.
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN:
Yeah. And take over contacts from somebody else
and be able to prove to the foreigner you are dealing with that
you are as good as the guy who recruited you. Things like
that. You see I make one of those points in that book review I
gave you on Turner's book. You can't do it overnight. It won't
work. And it didn't work. So when you are talking about seven
years for an officer, that's a minimum
--
seven years before he
is even ready to really do something and become a decent all
around officer, both Headquarters and field. You've got a long
way to go before you rebuild when you suddenly lose 200 people
Or with Turner, 800 slots get wiped out like
at one pop.
that. 820 as a matter of fact.
INTERVIEWER: Was that the number that left?
MR. HALPERN: Yeah, you'll see why
--
I've got to make a note
121
SECRET
13-00000
:
SECRET
on that number. I'm not going to give it to you now. You'll
read it. And when people up on the Hill or other people say,
you know, "What's so tough about going out and collecting
intelligence?" Try it. It just doesn't work the way it is
done in the movies.
INTERVIEWER: It takes a lot of experience.
MR. HALPERN: You need experience, you need to have somebody
you can talk to, somebody who has been around before.
INTERVIEWER: Judgment.
MR. HALPERN: Yeah. And initiative. Lots of initiative. And
that's where you get people who say, because of that
initiative, "Look at that idiot. He spent six months and
nothing has come out of it." Yeah, it's wasteful. You've got
to try.
But I would rather have a guy go out on his own trying
things, than me having to sit at a desk or using a bull whip to
push him out, or dragging him out by the ears. He's got to
have enough initiative to go out and do it on his own. This is
what all these things that have happened. And are still
happening. And all the attacks on the Intelligence Community
people and what have you. I don't care whether it is CIA or
FBI or what have you. It's all the same problem. You know,
the officer who has got to start saying, "You know, why should
I stick my neck out? You know, if I could just do it the
careful way I'll get my promotion. I'll move ahead slowly.
I'll push the paper." But collecting intelligence is not a
paper job. You've got to go out and talk to people. It's
122.
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
talking to human sources.
It's working with humans. It's
different than sitting in the laboratory coming up with a black
box. And some of the black boxes, at least, we used to have to
have humans put the black boxes in the right places. Some of
the operations that we had where we were trying to drop them in
the right places from overhead as a matter of fact, to give
--
you some idea of the problem, one of the operations was called
JAVELIN. You know what a javelin is?
INTERVIEWER: Yes, sure.
MR. HALPERN: And that's what we were trying to do at one point
for our operation with black boxes. To get the black box in
the precise point where the black box had to be. Technical
stuff is very good when it works. But it's got to be so damn
¨ precise many of the times that it is almost impossible. It
works in the laboratory. Fine. Beautiful. And you can set up
experimental conditions and demonstration conditions. Easy
when you have total control. Try to do it in the real world.
INTERVIEWER: Yes, with it's traffic lights.
MR. HALPERN:
INTERVIEWER:
Just use your imagination.
Sure.
MR. HALPERN: Try to do it in the real world. And so the
problem of training an officer and experience of an officer and
getting people back into the business and making your contacts
and all that goes with it. Yeah, our generation was not bad.
INTERVIEWER: It's truly a profession isn't it?
MR. HALPERN: Yeah. That's what we have been trying to tell
123
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
people. And that is why we have been trying, I think with a
little bit of success, very little, starting to get in academe,
in this country at least it's pretty hard in some other
countries -- but in this country to try to get academics to
understand government, history, political science courses,
international relations courses, you name it. After all these
years they have been missing abet in terms of the impact of
intelligence by all governments, I don't care who they are, on
foreign policy and foreign activities. You read history books
in the 1930's, '40's, '50's, '60's. And then in the '70's
beginning barely to mention the fact that there might have been
some intelligence action, that some information a government
didn't know or did know, which made a big impact. And until
ULTRA broke in '72, I think it was, nobody had a clue.
thousands and thousands and thousands of people had been
involved in ULTRA.
And yet
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, somebody called it the missing dimension,
the intelligence role.
MR. HALPERN: That's it. Sure it's a profession. It has been
a profession for a couple of thousand years that I know of.
The people haven't regarded it as such.
INTERVIEWER: Textbooks just
.
.
MR. HALPERN: Totally ignored it. Way off in limbo.
INTERVIEWER: I still, from time to time, look at different
diplomatic textbooks. There is no mention in them about the
Black Chamber that Yardley was running out of New York City in
124
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
the 1920's. They don't mention it.
MR. HALPERN: It wasn't mentioned. It wasn't thought of. It's
impact on the Washington Naval Conference.
We knew what the
hell the outside was going to do. And the fact that, for
example, we had some good operations in terms of -- and not all
intelligence is strictly politics or military. Economics is a
big one. We had some good, but I won't even tell you which one
it is, even though it's on a classified tape. But you can find
it later. We had a good penetration of a foreign government's
economic delegation through a conference of ours on trade. And
we had dead to rights, we had the text of their negotiating
positions, what they could say, how far they could go.
Everything. The whole "shmear." The State Department
Ambassador and the Deputy Chief of Mission from that particular
country, our Ambassador from DCM, refused to believe the
information we gave them. Literally, said, "That's
impossible. You couldn't possibly have gotten this. Somebody
is making it up for you. And you are paying them good money"
and all that kind of stuff. But we weren't paying him any
money. The guy didn't know and we weren't about to tell him.
This was one of those things where the agent, it was done
simply on friendship and loyality of the case officer which had
developed over a long period of time family relations,
--
family friends and all that kind of stuff. Anyhow, the State
Department said this is nonsense. The US Trade Representative
said this is nonsense.
"If the Ambassador wouldn't believe it,
125
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
why should I believe it." Well, the negotiating went on bit
by bit, bit by bit, day after day. It developed everything.
All they had to do was look at the information and the guy was
following the text. It was unbelievable. And fortunately,
fortunately, before the conference was over the US
representatives believed what the hell we had told them and
were able to work out a deal in such a way that the US
benefited by it by $700 million. It's a simple little watering
operation. So it takes time to work these deals in terms of
not all sources require lots of money. And not all sources are
the kind of people you just walk in and say, "You work for
me."
It takes time to develop and what have you.
And the guy
was doing it simply out of friendship and loyalty to an
individual. It wasn't the US he was concerned about... And it
wasn't his own country he was concerned about. Just mutual
friendship. Maybe they have got them today, too. Maybe they
have got that operation, too. I hope so. It takes time.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, I think some textbooks almost present the
world as though everything that's said in the United Nations,
that's the sum total of what's going on about all the
backstages
MR. HALPERN: Well, it's more than backstages, too, Ralph,
because I remember Professor Janowsky at City College. He
said, you know, we all sit around and we study things. Great
documents, like the Monroe Doctrine. And as if somebody sat
around and thought this up one day. And it's like coming off
126
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
"
of Mount Sinai. You know. And he said, "Most of these things
are done by people like you and me." He said, "I don't know
what you had for breakfast. Whether you had a fight with your
wife. Whether you had a cold and a headache that day." And a
lot of these decisions are done this way. And they are made at
the spur of the moment. They are human decisions by human
beings. And I remember very clearly, I was still wet behind
the ears, this is 1948 or '49, '49 I guess it was. I happened
to be the desk officer in Indonesia (Clandestine Services).
And we had very good operations. This was, oh yes, the Dutch
police action, I guess, in '49. And we had a very good agent
in Indonesia who was able to follow and keep us very current,
almost minute by minute, actually hour by hour the location of
where the Dutch were taking the Indonesian political leader
that they had captured in Jakarta. And where they were moving
him, from city to city to city to city or town to town to town
to town and where they finally put him. And I was going over
regularly because I didn't want to trust the telephone. And I
was going over from the old building around the well known
Reflecting Pool. I was grabbing the intelligence and it was in
raw form. We didn't even bother going through the Reports
Board in those days which had to clear everything go out, be
"
· sure the commas and the semicolons were in the right places and
what have you. And I had some hot intelligence that I got
permission from my boss just take it over to my opposite--well,
he was more than my opposite number, he was the Chief of the
127
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
South East Asia desk all the Southeast Asian countries
--
William S.B. Lacey, W.S.B. Lacey.
Nice guy. Nice big
moustache.
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN:
L-A-C-E-Y?
L-A-C-E-Y I think. Yeah, Bill Lacey. And I was
all of 26 or 27 at that time.
And I kept bringing this stuff
over to him. Piece by piece. As we got it. I was wearing a
path between us and the State Department and the Reflecting
Pool where we were. And I saw how US policy toward the Dutch
and hanging onto Indonesia, how that changed like that. ` Bill
Lacey said to me, he said, "The Dutch should have told me
not the US
--
--
should have told me that they were going to do
this and what they were going to do with the political
leaders. They should not have surprised me." Sure, Bill. I
said, "I'm not involved in that, I'm just giving you the poop.
You are making the policy." He says, "You're damn right,
Sam." He says, "As of now Indonesia is going to be a free
country. And we are not going to stop the Indonesians. We are
not going to help the Dutch anymore. They didn't tell me that
they were going to do this."
INTERVIEWER: Oh wow.
MR. HALPERN:
There's American foreign policy.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, exactly.
MR. HALPERN:
Right there. You know, Bill didn't have to sit
around with a lot of people, a lot of staff. I'm sure he went
I and got whatever he needed to do to get the thing approved and
128
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
nobody knew the difference.
INTERVIEWER: Good point.
MR. HALPERN: So. You know. And the academics in this country
have never caught on. Maybe they are catching on slowly now.
INTERVIEWER:
Slow.
MR. HALPERN: Yeah, very slow. That there is an impact on this
stuff. You got humans and humans and humans. And that's all
there is. And I think, for example, Roy Godson, started in
1978, at Georgetown on the National Strategy Information
Center. And he has a number of academics come almost every
year up in Maine.
INTERVIEWER:
And he is running another one this summer.
MR. HALPERN: Yeah. Okay, that's beginning to have an impact.
I don't know how many thousands of academics there are in the
colleges and universities. But he is just barely scratching.
the surface. And it has taken him 10 years.
INTERVIEWER: He ran the first one up at Bowdoin in '81.
up there.
I was
--
he
MR. HALPERN: Okay. There is one. I was one of the guys
asked me to come to tell them about the intelligence of '78
which I did. And unfortunately Angelo Codevilla got a hold of
him too and so changed Roy Godson's views, but at least we got
started on this thing. And I attended a lot of those seminars
that he started in '78 and '79 and so.
INTERVIEWER: Were they local?
MR. HALPERN: They were all here, but he brought in people from
all over and they had a good foundation.
129

13-00000
SECRET
Godson was the first guy to get a group together. And you
--
know, he is now regarded as a great intelligence expert. And I
keep kidding him about that. But he doesn't
I you know, he
knows something. But he has never been in the business. He
doesn't really appreciate it. Anymore than Angelo Codevilla
knows what the hell is going on. But at least he had the
foresight to start something like this going. And he got a lot
of good people involved. From former intelligence officers, to
current intelligence officers, he got a lot of people with a
lot of experience to write good papers and mediocre papers and
bad papers.
Mine's a lousy one that I did, the first one on
clandestine collection, because it was being done
did it for the lowest common denominator.
--
I mean,
I
You know, it's
like trying to teach somebody ABC's. There's no point in using
a lot of high "falootin" jargon. So it is, from an
intelligence professional point of view, it's a very weak paper
mine on clandestine collection. Because it just barely
skims the surface. It doesn't go into the details at all like
we've been discussing. But at least Roy was very good in
pushing this idea, trying to get academics to look at this new
dimension. And it has to be. There has been a tremendous
gap. Just like there was a gap on the military aspects of
World War II until you got a hold of the ULTRA aspect. And as
somebody said, they have to rewrite all the history books.
Sure they do. And they ought to rewrite all the history books
for everything else in terms of the missing dimension of
130
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
intelligence and its impact throughout history. Whether it's
Moses or
INTERVIEWER: Or George Washington.
MR. HALPERN: Anybody. And people are beginning very slowly to
pick it up. Very slowly.
INTERVIEWER:
Yes, I am encouraged.
MR. HALPERN:
Slow.
It's is going to take a generation in there.
Easily. Easily. And I am told that there are still academics
in this country who won't touch intelligence.
INTERVIEWER: I am told that too.
MR. HALPERN:
They think it is a dirty name and a dirty
business. You don't have to be involved in it, for God's sake,
to do some research and look at what the heck happened. And
what made people come up with certain decisions or not come up
with a decision. You know, it's been there..
INTERVIEWER: Strange. They sometimes will deal with Congress
and Congressional elections and there is an awful lot of
skulduggery that goes on in that process. And they don't seem
to realize that that happens.
MR. HALPERN: That happens all the time. And I guess maybe
what you need is an Ida M. Tarbell to do a study on politics or
intelligence or foreign affairs like she did on Rockefeller.
You know, wake people up. Or even do a Beard economic
interpretation of the Constitution.
--
Do an intelligence
interpretation of foreign affairs. I don't care what you call
it. But it is there. Nobody is hiding it. Not any more we
131
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
aren't. And you can go back, like you did in your book, you
can go back, it's there in the record book. Go find it. It's
a hell of a job. It's a lot of work. A tremendous amount of
work. I don't envy anybody wanting to go into the OSS records,
those that have been declassified in the Archives now.
Horrible, horrible.
INTERVIEWER: They will. Little by little.
MR. HALPERN: Little by little.
INTERVIEWER: What about this, Sam. Earlier, well, the late
'70s in an interview one of the Agency Directors said that the
Agency is part of the President's bag of tools, and my question
is: Do you see the Agency as also part of Congress' bag of
tools?
MR. HALPERN: No, it is the President's pretorian guard and
everything that means. It's an executive tool of the
government. Well, it's a tool of the executive branch of the
government. It is not a tool, in my opinion, of the
legislative branch of the government anymore than it is the
judiciary branch of government. You've got three branches in
this system. And I know a lot of my friends do not agree with
me. And a lot of my close chums have testified on the Hill
about, if the Congress should be in with the President on
directing: a. foreign policy, b. intelligence, c. the
military, etc., etc. I don't think you can work that way. Our
system can't operate that way. You've got to have an executive
on top who is answerable to the people and to the Congress for
132
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
1
his actions. But you can't have 535 so-called elected
representatives plus 18,000 staffers second-guessing what the
President and his entire government bureaucracy is doing day by
day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second. It
won't work, it just can't work. The Executive has to take the
responsibility in my opinion. For what it does, the good, the
bad, and the indifferent. Not everything the Executive does is
right in my opinion. For example, I think that the mining of
the harbors in Nicaragua was the silliest goddamn thing those
guys ever did. And I was involved in operations similar to
deliberately and directly. But you target. If you
want to go for ships target the bloody ships. We did. We made
that
--
some successes, we had a lot of failures. A lot of waste
motion. No question.
had been retired were called back a few of them had been in
And I remember some of my buddies who
--
Latin American affairs, and also covert action, paramilitary
affairs, and covert action affairs and political action, also
covert action were called back for a session with the guys
--
running the Nicaraguan activities. And among the things they
were beating the bull about was, what about mining the
harbors. And without exception, I am told every single guy
they called back for consultation in this meeting
maybe a half dozen
---
go anywhere near that.
--
4, 5,
every single guy said, "Oh Christ, don't
That's silly." At the end of the
conference they were told the mining of the harbors had already`
started. And as one of my friends said, "What the hell did you
133
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
call us in for, then?" So not everything the Executive does is
right.
Obviously. At least I don't think it is right.
Nixon's forcing the Agency to go after Allende in 1970 without
any kind of lead time, at the last second, was absolutely
stupid. And we told them that. But the orders were to go, So
we went. And there are lots of other examples of that. But
again, under our system you've got to have the Executive make
the errors. You can't have Congress sitting around and
deciding what the President, what the hell he is supposed to
do. It's like, take Metzenbaum and Qadhaafi. So one day
Metzenbaum says, "Yeah, we go after Qadhaffi, let's go get
him." The next day there is another problem with somebody
else, Mr. XYZ in some other country, and Metzenbaum says to the
President, "Oh no, you can't touch him, he's a friend of
mine!" Well, what the hell. You can't have that kind of
nonsense. The President is responsible. I don't care who the
President is. Whether it is Reagan or you or me or the next
guy. That's the system we've got. And I don't think that CIA
or the Intelligence Community has got to or should be part of
the side pocket of the reference library of the Congress.
Sure, give them the intelligence reports that you give
everybody else. You go up and tell them what's going on in the
world. They can have NIE's if they want to read NIE's. They
can have Special NIE's if they want to read those. But when it
comes to decision making, based upon that stuff, uh uh. That's
the President's responsibility. And whether it's covert action
134
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
or whether it's collecting intelligence, that's his job. It
was up to Ike Eisenhower, for example, to tell them, "Okay, fly
the U-2. I know I'm going to see Khrushchev in Paris. Go fly
that U-2." And he did. Can you imagine trying to ask? Who do
you talk to in Congress? Which committee do you go to? In the
old days, at least, you had maybe a handful of guys in each
House who had some kind of control over the House or the
Senate. And you could work with them. Who do you go to
today? Look at what happened yesterday. Jim Wright couldn't
even get a bill through. And he had to muck around with the
clock literally change the clock of the calendar day on the
business of the tax bill. So one minute they have to announce
that the vote is, I think, 206 to 205 against, and Jim Wright
stops the day's activity
gets ahold of some guy
--
--
literally stops it on the clock
I forget the Representative's name
twists his hands or his arms or his balls for all I know, and
the next thing you know there is another vote. And the vote is.
now 206 to 205 and the bill is passed.
INTERVIEWER:
In favor.
MR. HALPERN: You know. But who the hell do you go and talk to
in Congress when you say, should the Agency be part of the
Congressional team? No, it can't be.
INTERVIEWER: Then how about this statement, this is a
statement someone made: "Since the mid-1970's, some say, the
CIA is poised nearly equidistant between the Executive and the
Legislative branches and Congress may actually have more
135
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
influence today on CIA priorities and how much money is spent
rather than the Executive Branch."
MR. HALPERN: I've seen that statement. I know who made it and
I don't agree with it. It may be the truth. He may be
absolutely right in what the situation is today. I think
that's wrong.
I realize CIA and every other member of the
Community has to go to Congress to get his money, his men, and
his material. I understand that. And you've got to play
favorites and you've got to butter-up people and all that kind
of stuff. But as far as being in between the Congress and an
Executive in terms of running an intelligence organization,
it's dead wrong. It belongs to the Executive. It's a part of
the Executive. And it is in every other country that I know
of. It's not the Congress that runs the business. It's the
President that runs the business. You can't be in physically,
and literally, and actually they may be in between. He is
absolutely right. But that's a wrong system. And if that's
the way it is going to continue, you are not going to have an
intelligence organization.
INTERVIEWER: Really in trouble.
MR. HALPERN: I think so. Who is your boss? If Congress tells
you to do something and the President says don't do it, what do
you do?
INTERVIEWER:
Your're equidistant like the old story of ancient
times that if you put a mule midway between two stacks of hay,
the mule would starve to death.
136
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: I am serious. What do you do? Congress says do
this. The President says don't do that. What do you do? Do
you go to the Congress, listening to some of the guys on
television and reading what they say and listening to some of
their speeches, or if the President tells me to do something
that I don't think is right, I'll come running up here to the
committee right away and tell you all about it. Okay, then the
President has no confidence in the man and there is a new
Director. Okay. On the other hand if the Congress tells the
Director to do something and he doesn't tell the President,
then what? So, if you've got a strong President, that Director
is out on his ear too. And I use specifically Bill Colby in
1975. On January 15th, 1975, and it's in his book, so I am not
saying anything special. Bill Colby goes to the Hill before
the Stennis Committee, the Senate Armed Services, and blows his
gut all over the place. The entire organization of CIA, men,
women and children are all laid out for everybody to see,
despite the fact that the law, the Central Intelligence Agency
Act of 1949 says he doesn't have to do this. So he just gives
the whole store away. Maybe no great damage was done, but
anyway, he does it. "On their way back from the Hill," says
Bill in his book, "something dawned on me. Gee, I'd better
stop off at the White House and tell them what I've done.". Now
if I had been President Ford, there would have been a new
Director that afternoon. Bill worked for the President.
doesn't work for himself. His commanding officer is the
He
137
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
President of the United States and not the Congress of the
United States. And he should of at least had the decency, the
plain ordinary decency and courtesy, on the way to the Hill, to
stop off at the White House and say, "Hey, this is what I plan
to do on the way up." He does it in reverse and there isn't a
thing that the President can do at that point. His hands are
tied. He may have agreed with Bill. He may have disagreed. I
don't know. But that's not the way you run an organization.
INTERVIEWER:
it.
MR. HALPERN:
INTERVIEWER:
He had no options by the time he found out about
That's not the way you run an organization.
It's a good example.
MR. HALPERN: So coming back if that's where they are today
and if Judge Webster is now equidistant between the Hill and
well, Gates is in between. I know who's involved. If they are
at equidistant now, they are nowhere. Absolutely nowhere.
They either work for the President, or they don't work. And
I've used the term "pretorian guard," and I mean that. And it
may be the wrong way to run the system. Then my comment is,
"Change the system." That's all. And I am perfectly willing
to take a look at any system they want to propose.
INTERVIEWER:
What about this statement: "Sharing intelligence
with Congress is one of the surest guarantees of CIA's
independence and objectivity."
MR. HALPERN: No way.
I don't understand that at all. I don't
see how the two have anything to do with each other.
138
SECRET
1
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER: I think that was made in a recent speech.
MR. HALPERN: Yes, it was. I know. But I still don't
understand how that can follow. If the comment is meant to
refer to the fact that a DCI can cook the books like Casey has
been accused of doing, in terms of presenting the information
to the President, I don't see how that is going to wash. If
you've got an analyst who believes in one view of a certain
event, and the Director tells him to change his view, you're a
lousy analyst. Sure, he might want to keep his job and all
that kind of stuff, but going up to the Congress and telling
them, I think such and such and my Director thinks differently,
is not going to keep things honest in any sense of the word.
The Director can still tell the President what he thinks. And
that's where the decision is made on any particular activity.
I don't think even the crazy people in Congress say they are
going to make all the decisions. Take a look at the case of
John Horton on the Mexico business. I don't know the details
at all.
I know John. very well and he has never talked about.
any of this stuff, except what he said in the public press. I
read that and I've seen him on television and what have you.
But even when the House Committee, the Intelligence Committee,
after the brouhaha of John having left, when the House
Intelligence Committee examined the situation to see whether
Bill Casey actually did cook the NIE as was alledged John
--
never alledged this but other people have if I remember
--
correctly, and I think I've got the clipping somewhere, the
139
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
House Intelligence Committee said they had looked at all their
drafts, they looked at the final version, and there wasn't any
cooking. So what the hell are people talking about, the best
way to insure objectivity is to bring Congress into the act.
This is nonsense. That's the trouble with a lot of this
stuff. People think that you have got to get the Congress to
look at things, and therefore everybody be very careful,
otherwise somebody is going to say, "Well, you didn't do it
right." Well, this is nonsense.
INTERVIEWER: Why do you think there is so much more talk about
the Congress being involved in the process?
MR. HALPERN: Oh, Congress has always been, always wanted to
be, in the history of the country, ever since the Constitution
was written they've wanted to be involved. Go back to the Jay
Treaty, when the House of Representatives insisted on seeing
all the documentation of the Jay Treaty. And the President
said, "No way, the Senate gets it." And the Senate got it.
The Senate got everything they wanted. It was months later.
before they decided what to do with it.
Washington.
But you start with
INTERVIEWER: And they debated that whole treaty in secret.
MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah. That's right. But the House wanted to
get into the act. And thank the Lord we had a strong President
who said, "The Constitution is very clear. I have to work with
the Senate on advise and consent. Not you, the House. Go
away."
140
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER:
last 10 years?
Do you feel the Congress is more involved in the
MR. HALPERN: Oh, they've been pushing harder and harder and
harder and harder. Now again, let's change the system if you
don't like it. It's been a rough one starting out, you know,
200 years. They have been battling the same fight. Nothing
has changed. If you haven't seen it, you ought to take a look
at three volumes done by Professor Goldsmith called The Growth
of Presidential Power.
INTERVIEWER: I haven't seen them.
MR. HALPERN: Well, I've got them if you want to look at them,
take the time later. You can browse through them. And it
starts out with this business of the Jay Treaty and goes right
on through. It doesn't cover every minute of the government's
history.
INTERVIEWER: The tensions between.
MR. HALPERN: This book is dated 1974 so it stops with the
Huston Plan. But I don't see Congress, at least the way I
understand the system and the way it operates. Congress has a
chance to do more than they have been doing. I think it's
wrong for them to get into the act. They always have the power
of the purse. That is very clear. And they can stop what they
don't want to see happen. They haven't got the guts most of
the time to do that. This is what happened, you know, in
Vietnam. Nobody declared war. You know, Vietnam conflict, I
suppose, is a fancy word for it, or the Korean police action or
141
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
!
Or 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.
Take away his
MR. HALPERN: Sure. Close his bank account.
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.
142
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER:
Do think that more intelligence data and so on
Is it your
has been going to Congress in the last decade?
impression?
So
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.
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
143
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
information 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?
144
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. 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
145
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
can'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
146
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
in 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
We might print somebody
money. We don't print our own money.
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
147
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
they 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
If you want to
If you want to
just don't believe in mucking up the system.
change systems, say so. All the way around.
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
148
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
.
compartmented. 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
There is no question about that.
would say yes.
INTERVIEWER:
'75?
Did you see it, did you witness any crushing in
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
Including guys who
that kind of stuff in talking to people. Yeah, it was a bad
time, no question about that. Very bad.
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.
149
--

13-00000
SECRET
And 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
150
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
do 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.
37>
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
151
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
viewed 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.
152
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER: That was their solution.
MR. HALPERN: Yeah, give them a one cent figure.
care. Or a dollar figure. One dollar. No more.
I don't
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.
153
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER: 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
•
." question.
But I
knows? Again, we are at a "What if
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
154
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
see 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,
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
it's still on. But somewhere, somehow,
can't do this. He did it. And he said, you know, "Sooner or
155
SECRET
:
13-00000
SECRET
later, if we lose the war, there won't be any country to worry
And I'll take my chances with Congress
about anyway.
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
156
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
anything. I was in no position to do that. But I was loud and
vociferous in my statements to the people who were willing to
listen among my colleagues. Some of them said, "Bill had no
choice. He had to do that." And I kept saying, "Not that
way."
He may have had to reluctantly and over a period of time
give up a piece of paper and another piece of paper and another
piece of paper. But you don't suddenly open the door to the
safe and say, "Go in, fellas, and enjoy yourselves." He took
stuff up there by the bushel barrel full. It was crazy.
INTERVIEWER:
Now some of the records had been gathered for the
Rockefeller Commission and then were moved over to the Senate
Commission wholesale.
MR. HALPERN: That's true.
That was by Presidential Order.
The President runs the show. It's perfectly okay. It's like I
said in early '75 when I was trying to collect stuff for Bill
Colby, the DCI, information in answer to all the charges that
were coming up in the press in those days. I didn't know what
he was going to do with them. And I had the same qualms that
my buddies had, in terms of, if we give it to Bill, God knows
what 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 you
don't, you might ruin your job. Okay the stuff, just give it
to the Rockefeller Commission." There was a Presidential
Commission reporting to the President. The documents belong to
It's up to him if he wants to put them on a
the President.
157
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
bulletin board out in front of the White House. That's up to
him. That's his job. He's got the legal power to declassify
every piece of paper in the government. Fine, go ahead and do
it. You are the boss. I think you are crazy, but go ahead and
do it. And the same difference between the Congressional
Committee, Presidential Commission. I'm sorry. Maybe I'm
simplistic in my approach to the legalisms involved or the
operation of an organization. Somebody has got to make rules
and regulations and procedures. And somebody has got to follow
them. Not everybody can be all things to all men at all times.
INTERVIEWER: What about the suggestion by someone that Mr.
Colby was responsible for exposing the CIA to the public?
MR. HALPERN: Well, that's just the consequence of what he
did. That's all. It's easy. He did that, as I say, from
January 15th, 175, when for the first time the entire
organization of the Agency was laid out for public view.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think he was hopeful that the material he
was supplying would not be publicized, would not be given out
by the Committee?
MR. HALPERN: He was in an open session. He knew it.
INTERVIEWER:
Well, that one.
MR. HALPERN: The Stennis Committee. He knew exactly where he
was.
Open session. And that's why it dawned on him as he
left, as he says in his book, "On the way back from the Hill it
dawned on me, that's probably on the ticker tapes now, on the
158
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
wire services now. I better go stop by and tell somebody what
I have just done."
INTERVIEWER: Did you see any signs of that sort of attitude
earlier on with Bill?
MR. HALPERN: With Bill? No, not to that extent. Not in the
sense of kind of freewheeling. No, that never came through.
But I wouldn't have been surprised at whatever Bill did on that
kind of stuff. It always surprised the hell out of me. I
mean, it never surprised the hell out of me, what he did. It
was strange in many cases, but he was a strange man. Probably
still is.
INTERVIEWER: Okay, how about relationships between Colby and
Angleton. Strained?
MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah. Very strained. Very strained.. I don't
know how far back it goes as far as the Italian business is
concerned, because Italy was one of Jim's early bailiwicks.
INTERVIEWER: I mentioned before lunch, Angleton-Colby
relations. Angleton-Helms relations?
MR. HALPERN: Very, very good.
INTERVIEWER: Very, very good?
MR. HALPERN: Always have been.
INTERVIEWER: Good working relationship between the two of
them.
MR. HALPERN:
Oh sure, they had their differences in views on
lots of subjects including the Nosenko case and a lot of
others, but by and large it was excellent.
159
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER: Other than Mr. Colby, who was the most
influential person from the Agency in dealing with these
Committees?
MR. HALPERN: I have no personal knowledge of that so I am not
sure. I would guess that the three guys who were set up to be
the liaison. Breckinridge, Bolton and Elder I presume were the
most influential guys because they were in daily touch with the
staff as well as the Senators and Representatives. I forget
who was technically the boss. I think it was probably Scott.
The boss of the office on the paper. And Seymour was a
consultant or contractor or rehiree or whatever it was because
he had retired.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, he had? I didn't know that.
MR. HALPERN: Yeah, he had retired with me and 250 other guys
from the DDP on December the 31st, 1974.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, he had too.
MR. HALPERN: And then he got called back and rehired on
January the 1st or January the 2nd, whatever it turned out to
be, for this kind of stuff even before the Church Committee was
created. So I guess of all of those in terms of staff
officers, I guess those three were the guys who were more
intimately involved than anybody else. But I may be, you know,
dead wrong on that.
INTERVIEWER:
And that was 200 plus that left at the end of
December?
MR. HALPERN: Yeah, regular retirement. I mean, the retirement
160
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
computations as a result of the cost of living allowances that
were then growing along every six months or so made it so that
it was economically crazy not to retire. You were better off
to do what Seymour did, which was retire one day and come back
on contract the next day because it worked out that way much
better. Better financially, that is. So a lot of guys just
took advantage of it long before the business of the Church
Committee came into existence. And you had to have your papers
in quite a while before the December 31st retirement date so
that they could do all the processing and everything, get the
approvals and processing and what have you because it wasn't
automatic. You had to go through the usual bureaucratic chain
of command to get approval to retire. So most of these people
had been thinking about retirement for some time. It had
nothing to do with the Schlesinger cleaning up in '73, this was
a year later in '74. So a lot of guys were planning it and
just kept on looking at the financial statistics from the
retirement branch to see when the best time was to go. And so
it suddenly ended up with about 200 or 250 from the DDO alone.
And we all went out at the same time.
INTERVIEWER:
You served Tom Karamessines until February of '73?
MR. HALPERN: That's right. And then Bill Colby after that.
INTERVIEWER: Then Colby after that?
MR. HALPERN: Until about May of '73.
INTERVIEWER:
Until May of 173. And then what Sam?
MR. HALPERN: Then my next assignment was as the Senior
161
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
Personnel Officer. Mainly, my job was worrying about
assignments for senior personnel. That means the super grades,
GS-15s and above for the DDO. I prepared all the necessary
paperwork and make recommendations to the DDO as to next
assignments and what have you. I did that for, well, sorry,
correction. I first was given a job by Colby and Bill Nelson
who was then the DDO while Bill was in limbo waiting to get
sworn in. I mean, Colby was in limbo. My next assignment,
actually, was to do a study of DCS which Colby had just
incorporated into the DDO. It had been under the DDI for
years. And the DDO, that is, the Directorate suddenly had
another component, totally new component. They didn't know
what to do with it. For years they had been trying to get
their hands on it, we had been, even under Tom K.
decision had been made. And Colby, one of the first things he
did was to just transfer. The same time he transferred TSD,
the technical people into the DDS&T, he transferred the DCS
into the DDO. And so I was asked to look into it and come up
with a paper saying, you know, what's this animal we now own?
What do we have here? And so I did it and I think it took me
two or three months to do a study. And I visited quite a
number of the field bases, field offices throughout the
country. Talked to a lot of people and talked to a lot of
people in Washington and wrote a paper. And then it was after
that that I was made the Senior Personnel Officer
And no
--
or officer
for senior officers in the DDO. And one of the conditions
--
162
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
that I had made in doing the study on DCS, that come what may
with my report, whether it was a good report or a lousy report,
I didn't want people to assume that once I made the report that
I would move in and take over DCS, you know. Being charged
with having doctored the report, I said, "I want it clearly
understood I am not going to be assigned to the DCS when this
is over." And everybody agreed. Scouts honor, cross my heart
and hope to die, all that kind of nonsense. Hand on the Bible
and what have you. And after I did my personnel job, which I
am not a personnel officer and I didn't like it but I did it
as long as I was told to do it. And so and behold, when I was
stirring around saying, you know, "This isn't my job. There
must be something else you guys have for me to do." And
behold, when Jim Murphy retired in '73 and Jack Horton was
moved up from Deputy Chief of DCS to Chief of DCS, I was
detailed as the Deputy to Jack Horton. And so in early '74,
late '73, early '74, I was made Deputy Chief of DCS and then
made another trip to the stations for other reasons, because I
was looking at them from two different points of view. And
that's what I was doing. And then when I retired, I retired as
Deputy Chief of DCS.
INTERVIEWER: Good, I didn't have that gap. As you look to the
past, how was counterintelligence affected by the Hearings?
MR. HALPERN: I think that were affected, I'm just guessing
again, because on was on the outside, but my guess is it was
probably affected even more drastically than the rest of the
163
SECRET
13-00000
:
SECRET
shop largely because of the MHCHAOS program, the mail opening.
program, and because of Jim Angleton being charged with being
the gray eminence and spook and God knows what else. I think
it was probably badly hurt. Much more so than the others.
INTERVIEWER: Badly damaged?
MR. HALPERN: Badly damaged. And particularly with Colby
saying that he never got anything out of counterintelligence.
Jim Angleton could never convince him about
counterintelligence. Bill just didn't understand it, that's
all.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. How about Mitch Rogovin? Any notions as
to how he influenced the
•
MR. HALPERN: I have no idea. No personal knowledge whatever.
What I would be giving you is hearsay.
INTERVIEWER: Okay, how about Director Schlesinger's relations
with Congress?
MR. HALPERN: Well, as far as I know Jim was only in the job
from February '73 to June '73. I have no idea what those
relations were. First of all, I was bouncing around mostly as
Colby's Exec and we had enough troubles worrying about what to
do with Jim. Colby knew pretty well because it was mostly
Colby's ideas that Jim was signing-off on as it affected the
DDO. I just don't know what his relationships were really. I
wasn't close enough to get near. I can give you a gut
feeling. But that's no help.
INTERVIEWER: And how about during that time, Colby's relation
164
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
with Congress?
•
MR. HALPERN: I don't know. I don't think there were very'
many. I think everything was handled through Jim. Because in
those days, officers below the rank of the Deputy Director and
Executive Director, very few officers as such ever had any
direct relations with the Congress. Bill Broe as the IG, under
Schlesinger, was the first guy, first officer below that top
level who was directed to testify in Congress on the Chile
affair because Bill had been Chief of the WH Division when it
all took place. And so, Bill's contacts with Geneene of ITT,
for the substantive of issue, I believe Bill was the first guy
who
Schlesinger changed the ground rules right away.
And I think he was the first guy. Other Directors had taken
officers up there with them to testify in executive session,
classified hearings and briefings. Dick Helms took. Ted
Shackley, for example, to testify about a number of things. I
think one of them was the Laos war and another one on Vietnam
and so on. But aside from that kind of, the Director doing the
briefings with a staff officer to assist him, in effect, I
think Bill Broe was the first, I believe he was the first,
officer to testify in his own right under oath, etc. And then
his testimony was declassified almost immediately and published.
INTERVIEWER: And the Director was present?
MR. HALPERN: I don't remember whether he was present or not.
INTERVIEWER: So this was a.
MR. HALPERN: It was a change.
•
•
165
SECRET
1/3-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER: Big departure?
MR. HALPERN: Vast change. I believe Bill in '73 was under
Schlesinger, the first guy.
I'm almost certain of that.
INTERVIEWER: Do you happen to know who was Congressional
liaison at that time?
MR. HALPERN: It would have to be
•
I don't know who the
John Warner
heck I don't know offhand. I don't remember.
--
would know. Give John à buzz and ask him. Or the record would
show in the Agency who the heck was on what job. I'm trying to
think and I don't remember offhand. It may be in the public
hearings for that matter. I just don't know. I've got them in
there somewhere. But I think it would be easier for you just
to check. Because that was a wide thing and it was an
unclassified officer.
INTERVIEWER: Okay how about, some suggest, I approached it a
little bit differently a little bit ago, that Mr. Colby's
cooperation saved the Agency from very serious harm.
MR. HALPERN: Run that by me again.
INTERVIEWER:
Some suggest that Mr. Colby's cooperation saved
the Agency from very serious harm. Some going so far as to say
it might have been dismantled. Is that a common view?
MR. HALPERN: Well, I'll tell you, if it is it's a new one on
me.
I know it's a view, but all I can say to those who hold
that view is, what the hell do they regard as damaging to the
Agency? If Bill didn't do the damage to the Agency, what the
hell did? I don't think the Congress would have dismantled the
166
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
Agency under any circumstances. If, by dismantling, basically
you say get rid of the clandestine side, because I think even
the silliest guy on the Hill always said you've got to have
analysis, research and analysis. That's DDI. And I think they
are all pretty smart enough to say, "Well, we've got to have
those bloody things up in the sky. And we've got to have
technical stuff." You know everybody is for technical stuff.
And the DDA simply provides the the money and the office space
and the paper clips. So the only thing that would be
dismantled would be to wipe out clandestine activities. And I
don't think anybody on the Hill seriously considered wiping it
out completely. Controlling it, reducing it, putting it under
some kind of further Congressional constraints, yeah, that was
going to happen. Moving it out of CIA and making it a brand
new agency by itself, yeah, there was talk about that kind of
thing. But where the hell would they put it? In the White
House? Well, that's possible. Look at the nice mess with got
with North and you can imagine that in spades. So those people
who hold the view that Colby's frankness, if that's the word to
use, or cooperation with the Congress, saved the Agency from
real damage, I don't know what the hell damage is then. Sorry
Ralph, you asked.
INTERVIEWER: I asked, you bet.
MR. HALPERN: I think people like that have got rocks in their
head. I don't know what the hell they are imagining.
INTERVIEWER: Tell me, on a scale from 1 to 15, with 15 tops,
167
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
how would you rate Mr. Colby's work in the investigation?
MR. HALPERN: In the investigation?
INTERVIEWER: In the investigation.
--
Congressional, Pike,
Church.
MR. HALPERN: In relation to what? I am not trying to hold
back. In relation to what? In relation to harm to the Agency,
harm to the community? Helping in Congress? Hurting the
President? I'm not sure.
INTERVIEWER:
In relation to the Agency, and if you will the
health of the Agency, the strength of the Agency.
MR. HALPERN: Oh, I'd give him no more than a 5. No more. My
Lord. I think he did a lot of damage. I think he aided and
abetted the kinds of anti-intelligence activities, and
anti-intelligence feelings on the Hill. And I forget whether
it was Kissinger or Rockefeller who made that, maybe it's a
apocryphal remark, to Colby about, you know, do you have to go
to Confession all the time? That's my attitude as far as Colby
is concerned.
INTERVIEWER:
I'd like to read a statement and see what you
think of it. This is a statement that was made to Mr. Colby in
December of 1975. And I am quoting, "It has been my experience
and judgement that if you, Mr. Colby, are asked precisely the
right questions, you will give an honest answer. You do not
lead us into those areas which would help us know what the
right question was to ask. You do not make it easy for us to
ask the right question." This is a Congressman, Sam.
168
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: I know.
INTERVIEWER:
"Anyone who thinks you have been running back and
forth to Capital Hill with briefcases bulging with secrets
which you are eager to bestow upon us hasn't sat on my side of.
the desk."
MR. HALPERN: Do you want me to comment?
INTERVIEWER:
Yes.
MR. HALPERN: I think the person who made that comment didn't
realize how much he was getting. He may have been ignorant of
what the intelligence business was all about, what the
profession was all about, what the Community was all about.
And he may have thought that Colby wasn't giving him the keys
to the guardhouse. But in fact I think he was.
Again, I
wasn't there at the time so I am only guessing.
But I think he
did give them keys. I think the Congressman who made that
comment thought that there should have been a hell of a lot
more. I think he was living in a dream world. He didn't
realize how much he was getting from Bill. As I said before, I
would have preferred if the Congressmen really had to dig and.
burrow and argue for every piece of paper. That's a personal
view and I think that I would, if I had been there I would have
tried to see what we could do to keep it that way.
I must say
I can image Seymour Bolton trying to convince Bill Colby about
not pushing things forward and not rushing things. And maybe
he succeeded in holding back some stuff or at least delaying
production of some stuff. But I can imagine Colby totally
169
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
overruling Seymour most of the time or some of the time. I
don't know. But I can't imagine Bolton, knowing Seymour very
well indeed, that Seymour would want to go rushing foward with
this thing because if nothing else, Bolton was a political
animal. He had the best political sense of many guys there.
INTERVIEWER: He did?
MR. HALPERN: Oh, he was terrific on this. He was basically a
political action officer and always was. And particularly in
Germany, he knew the German scene very well indeed. And the
German leaders very well indeed, some of whom were on his
payroll. But that is another story. Or had been on his
payroll, let me put it that way. Years ago. Anyway, I can see
Colby saying, "Oh I know better than that, Seymour. I know how
to handle those guys. Let me handle it my way. And I'll
handle it my way." But Seymour would be a good staff officer
and provide Colby with all the information that Colby should
have. And it would be up to Bill then to make the decision on
what to do. That Congressman, I think, thought there was much
more and thought that probably Bill was holding out on him. My
own gut feeling, and it is purely that, was that Bill did not
hold out. And he wasn't trying to hold anything back. I think
he really believed, probably to this day, that he did the right
thing by making things easier by showing a cooperative spirit,
by putting things forward, and I think the other apocryphal
statement I made, you know, about, do you have to go to
170
SECRET
13-00000.
SECRET
confession everyday is the other side to that same question.
And the Congressman, I think, was just full of delusions.
That's about all I can say.
INTERVIEWER:
How about your reflections on media coverage of
the Congressional investigations? Do you feel they were
objective?
MR. HALPERN: Well, obviously not. They were not objective.
They were all hype. Nothing but hype. If you looked at some
of the stories that appeared in the print media and the radio
and television media, the headline always had to have those
three nasty letters, CIA. I don't care what it was. They
always dug up a CIA headline. You take a look at the obituary
pages of The Post and New York Times and invariably if somebody
died God knows where and God knows how long they'd been
--
sick, with cancer or had an accident, got killed in a car crash
--
and if they happened to have been in CIA even as a logistics
officer or a finance clerk or a courier, and if they could dig
out the word CIA, that would be in the headline. "CIA Courier
Dead" or "CIA Officer Killed" or so and so. It was always the
CIA. It use to make me sick to my stomach to watch these
things on television. To this day I can't watch Tom Brokow
without remembering some of his absolute awful, asinine
statements that he made as a great pontificator on all of this
stuff. Dan Rather was bad enough but he wasn't on top then.
It was Walter Cronkite. But Dan was always covering
171
SECRET
13-00000
:
SECRET
this thing. He was bad, but he wasn't quite that bad. I think
Brokaw was the worst.'
INTERVIEWER:
Daniel Schorr, was he
MR. HALPERN: Schorr was a bad one all the way through. They
were always looking for that CIA headline. It could have
something to do with some other Agency but if it was
intelligence, CIA always got the hook.
Let me give you a
perfect example of what I am talking about. You remember, I'm
sure, the famous picture of that so-called assassination gun?
The dart gun
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN:
Right.
--that Church was holding up and Tower was
looking over the side and what have you. And first of all,
Bill Colby should never have brought that up on the Hill. He
I shouldn't have taken it up there. But it was labeled to this
day, and it's even in the John Ranelagh book, and I tried to
get him to correct it in the paperback but he couldn't because,
I think, because of the fact that there was a caption under a
photograph and to change a plate like that is very expensive
for a publisher. John tried to make some changes in the text,
not the caption under the photograph, but in the text itself to
indicate what I was trying to tell them, that by dammit, it was
not the CIA gun. The gun happened to have been found in one of
the safes at CIA when these young kids were running around in
the safes in their bare feet.
And in the testimony on the Hill
172
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
before the Church Committee, it appears in the bloody same book
that the testimony of Colby's in, two days later, two or three
days later, Dr. Senseney of the Special Operations Division of
the Department of the Army at Fort Dietrich, Maryland, Dr.
Senseney testified. And in high dudgeon practically when he
said, "That's not a CIA gun. I'm the guy who developed the
gun. I developed it and not for CIA. I developed it for the
entire US Government and it had nothing to do with Operation
MONGOOSE or Cuba. It wasn't even developed then. I developed
it for the Special Forces in Vietnam in 1965. It's my gun. We
did it. It's an Army gun.' But no, you'll never find it in
history today. It's always a CIA gun. It's going to be a CIA
gun until you and I are dead and long after. They can't
correct the history books. And it's all in the same bloody,
green covered set of hearings where Dr. Senseney says, "It's my
gun."
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN:
How does Senseney spell his name? You know?
I'll give it to you. Hold on.
INTERVIEWER: The machine is back on.
MR. HALPERN: I'm not making this up. This is Volume I of the
Church Committee Hearings and oddly enough the title of the
Volume is "Unauthorized Storage of Toxic Agents." And that
subject has got nothing to do with the dart gun.
Anyway, Bill
testified with that dart gun nonsense and he had with him at
the time Sayre Stevens and Mitch Rogovin on September the 16th,
173
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
He was Department of
1975. On September the 18th, 1975, two days later, Dr. Charles
A. Senseney, spelled S-E-N-S-E-N-E-Y.
Defense employee formerly in a Special Operations Division at
Fort Dietrich, Maryland. And if you'll wait a minute I'll give
you the actual page number of that. I've been trying to get
this damn thing. People won't listen to me and nobody will.
INTERVIEWER: Well I am and the machine is and we'll get it out
to the public.
MR. HALPERN: If you'll hang on one minute here it is. This
--
is what I wrote to John Ranelagh and I sent it to him in this
form. He took 80 percent of these 38 pages when he put out his
paperback. Anyway, I'm saying this, "Re the photo of Senator
Church holding a dart gun. The gun was not a CIA gun.
It was
not developed in the early 60's. It was not developed as part
of Operation MONGOOSE. See Church Committee Hearings, Volume
I, Testimony of Charles A. Senseney, Department of Defense,
Special Operations Division, September 18, 1975, Pages 159 to
The gun was developed long after MONGOOSE which was
run from October 1961 to October 1962. It was developed in
1965 for Special Forces in Vietnam and was available for all
interested government agencies." Quote unquote. And there's
the text. But the media two days later never mentioned a word
about, "Two days ago we gave you a report about that dart gun.
We called it a CIA gun. Oops, we made a mistake. It's not a
CIA dart gun." You think Colby as DCI even tried to put out a
177.
.
•
174
SECRET
13-00000
:
SECRET
correction to the press, a notice saying, "Hey fellas, please
put even a little half-inch box in somewhere on page 55." CIA
didn't do a thing. And I hold Bill responsible for that and
. I'm sorry to be so strong about it.
But that is Bill's fault.
He knew what they were
He brought that bloody gun up there.
doing. He saw the headlines as well as you and me, and the
print media and the television media, the electronic media and
the radio. He never did anything at all to try to correct the
record. At the time it might, big might, big question mark,
might have had some impact on some of the media to say, "OOPS,
it wasn't a CIA gun, it was a Department of Defense gun."
Never! I tried to do it in my own little way. I
didn't have a chance to even start. I've told everybody that I
could think of including Bill Colby the same story I am telling
you. I said, "I am not making it up. It's all in the same
green document."
Never.
INTERVIEWER: Does he mention that in his book? I don't
remember that. Does he mention that in his book? Does Bill
Colby mention this? I don't think so.
MR. HALPERN: He never made any attempt to correct the record.
Sure the gun was there. I'm not denying that. But it wasn't a
CIA dart gun or the CIA assassination gun. Nobody in the media
tried to correct the record. Church didn't, obviously.
Never. But the guy who should have done something is Bill
Colby. And I hold Bill personally responsible for not doing
175
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
anything about it.
INTERVIEWER: I'm glad to get it on the record.
MR. HALPERN: It's on the record. I've had it on the record so
many times with people. I've told this to Seymour Hersh. But
he didn't believe me until he did his own homework. He didn't
even believe in looking at my copy. It wasn't here in this
house. I was out with him. I do my homework. And when I've
got, you know, I said, "I'm not saying this. Here, you read
it." He had to do his own homework and he finally told me at
another subsequent session, he said, "Yes, you were right,
Sam." I said, "I didn't make it up." And I don't know
Senseney from a hole in the wall. You got me at the wrong
moment.
INTERVIEWER: I'm glad to get it.
MR. HALPERN: I'm getting hot under the collar.
INTERVIEWER:
That's fine. That's fine.
MR. HALPERN: I don't mind, you know, taking blame for
something we did. And there is no blame in having a dart gun,
by dammit. I think Senseney was right to have perfected one.
The fact that we didn't use it and nobody else used it, that's
another one of those wasted things, wasted efforts maybe. But
if suddenly somebody needed - well, we did use it, I'm
sorry. But not as an assassination weapon. We used it against
dogs.
INTERVIEWER: Right, guard dogs.
176
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: The guard dogs were put to sleep in at least one
operation.
INTERVIEWER:
dart gun.
You know in Spy Catcher there is mention of a
And I wondered when I read that whether the British
had worked on it and then we did? I wasn't sure.
MR. HALPERN: According to Senseney, he did this on his own..
He and his laboratory types. I don't know Senseney. It's all
in here. Read the written report.
INTERVIEWER: All right. I'm going to.
MR. HALPERN: You know, it's like this business I told you
about my being out in Boulder, Colorado at the World Affairs
Conference. Perfect example. It's okay for somebody to use
the Church Committee Reports to damn CIA, but I can't use the
same bloody report to defend CIA. So where the hell do you go?
INTERVIEWER: In one hell of a circle, that's for sure.
MR. HALPERN: That's for sure. Round and round and round.
Anyway, you caught me at a wrong moment.
INTERVIEWER: No, it's fine. Tell me, why do you think the
press was playing all CIA up and playing CIA .?
•
MR. HALPERN: I think part of the same business of being
anti-establishment, anti-government. Remember, this is after
Vietnam, after Watergate. It all adds up. Attack, attack,
attack, attack, attack.
INTERVIEWER: Anti-secrecy?
177
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
MR. HALPERN:
Well, partly. Sure.
Remember, the Freedom of
Information Act was just beginning to be used. And it's part
of the whole business, it's against the establishment.
And one
of the guys who was on the Church Committee staff, one of the
staffers, Rick Inderfurth, I think is his name.
INTERVIEWER:
Yeah.
MR. HALPERN: Okay, you know that name?
INTERVIEWER: Yes, I do.
MR. HALPERN: Well, after the Church Committee business, his
next job was in the media on television as a correspondent.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, I didn't know that.
MR. HALPERN: Guys were looking for other jobs. So, you know
looking out for their future. I don't object to that but I
hate for them to have gotten ahead over the dead bodies of the
Intelligence Community. I mean, it's a little bit beyond the
pale as far as I'm concerned.
INTERVIEWER: Okay, how about the writings of Seymour Hersh.
Significant factor?
--
MR. HALPERN: Yes. If nothing else The New York Times and
The New York Times still has an impact
--
and when you have two
big front page stories like that, it's going to make an
impact. And it did make an impact. And particularly when he
had the help, and he admits it, and Colby admits it, he had the
help of the DCI, Colby, who confirmed to him a lot of the stuff
he had about some of the activities in New York, some of which
178
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
were wrong. And Colby didn't even know they were wrong. But
Colby went ahead. This is part of Colby's problem again
giving away more than he has to give away. Why the hell he
talked to Hersh beats the hell out of me.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. How about certain newspapers.
Were they
especially harsh in their treatment of CIA during the time?
MR. HALPERN: Yeah. I don't know of any that wasn't. There
may have been some around the country.
INTERVIEWER: Christain Science Monitor, maybe?
MR. HALPERN: Nope. Oh no, no, no, no. The Monitor was along
with everybody else. They were a part of the pack. And I've
got all the clippings. The Monitor was part of the pack.
INTERVIEWER: Wall Street Journal?
MR. HALPERN: That I don't know. I don't read the Wall Street
Journal religiously. I used to read The Monitor, The Post, and
The New York Times very religiously. I found that I: a.
couldn't afford them all, and b. my clippings were overflowing
the room anyway, and I just read The Monitor and The Washington
Post and, of course, Time magazine.
INTERVIEWER:
Washington Star? Was that
MR. HALPERN: The Washington Star was going but they were all
on the attack. Nobody wanted to be left out. Everyone, they
. all wanted to be part of the show. And that's why you had the
television and the radio, all the different channels. I don't
care what, all the news broadcast. It was almost as if
179
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
everybody said, "This is the time fellas and we are all going
to make headlines." And they were all looking for headlines no
matter what it was. Good, bad, or indifferent. They didn't
care about the facts. This was one of the reasons that AFIO
was created we called it ARIO when we first began under Dave
Phillips
--
to try to put some kind of moderation and some kind
of factual sense into some of these guys who had absolutely no
concept of what the hell they were doing, what they were
talking about. It was just like the Representatives and the
Senators who didn't have any idea except that they all thought
this was James Bond fun and games stuff. And there was no
leavening of any kind of criticism. And what we were trying to
do, at least in the AFIO side or the ARIO side, was to have a
place where the media could come and talk to us.
And we
weren't going to give away any secrets. And we didn't. But to
put things in perspective, put things in context. Try to
explain to them what the hell that terminology was, what the
definitions were, what covert action was. You know, nobody
knew.
INTERVIEWER: AFIO or ARIO ran a questionnaire with its
membership. Do you know whatever happened to the questionnaire?
MR. HALPERN: The questionnaire was put out at the request of
one of the members who was doing some kind of a study a
Ph.D. or a Masters or something. He was doing a paper. And
this was a part of his paper. And I don't know what the
180
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
results were. I never saw the finished product. But you can
check with the office and see if they have it.
INTERVIEWER: I saw some mention in one of the Congressional
documents, Dave Phillips in testimony, maybe for government
operations.
MR. HALPERN: Well, it may have been. But again, Dave wasn't
running the questionnaire. That was an individual member's
effort and using AFIO as a means of getting it out to the
membership in kind of one fell swoop. He didn't have any way
of getting I don't know what the membership was, maybe a
thousand or fifteen-hundred something like that he wouldn't
--
--
have any way of reaching that many people as a private
individual. So we sent out the questionnaire that he
prepared. And as a matter of fact I don't think I even
responded to it because I thought some of the questions were
silly. And I didn't see any point in answering silly
questions.
INTERVIEWER: You didn't save it?
MR. HALPERN: No, I didn't. I'm sorry.
INTERVIEWER: I'm just curious because from the testimony there
are some percentages.
MR. HALPERN: Dave may have. You might ask Dave.
Dave may
have saved it. I don't know if the office itself saved it.
They weren't very history-minded in the office.
181
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER:
How about your impressions regarding support from
the White House during the Congressional investigations?
MR. HALPERN: Again, from the outside looking in . . .
INTERVIEWER: Right.
MR. HALPERN: I don't think the White House was very
supportive, or at least as supportive as they might have been.
But I think I've always thought that they might have been more
supportive if Colby had been more honest with the White House
in the very beginning. And the beginning to me is January 15,
1975, before the Church Committee. And read Colby's book about
that. I mean, he himself says, you know, says he was out of
step, basically. And if I were sitting in the White House, why
would I suddenly think that this guy was going to work with
me.
You know, he cut my feet off at the stumps, at the hips,
the first time around. And there is no way I can pull him back
now. I think the White House was concerned, I think Henry
Kissinger was concerned about the fact of the loss of emphasis
and the loss of capability in the Intelligence Community and
how to stem that particular problem. And if you remember, Ford
came out with his own plan of reorganizing the Community and
took a bit of the wind out of the sails of the Church
Committee, which I thought was a smart thing to do.
It may
have been cosmetic and it may have been simply a deal. But by
that time he was dealing with Bush in '76, a different kind of
a guy.
And well, an Executive Order came out under Ford in
182
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
February of '76 and it's called the Bush paper. It wasn't. I
mean, Bush couldn't possibly, even with his staff, have written
a new Executive Order in the couple of weeks that he was in the
office. It had to be the one that was prepared by Colby and
his staff or his staff officers. So that was basically the
order that came out in '76 with a Bill Colby related order, an
attempt to do something. But again, why should the White House
and all of it's parts gone out of its way to work with a guy
they weren't sure of? Now when Bush took over in '76 it's a
different story. But by that time the damage had been done.
It was '75 when the damage was done, not '76, because by '76
the Hearings had died down, the coverage had died down, and it
was only starting to come up again when they started to show
these green books and the reports and the Hearings and by that
time it was the middle of '76. But it doesn't take long to
destroy an Intelligence Community. You know, boom.
INTERVIEWER:
Haig?
Did you ever hear anything of the role of Mr.
MR. HALPERN: Not much. Not much. At least I don't remember.
I think by that time Al was out of town.
at that time? By '76?
Wasn't he in Europe
INTERVIEWER: By '76, he would have been.
MR. HALPERN: Yes, he would have been in Europe by that time.
So I don't remember hearing of Al very much.
183
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER:
That's right. He went off to Europe. How about
this: A number of observers believe the Congressional Hearings
in this year of investigation were a real watershed in CIA
history.
MR. HALPERN: Oh sure. Before the deluge and after the
deluge. No question. No question. We thought we had a
problem in '67. That's about nine years earlier, eight years
earlier when we had the Ramparts flap. And that was a
tremendous flap. And I think we discussed that last time and
I'm on tape on that. But that was the first big real problem
we had, big war issue. I mean, the Bay of Pigs was bad enough,
but that was limited, by comparison, to the Ramparts flap which
was worldwide in its significance; and covered a whole variety
of subjects, in terms of the different covers we had used and
in terms of the different things we had done. Even though it
was all covert action. But by '75 we weren't just talking
covert action. The Bay of Pigs was also covert action. It
just happened to be paramilitary activity of covert action, but
it was covert action. But by '75 you are getting into
intelligence, you are getting into counterintelligence, you're
getting the whole "shmear," let alone the CA stuff, the covert
action stuff. So '75 was the first time there was across the
board from A to Zed and back again. And it was the kitchen
sink, soup, apples, nuts, everything.
And it wasn't just CIA,
it was the entire Community, which even hurt worse than that.
184
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
It included things like NSA, which up until then had been
really sacrosanct. And they blew stuff in NSA like, I wish I
knew the detail. But all you've got to do is read the stuff
and can have a feel for what the hell went wrong there. They
blew more than they should have.
INTERVIEWER:
There was a comment by Bob Woodward in Veil that
:
Bill Colby in the Hearings, his real success was that he
protected NSA.
MR. HALPERN: Oh, I've got hearings in there about NSA and NSA
being on the firing line, and I know the staff officer who
helped prepare most of the testimony by the Director of NSA at
the time, General something or other. I forget his name right
The guy who did most of the work had been a college
classmate of mine at the National War College, Jack Harding.
And it hurt very badly all the way around. And Colby couldn't
have possibly protected them.
now.
INTERVIEWER: Woodward overstated it.
MR. HALPERN: And as a matter of fact, I think part of the
problem, again sitting on the outside, was that each of the
agencies in turn had to protect their own domain and their own
activities. And no DCI, I don't care who he was, could have
been able to coordinate and alter the extent of trying to come
up with a solid front. I think if he did there might have been
some law which said you are in collusion. So you can't, you
185
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
know, you are not allowed to defend yourself together. I don't
know, I'm just guessing.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. How about the Congressional investigations
--
affect Agency morale a lot or
MR. HALPERN: Well, I can only assume again from the outside
that they had to. I know people talked to me about it from
people who were inside, talking to me on the outside, in terms
of what its done in terms of morale. I think as I said before,
the feelings of, if you guys who had been here before hadn't
done those nasty things, we wouldn't be under the gun.
We are
back to square one on that.
:
INTERVIEWER: Sure. Okay. The issue of oversight. Do you
believe that oversight by two select committees is preferable
to the earlier oversight by six to eight committees?
MR. HALPERN: We never had six to eight as such. There were
four committees of Congress which had oversight, two in the
House and two in the Senate. There was under the Hughes-Ryan
Amendment six to eight committees we reported to. I wasn't
involved anymore. But anyway, the Agency had to report on
covert action. It was a separate subject.
INTERVIEWER: Right, good distinction.
MR. HALPERN: So that there never were more than four oversight
committees as such. And now we are down to two. And I have
been on public record and in print favoring one committee. As
long as you are going to have committees, have one. But people
186
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
forget that even when you have only two now, we still have to
remember the Agency still reports to Foreign Affairs, briefs
them on foreign affairs. The House Armed Services Committee
still gets special reporting. The Appropriations Committees in
both the House and the Senate are always involved with
everything. So you've got four committees right now anyway.
Minimum. In practical daily life. You've got to go to
Appropriations and nobody in Congress is ever going to keep
Appropriations out of anything. And on top of that, then there
is Government Operations. I could go on forever. So boiling
it down to even one joint committee, it'll help some, but it
won't solve the problem. But it is better than having two,
with two separate staffs.
INTERVIEWER: Okay how about, do you think it is practical for
the Congress to be informed of the covert activities of the
Agency?
MR. HALPERN: Yes, within limits, within reason. They are not,
as I said before, they are not part of the Executive and they
are not going to be I hope they are not going to be
11
1
in
charge of or as part of making the decision whether you are
going to do something or not. And whether that is cover action
or whether that is sending the Marines in, you can't have them
sitting there telling you you can do it or you can't do it.
Not if you are going to be a President.
187
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
INTERVIEWER: Okay, what about this one, Sam, and you've really
been very, very patient. I really appreciate it. What are the
lessons that you think are to be learned from the Church and
Pike investigations? Either institutional lessons, that is the
Agency or.
MR. HALPERN: I think first of all you need one, I think if you
are going to have an oversight it should be one joint
committee, a small oversight committee, not very many numbers
either in staff or in Representatives and Senators. The
Director has to be honest with these guys. He has got to tell
them lots of things that he normally wouldn't tell them, I
think. And what he tells them has to be cleared with the
President before he tells them, except for the normal mundane
things like normal budget stuff and normal personnel figures.
No President should get involved in that. It's silly. But in
terms of specific activities, whether intelligence collection
or counterintelligence or covert action, don't dummy up with
Congress. On the other hand, you've got to build a rapport
where there are certain things they are not going to ask you
about they shouldn't ask you about such as identities of
agents; and that kind of thing. Such as the kind of liaison
arrangements you make with foreign governments. Yeah, they
might consider it as a treaty and, therefore, it comes under
the treaty making power. It's advise and consent powers of the
Senate. But I think they've got to bite the bullet themselves
--
--
188
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
and realize that certain things are not for discussion even at
that level. I think a DCI has to glad-hand the people on the
Hill not all 100 of them in the Senate or 435 in the House,
obviously. But the House and the Senate have got to have some
delegation of their responsibilities, their authority and what
have you to a handful of people And that can't change every
six months or every two years. There are going to be some guys
who are going to stay there for a while. And that's why the
arguments against the joint committee because the House of
Representatives has an election every two years. But a lot of
guys are in there for life, basically. They come from safe,
what the British would call safe boroughs, you know, safe
districts. It's only the rare thing that's going to change
it. So there has got to be some kind of give and take on
this. And they've got to grow into this real world, on the
Hill, that certain things you just don't ask about particularly
in the intelligence and the counterintelligence field. You
know, if a Congressman says, "Tell me who the Soviet spies, who
the Soviets have recruited on my staff." Uh uh. You don't
tell them that if you've got any good hard information, not
until you are absolutely certain and not until you've got some
kind of an operation running to control the damn thing and play
them back or whatever the situation is, because these guys, the
first thing they do is fire the guy. That's the last thing in
the world you want to do if you are running a
.
counterintelligence operation. So you've got to have give and
189
SECRET

13-00000
SECRET
take on this kind of stuff.
You've got to play games with
these guys on the Hill. You've got to wine them and dine them
and breakfast them, or whatever the phrase is. I think the
DCI, whoever he is, has got to be able to work with a select
group of people on the Hill who have got to have the confidence
of the rest of their colleagues, whom they can trust and who
can understand, like Huddleston says, that not everybody in
Congress is going to know everything that these guys are going
to know. These guys in turn are going to have to understand
that they can't know everything either. There are some things
that you just don't talk about. And I'm not talking about
these big covert action operations and what have you. They'll
hear about those when it comes to passing the money for a
particular political action operation or a paramilitary
operation. Those things take lots of dough. It's like in the
old days the Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty took lots of
money to run those radios. And Congress knew what the hell was
going on. And Congress knew that RFE and RL were advertising
in this country from the very beginning for American donations
by American citizens to fight Communism via the radio
airwaves. And I don't know if that was legal or not to this
day, but I guess nobody objected. And they didn't object in
the Church Committee to this thing. Except that now that it is
run by another part of the US Government, that makes it okay.
It's the same thing.
190
SECRET
13-00000
INTERVIEWER:
Same government.
SECRET
MR. HALPERN: Same government. Same people involved. Same
appropriations and all that kind of stuff. I don't understand,
honestly, as a citizen, what the hell the big difference is.
So, but in terms of the future, there has got to be some kind
of better rapport than developed as a result of the Church and
Pike Committee which was strictly adversarial. And you can't
have that and run intelligence. I don't care whether it's NSA,
DIA, CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, Drug Enforcement
Agency. Any of them. And what is it, there are 11 or 12
components in the Community at the moment and all of them have,
you've got to understand, what in the hell the world is all
about. And you can't have all of this stuff going up on media
coverage. And you can't have it be used to help somebody's
election prospects.
INTERVIEWER: Both in the Executive and in the Congress.
MR. HALPERN: And the Congress. And the leaks, I am sorry to
say, most of the leaks come from the Executive side.
I'm sure
of that. And I've been writing on that, too. And at least
from sitting on the outside, and I don't know whether I am
right or wrong, but my own gut feeling is that the leaks as
they appear in the press and I don't know for the last 10
--
years what, you know, what really is classified. I've got a
feeling for it, that's all. After 32 years in the business you
kind of understand some of this stuff. But most of the stuff
191
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
is coming off of the Executive Branch.
Somebody is trying to
get some kind of yea or nea. Or some pluses. And you can't
run it that way. I'm sorry. I'm not looking for an Official
Secrets Act, but something that has a better control over who
says what, how, where and when. So Church and Pike Committees,
if there is going to be any pluses out of those two circuses
and they were nothing but circuses
--
it's got to be along
those lines. A greater confidence, greater working together,
and a better understanding between the two branches of
government that this is a serious life and death business,
particularly these days. And if you've got some decent
intelligence, I don't care whether it's technical or human
intelligence is intelligence
--
it might save us all in the
long run if we know in advance and then can use it in advance.
Lots of times Presidents have misused good intelligence. Or
wouldn't believe good intelligence. I gave you one example,
not a President, but senior officials at the State Department
refused to believe intelligence. And I can give you plenty of
examples within CIA, the DDI wouldn't believe human source
intelligence because it wasn't a picture and it wasn't SIGINT.
And chapter and verse, over and over again. And plenty of
times the human source reporting was wrong. I'm not saying
it's right every time. But there are lots of examples where it
was and it wasn't accepted. But there has got to be a better
acceptance that this is a profession, not just in CIA. I'm
192
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
talking about the Community.
Around the world there are
thousands of people involved and they are all not out to butter
their own sides on this thing. And they are trying to help.
And you've got to give them a chance. And you've got to work
with them and you've got to trust them. As I said many years
ago to somebody, I forget, and he put it in the newspaper and
he shouldn't have, but he did, I used the phrase something
about, "Someday somebody has got to trust somebody, sometime" or
something like that. And that may come out of all these damn
hearings. Take a look at the Iran-Contra Hearings which really
just blew you away on the kinds of things that were going on.
And partly because the people involved in the White House staff
had no concept of what the hell it was all about, what the
intelligence business was all about, what covert action was all
about. And when you had Senator, oh, who the hell was it,
Senator Nunn, I think it was Senator Nunn, try to explain to
Admiral Poindexter what the principle of plausible deniability
was all about, so help me, Poindexter didn't have a
cotton-pickin' clue! I sat here watching this thing and got
sick. Watching it. He had no concept of what he was talking
about. Senator Nunn knew a hell of a lot more than he diḍ.
And he was trying gently to lead him to the correct conclusion
of what the definition is. And these guys were from hunger.
Neither North nor Poindexter had ever had any experience in
intelligence work at all. And here they were running this
193
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
country's separate intelligence network. And it was
unbelievable and frightening. Very frightening.
INTERVIEWER: You think also, in these lessons to be learned
that the relationships between the Agency and the press
course, the Agency can only offer, I suppose offer
-
of
and what
I am suggesting here is how one develops trust between the
Agency and the press.
MR. HALPERN: And the press?
INTERVIEWER:
MR. HALPERN:
Yeah, and the same thing maybe with the public.
It's hard. It's hard. I think it's easier for
something like AFIO to do that kind of creation of trust
because AFIO has got no ax to grind. It's true, we know less
and less about what's actually going on inside specific
operations. And that is as it should be. Even though a guy
might retire one day and come into AFIO the next day and start
talking to the press, he has got enough sense not to get
involved in specifics. And it took AFIO a long time to develop
a spirit of cooperation and integrity with the media that are
the, more or less, solid media, the honest media -- not the
kooks
--
to accept an AFIO statement about something in terms
of, you know, good, bad, or indifferent. At first they
didn't. It took us several years to develop this rapport and I
give Dave Phillips a lot of credit for this
--
whereby you talk
to these guys and try to prove, you know, we've got no axes to
grind. We're not trying to hide anything. We've got nothing
194
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
to hide. And try to help them understand why some of these
activities go on the way they do.
INTERVIEWER:
And the same thing with the universities and
colleges?
MR. HALPERN: You try. You try wherever you can. But that's a
ལན་"་7)
tough job. Particularly if you get universities and colleges
that don't want to have anything to do with intelligence.
That's a dirty thing. And there a lot of them like that.
Well, you heard Bob Simmons at the AFIO convention talking
about the use of academics and intelligence work and all that
kind of stuff as if they are a separate breed of cat. Well,
they are not, not in my opinion anyway, even though they might
think they are. You know, dirty their linen and tar one
academic, and no academic can go abroad anymore because
everybody will assume that they are all intelligence agents.
Nonsense.
Nonsense. If you are going to Russia or you're
going to Africa or wherever you go, if you start asking the
wrong questions even if you are an honest-to-goodness, nothing
more than a political scientist trying to do a research job in
the middle of Wagadodo, you ask the wrong question there,
you're going to get your head handed to you. You don't have to
be in any way even near the United States Government.
other government.
Or any
Sure, the easiest way the Russians have it
is if they charge that everybody in the Peace Corps is a CIA
agent, which they did at one time. And a lot of people
195
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
believed them. Or everybody in the Red Cross is a CIA agent or
everybody who is an academic from wherever is a CIA agent. And
pretty soon, you know, everybody is a CIA agent. One of the
problems I think Casey had with the Congressional Hill, and
again this is sitting from the outside, is he kind of gave them
the back of his hand, which automatically creates an
adversarial situation. I don't know how much time he spent
wining and dining them. I mean, having them out to breakfast.
I remember Directors like Allen Dulles or Dick Helms or McCone
and others used to have members of Congress up there on the
Agency top floor at the dining room where they had lunch, or
breakfast in the Director's dining room. And, you know, tried
to talk to them man to man. And tell them a thing or two that
they'd want to know and ask them questions. And try to work
out some kind of dual relationship without having them become
co-equal managers. That's the big problem. I've got no
objection to telling a guy who is an elected Representative of
the United States, if he is one of a handful of people picked
by his colleagues to be privy to all the secrets they need to
know to help run the place, within limits, without
micro-managing the thing. Yeah, bring them into the thing.
Tell them a thing or two. Try to teach them what it is all
about and why it is important that they keep their bloody
mouths shut.
196
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
:
INTERVIEWER:
Do you think, again from the outside, in the last
10-12 years, in other words, since the investigation, do you
think the Agency has changed much, has learned much?
MR. HALPERN: Well, if Casey is the example, no. I don't know
what has happened since, but I would hope that somebody is
trying to work out some kind of better relationship.
INTERVIEWER:
Do you think Turner?
MR. HALPERN: Oh, I don't think Turner had any real, maybe he
did, but I can't see it.
INTERVIEWER:
It wasn't evident. ☐
MR. HALPERN: I think Turner is such a blow-hard that I don't
see how in the hell he could have done it, really. I watched
and listened. I was up there several times when he was up
there testifying on a number of bills, on charter legislation
I and things like that, which is a tough time to be around. I
think that AFIO, with all due modesty, AFIO people like Walter
Pforzheimer and Larry Houston and John Warner and others who
had good connections on the Hill going back to the year one on
the subject and who were believed up on the Hill and accepted
on the Hill even some of the staffs couldn't dent that.
particular characteristic of these three guys I think they
--
had a very good chance and they did influence some people
because they were listened to. They didn't have to be accepted
all the way through, obviously, but at least when these guys
talked, people on the Hill, most of the staffers
--
197
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
particularly on the Senate side, not the House side, which was
and the Senators themselves understood that these
a mess
--
were three men of integrity and honesty. And who were trying
to explain things to them. And who literally had no axes to
grind. They weren't going to get a promotion out of this.
INTERVIEWER: And they trusted them.
MR. HALPERN: And they trusted them.
And they were honest.
And my own feeling is, you know, you don't lie to the
Congress. Literally, you don't tell them a bald-faced lie. I
would never have done what North did or what Abrams did. I
mean, it was absolute nonsense. It's not only heresy, it's
suicide. If you can't tell them, you say, "I can't tell you."
Pure and simple. "I cannot tell you. And if you want to know,
please talk to my boss. Ask my boss that question." -Well, I
know the law says that I am supposed to tell you. I've got to
tell you. Well, okay sometime along the way you have to take a
chance and say, "I can't tell you. And if I go to jail, I go
to jail." But that is not easy to do, obviously. But you
don't deliberately lie to these people. That's all. And the
system is, if you've got to tell them and then they blow it,
well, okay, it's on their head and you've blown it. This is
one of the things about it is hard to be an intelligence
officer in terms of, these days, trying to be sure you can
convince the guy you are trying to recruit or the person you
are trying to recruit, male or female, that you can protect
198
SECRET
13-00000
SECRET
their identity. And I'm not so sure that's possible these
days. Maybe it is. I hope it is. I knew it was possible in
the old days. But I'm not so sure after what I read so much
these days whether it is or isn't.
INTERVIEWER:
Which is again an important observation relative
to the last 10-12 years.
199
SECRET