13-00000 SECRET MR. HALPERN: No. No. The one next to the ~- it's on the corner. Big building, before they built the Hart Building. Well, I forget. It was the guy who came up with that -- from Indiana, I think it was, or Ti linois. -- but 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: And you didn't know that you were going to do that before? Oh my. 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 té 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. After five - o'clock or later. INTERVIEWER: Was Bill Miller involved at all? MR. HALPERN: Yes, Bill was there, yeah Bill was there. And Schwarz was 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. And _ that was foreign policy as far as I was concerned. 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 tome 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. 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. Not 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. INTERVIEWER: And I imagine the people were really, I suppose, surprised that 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 T 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 $0 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 |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. That scared the pants off Carter and, what the hell was his name -- 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 win 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? 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. You can 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 al] 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 then ~~ 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 alot 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 sma} 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 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 smal] 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 | isa 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 caught in the middle. . | INTERVIEWER: He sure was. What about certain issues raised by the Church and Pike Committees? What are your thoughts about certain of them such as mail opening? MR. HALPERN: Well, 1 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 or not. 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 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 IT 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: AN] L 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. | 7 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 ‘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 —kibitzing. After you've seen a piece of paper if you.want to give it to me to staff out rd 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. Oh sure, 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. Because I knew enough about what the hell the 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. Just an assassination capability. “Create one please." And that's when Bissell got ahold of 8111 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? MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah. I remember that one. TI 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. As 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. 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 Iwas 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 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 -- some. of them like Church did, and others -- depends on a whole atmosphere. It's hard to say. I think, and if our own _ 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 Tater, 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 jong 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 bea 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 "5 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 T.. 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: Okay. How about employing journalists. Did that. topic .. | MR. HALPERN: Journal ists tous 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: That was the next one I was going to bring up. Same thing. 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-Q0000 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 -- they mean - executive session -- 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'11 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. Anda 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 with SIGINT. That's a hell of a lot. of stuff that's pouring . 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: It takes time. MR. HALPERN: 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 WW 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 intelligence. That means the top stuff. That means 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. IT mean, it was just ~~ I was appalled. I shouldn't have been. I should have known better. Basically, in terms of some of the quys 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 had. a 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 114 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 hel] 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 ‘77, 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. More money and more people. I think they were trying in some way repair the damages that they saw themselves -- finally when 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. INTERVIENER: 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 did. He did. But the momentum was there beforehand. You know. And Congress was pushing stuff into the Community. Not 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. It was brought out in hearings and what have you and you've got to be a nut to read.all that crud. But when you get interested in a subject, you browse through it. “I've got some. I haven't got anywhere near what Walter's 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 slots, they got their money. Just like CIA did, DIA did, every... NSA did, everybody. 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: Seven years? MR. HALPERN: 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 the way. Like another half year, at least. That isn't much. Preferably another year. That's five years. 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 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. INTERVIEWER: You have to build up your contacts. : 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 at one pop. Or with Turner, 800 slots get wiped out like | 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 Communi ty 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 move ahead slowly. I'l] 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: Just use your imagination. INTERVIENER: 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. And yet thousands: and thousands and thousands of people had been involved in ULTRA. 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 al] 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 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| 127 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. oe 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. I Was up there. | | MR. HALPERN: Okay. There is one. I was one of the guys -- he 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 -- 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 Tot 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 -— I mean, I did it -- for the lowest common denominator. 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. Slow. . MR. HALPERN: 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 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 that -- deliberately and directly. But you target. If you want to go for ships target the bloody ships. We did. We made some successes, we had a lot of failures. A lot of waste motion. No question. And I remember some of my buddies who had been retired were called back -- a few of them had been in 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 -- 4, 5, maybe a half dozen -- every single guy said, "Oh Christ, don't go anywhere near that. 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 fs supposed to do. It's like, take Metzenbaum and Qadhaafi. $0 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 Communi ty 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 Efsenhower, 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 -~ literally stops it on the clock oe gets ahold of some guy -- 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 Communi ty 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 ts 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'l] 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. 8111 worked for the President. He doesn't work for himself. His commanding officer is the 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. INTERVIENER: He had’ no options by the time he found out about it. MR. HALPERN: That's not the way you run an organization. INTERVIEWER: 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
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. But you start with Washington. | 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: Do you feel the Congress is more involved in the last 10 years? 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. Le 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 14] 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. | ' MR. HALPERN: Sure. Close his bank account. Take away his | credit card... Don't give him any money. Close down the White House. Paint it black. You know, make up your mind what you want. to do. If you want to follow this system, theres 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 has been going to Congress in the last decade? Is it your impression? MR. HALPERN: My impression is that it has. Just by reading the newspapers you can tel] that the stuff has been going up there by, not by. the bushel basket loads, it has been going up by the truckload. And I wouldn't be surprised if their computers are hooked up so the stuff goes instantaneously. So I'm sure. First of all they are on distribution for the NID, The National Intelligence Daily, as I am told, I mean, I read in the paper. Even that shouldn't be available to me and the press. Why the hell should I know about it? It doesn't do me any good as a citizen to know that my Congressman can read the National: Intelligence Daily along with another 1,000 or 1,500 people in the Executive Branch. What the hell good fs 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: Uhat 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 al? the convert action that . everybody is objecting to now. They didn't object then. I mean, those handful of guys didn't. I mean, the so-called Laos Secret War. They provided every penny. We don't make our own money. We don't print our own money. | | 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. He'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 just don't believe in mucking up the system. If you want to change systems, say so. All the way around. Tf you want to run the government, get rid of the President and have it. We always didn't have a President ‘running things. There was something in the old days, the Continental Congress. - They ran everything. The President of the Continental Congress was in effect the President. And you had Congressional Committees that ran things. But even they operated in secret when it came to intelligence. Look at the record. And they didn't tell everybody everything in Congress. The Congressional people Knew in the Continental Congress that the small committees that they created to handle the confidential and secret stuff were their surrogates. And hell, I think I mentioned to you the other day, Huddleston finally, on a committee, the Senate | Intelligence Committee, turned to his Congressional colleagues and said, "You have to accept us on your Committee (Intelligence Committee) as your surrogates and you can't know all the things that we know." Well, that's what we have been saying all along. Not everybody can Know everything. And you can't have it that way, that's all. And I must say, the Senate Committee, I think which is better even than the House Committee in some things, does not allow its staffers equal access to all papers, even now. They've learned. It's 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 would say yes. There is no question about that. INTERVIEWER: Did you see it, did you witness any crushing in ‘75? . MR. HALPERN: Well, I was on the outside. INTERVIEWER: Yeah, that's right. You went back. MR. HALPERN: This has to be impressions and gut feelings and that kind of stuff in talking to people. Yeah, it was a bad time, no question about ‘that. Very bad. Including guys who were retired like me who were under the gun for the kinds of. things we did. And also I have been talking to people inside who felt that if it wasn't for guys like us, the new guys inside wouldn't be under the gun now. And therefore they turned their venom on us. And I was specifically attacked by a couple of guys, I mean, verbally attacked, for some of the things, in terms of, you know, if you guys hadn't done all those nasty things, we wouldn't be under fire now. INTERVIEWER: And these were Agency officers? “MR. HALPERN: Agency officers. Serving officers at the time. 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... INTERVIENER: 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 ‘0's, I think, maybe. even the early 'g0'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. AD aig INTERVEENER!” Okay. Good, I'11 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.” £2 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 15] 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 overal | 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. iots 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. I don't care. Or a dollar figure. One dollar. No more. But you can't start putting out a bunch of figures like that. INTERVIEWER: I don't know if we touched on it last time or not ~- the murder and funeral of Richard Welch and it's impact on the Congressional Committee's work. Some say this lessened the Committee pressure and won public opinion over to the side of the Agency. Did you? | MR. HALPERN: Well, being on the outside and having been at Dick's arrival at Andrews field that night when his plane came in, I don't know whether it lessened pressure from Congress. I think it did have an impact on public opinion, and I think that can be checked by looking at the old tapes in the old news broadcasts and looking at the headlines and the stories in the responsible newspapers -- The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc. -- and - ordinary papers across the country and Walter Cronkite's broadcast and things like that. And I think you will find overall, there was a pulling back from the constant drumbeat of CIA being evil, CIA evil, CIA evil. I'm not sure if it had too much of an impact on Congressional Hill. Particularly the Church Committee and the Pike Committee. Particularly the Pike Committee more than the Church Committee. It had some, but I don't think it really stopped them. They kept going. 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 knows? Again, we are at a "What if . . ." question. But I think Colby was dead wrong to go as far as he went. Absolutely dead wrong. To this day there are a lot of people who think he was wrong. A lot of peoplé 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. INTERVIENER: 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 .. os INTERVIEWER: The ballet is still on? MR. HALPERN: Oh sure, it's still on. But somewhere, somehow, you're going to have to make a decision someday. And I'm -afraid we're going to make a decision only after some great catastrophe. And that's not the way to do it, I don't think. If we have to wait for a catastrophe every time we are going to be really down the tubes. -T'11 give you another simple one. Lincoln suspened habeas corpus. The Constitution says you can't do this. He did it. And he said, you know, “Sooner or 155 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET later, if we lose the war, there won't be any country to worry about anyway. And I'll take my chances with Congress afterwards." He had the guts, the fortitude to be President and make a decision. Nobody stopped him during the war. And after the war it was approved. Don't give a damn and all that kind of stuff, but anyway, it's the same thing here. Somebody has got to decide. You've got to go and Find out, otherwise you are going to have this ballet all the time. And I can't see Judge Webster standing up better than Bill Colby on something like this. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong. First of all, I hope we never get to that again. But it's a possibility. You've got to fight it. I'm glad to see, for example, that the Administration and Judge Webster has come forth and objected to the Glenn Bill on putting the GAO, in all of its glory and majesty, right in the middle of CIA's finances. I don't know where that bill is going to go but it is somewhere in committee now. But at least initially the Administration said, “No way." But we'll see what happens. INTERVIEWER: As far as the cooperation by Colby at the time it was going on, in other words, it was going to the committees, you were surprised? MR. HALPERN: I am never surprised at anything that Bill Colby does. Never. I've been around Bill long enough and.close enough not to be surprised: I objected to it. I mean, I couldn't go ahead: and grab him by the scruff of the neck or 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 the President. It's up to him if he wants to put them on a e 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, ‘75, 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? oo 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-He lms 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 DOP on December the 31st, 1974. : INTERVIEWER: Oh, he had too. . MR. HALPERN: And then he ‘got called back and rehired on January the Ist or January the and, 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 asa 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. Soa 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. Soa 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 ‘73. And then what Sam? MR. HALPERN: Then my next assignment was as the Senior 16] 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. And -no 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 -- 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 poo. 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
13-00000 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 heck -- I don't know offhand. I don't remember. John Warner would know. Give John a 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 inthe 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 heli would they put it? In the White House? Well, that's possible. Look at the nice mess with got with North ahd 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, ona 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 communi ty? 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 HiT] 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? INTERVIEMER: 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 intellicence 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, Pd But that is another story.( [Tet 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'l] 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 fappened 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 71 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: Right. MR. HALPERN: --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 “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 Hil] 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 CTA 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'l] 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: How does Senseney spell his name? You know? MR. HALPERN: I'll give it to you. Hold on. INTERVIEWER: The machine is back on. MR. HALPERN: I'm not making this up. This ts 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 | 1975. On September the 18th, 1975, two days later, Dr. Charles A. Senseney, spelled S-~E-N-S-E-N-E-Y. He was Department of Defense employée 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 177. =... ‘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 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 brought that bloody gun up there. He knew what they were 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. 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." | 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: You know in Spy Catcher there is mention of a ‘dart gun. 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 ne 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? 77 - 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 1 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: Hall 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 e 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: Did you ever hear anything of the role of Mr. Haig? ; . MR. HALPERN: Not much. Not much. At least I don't remember. I think by that time Al was out of town. Wasn't he in Europe at that time? By ‘76? | 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 now. 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. 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 OCI, 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 colluston. 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. a | 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. INTERVIEMER: 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 inthe 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 -- 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 personne} 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 SECRET INTERVIEWER: Same government. 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 1] 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. — 7 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 did. 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 al]. 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 telationships between the Agency and the press -- of course, the Agency can only offer, I suppose offer —- and what I am suggesting here is how one develops trust between the Agency and the press. | MR. HALPERN: And the press? INTERVIEWER: ‘Yeah, and the same thing maybe with the public. MR. HALPERN: 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 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 abrodd 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. Or any other government. 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 “and things like that, which. ts 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 - amess -- and the Senators themselves understood that these 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. "T 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. a 199 SECRET