104-10324-10002 Ralph E. Weber SECRET ° INTERVIEW WITH SAM HALPERN SECRET 23 October 1987 30 October 1987
13-00000 SECRET Interview with Sam Halpern 23 and 30 October 1987 INTERVIEWER: As one looks into the background of the Congressional investigations, what in your mind do you see as the most important factors for bringing about the Congressional Investigations in 1975? It is an awfully large area. | MR. HALPERN: I think if you Took into the history of the background of why the thing started it began long before the Seymour Hersh articles. The Congress was planning to go into something like this anyway for a whole variety of reasons. I think Morton Halperin and his group on the outside as well as the ACLU and liberal Senators (particular Senators) were itching to get at this for a long time. I am trying to think of the name of the Che is now a Washington Post reporter). investigative reporter (I'm trying to think of his name but I can't) who was in Government for a while, didn't like what he Saw largely as a result of the Vietnam War. Oh, Walter Pincus. INTERVIEWER: Waiter Pincus? | MR. HALPERN: Walter Pincus had quite a bit, I think, to do in the background in organizing this whole effort. And not many people realize that the title (it is a long winded title) of the Church Committee was actually a title that was prepared by the staff people months before the Church committee was even heard of or even Senator Church knew what was going on. INTERVIEWER: Is that right? © MR. HALPERN: It will take’ me some time to look for it but remind me to ook for it. I put together some language on this many years ago in terms of the inner-workings, what was going on behind the scenes among the staff people in 1 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET the Senate to look into intelligence across the board. CIA was just one of the targets, I guess one of the main targets,. but not ‘the only one. And it was just a happy (from their point of view), a happy combination of circumstances. Seymour Hersh was looking at different things and had access to different sources and wrote those two stories in December of '74, which just dovetailed beautifully with what they were trying to do and brought together what they needed and what. they wanted. And that is where the. title came from something the Church group came up with the title. It was the staffers. and the various other committees who had worked this out months before. And by the summer and early fall of ‘74 these guys were ready to go and when views from the ‘Church Committee impetus came, there it was. They had the title, they had the paperwork, they had everything done, and they just pushed it through. INTERVIEWER: Do you feel their efforts along these lines even pre-date the Watergate investigation? MR. HALPERN: Well I don't know if it pre-dates: the Watergate or not. I can't say. I just don't know. I think there were some possibilities of going in tandem with the Watergate. But I don't think that. the Watergate problem itself was what these ‘guys were interested in but I wish I could identify them better. They were targeting against intelligence as such and they succeeded. INTERVIEWER: ‘And some of it was disillusionment with the. MR HALPERN: Disillusionment with the Vietnam War. No question about that. ‘There was another guy. The name was Paul and the reason I say that -. the. last name was Paul - because we;’in the working of the intelligence officer, we had. a hell of a time with two Congressional teams that used to go out for Congressional committees -- these were staffers. One was made up of Pincus 2 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET who later became the Washington Post guy. Pincus and Paul (I am trying to remember what the first name of Paul was) but we always regarded them Pincus and Paul: P squared. - | INTERVIEWER: That is P-A-U-L? . . MR. HALPERN: P-A-U-L, yes. And they were problem children in terms of having to advise the field; the State Department had a similar problem advising the Embassies on how to handle these guys and how to brief them, what to brief them. We weren't trying to hide anything, or Kid them or lie to them or anything like that, but it was a matter of how you really work with these people to try to get them to understand what you are trying to do: These guys were always traveling around Southeast Asia, in. particular, and it was mostly during the Vietnam War problem. “And the second team (we called them L&Ms) first the L stood for’ - Lowenstein was the L (and I'11 be damned if I can think of what the M was). But. I think in looking into The New York Times in 1973 and 1974 long before the Watergate thing and the Church Committee. business began, these. guys were always floating around as Congressicnal staffers. I forget if they were the Senate or the House but anyway they had these two teams which were real problems in terms of the Executive branch of the government having to deal with the Congressional branch of the government. The old conflict of foreign. policy that lives in the Constitution. I think the Constitution was made that way, to. have the ‘stresses and strains that we still see today. INTERVIEWER: Were these teams looking at the domestic? MR. HALPERN: No, no. This was all foreign. INTERVIEWER: Oh, all foreign. MR. HALPERN: They were all looking at foreign at that point. They had . 3 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET nothing with the Church nonsense and MHCHAOS. It was all in the foreign affairs field. And they were mucking around all over the place trying to get into stuff which we held as classified both we the State Department, the Defense Department, what have you. Including the use of the Meo tribes in Laos, it came out some money was involved, people were using Air America was used, all that kind of stuff. These people were not representatives of the then Intelligence Oversight Committees and with the advice of the then | Oversight Committees (the four of them we had) we had to be careful as to what we told these people from different committees of the Congress. The four oversight committees were jealous of their prerogatives you could imagine particularly in the days when you had real strong men running the Congress and they did not want all of these other committees, in terms of jurisdictional fights, mucking around in what they were supposed to be handling it. -And so " somehow we were caught in the middle of the jurisdictional fights in the Congress at the same time we were handling classified stuff we didn't know how far you can go with these people. They weren't cleared for a lot of stuff. So they were real problem children. ‘And these two teams were the precursors to what later became the Church and Pike Committees. INTERVIEWER: Well, were these teams attached to particular committees or subcommittees ? MR. HALPERN: Yes, well they were representatives of particular committees. I ' just can't remember what. the committees' names were. INTERVIEWER: OK, right. MR. HALPERN: It didn't really matter to us. They were not part of the four oversight committees. | INTERVIEWER: They were not? 4 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET MR. HALPERN: They were not. INTERVIEWER: OK. —— MR. HALPERN: And the oversight committees, maybe that was one of the problems, didn't do much oversight as you well know. And as a matter of fact I remember these reports from DCI's coming back saying, "I got nobody to talk to up on the Hill. They won't listen. All they want to do is give me money and personnel. -And they say, you know, “Go'do your job." And so this is | true. I have heard that from senior officers in the jobs I have held at staff meetings over and over again. The Director came back again and he doesn't have anybody to talk to. Nobody wants to listen. Nobody wants to- know. And there is. Senator Stennis and Saltonstall and all. of those others. INTERVIEWER: And Russell? | | | MR. HALPERN: And Russell who sat on the floor of the Senate. You know there are certain things you have to just accept and not know. about. Or Goldwater ~ even today, when he was chairman of the Senate Committee said, "This Committee shouldn't exist." So the four oversight committees never gave us any trouble really except toward the end, they were very clear about one thing. I think it was Russell who told I think Dick Helms, DCI -- and you can check the record on this one I'm sure -- who told him, “this is the last year," (I forget what year it was, I guess it must have been ‘71 or something like that.) This is the last year we are going to fund those Meo tribes for you. It's getting too big. Turn it over to the military," you know, "and lose it in the Defense budget." Because it.got to over a dollars and “all that kind of stuff, I guess in those days that was a little big. INTERVIEWER: Well did you have the impression besides Pincus that Paul and L&M were also Vietnam veterans or. . .? 5 SECRET
13-00000 - SECRET MR. HALPERN: I don't know if they were Vietnam veterans as such. I think they did not like what was going on in Southeast Asia. And the so~called Secret War wasn't a secret in Laos. It wasn't a secret war, for God's sakes. How could it be secret if the press was writing about it? INTERVIEW: Sure. | | | MR. HALPERN: It was the press that gave it the name Secret War. The Senators and the Representatives, they knew what the hell they were appropriating. I mean, at least the committee members did when they put down money into the budget, and all the budgets and all that money was cleared by Congress. The CIA doesn't print its own money for God's sakes. Somebody had to appropriate the money, and it was there. And as a matter of fact it was (what the heck is. his name) Saltonstall, I think. INTERVIEWER: Symington? - MR. HALPERN: Symington. I'm sorry. Symington was the guy who later got Dick Helms in trouble in ‘73 in front of the Church Multinational Corporation Subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs Committee and not his own committee. It. was Symington, Christ, he reviewed the troops out in Laos. who was then Chief of Station, | arranged for (I forget who the heck was Chief in Laos and Vietnam), but anyway, he went up to the Meo tribes and reviewed them and then he goes, “I never heard of things like this." What are you going to do with them when they do when they do that? So, but that is much later. I mean, earlier than the Church Committee itself, the one we all know about. But this was all background’ in terms of, I think, it was the Vietnam war basically that ‘got people. upset, the problem of the war. INTERVIEWER: Did you also have the feeling that there was a different 6 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET attitude that threat of the Soviet Union wasn't as great. Not necessarily seen that way in the Agency but outside the Agency? ; MR. HALPERN: Oh. By- that time people were looking at Vietnam. They weren't looking at the Soviets. There is no question. I am talking '73, ‘74. There was no question about that. The spirit of Detente may have something to do with that. The spirit of Glassboro, do you remember Glassboro, NJ? INTERVIEWER: ‘Sure, yes. MR. HALPERN: Johnson, which began even before Henry and Nixon and what have you. But I think that all, I think, was totally overshadowed by Vietnam. I think that was one of the big problems, the Vietnam War. | 7 INTERVIEWER: And you saw this not only in the public but also in the Congress. MR. HALPERN: Uh huh. No question. No question. I don't think Congress ever really understood -- well, I know they never understood what Jim Angleton was talking about on counterintelligence. Hell, for that matter very few people in the Agency I think really understood that one. And I didn't have any appreciation of it either until I got into the job as the Exec for the DOP. Because unless you see an overall world picture it is hard to imagine this big thing happening around you when you are worrying in one little area. But anyway, I honestly think it was Vietnam that upset the apple cart. Watergate just added to it. | INTERVIEWER: Just added to it. MR. HALPERN: The frosting on the cake I suppose or the whip cream on the banana split. Whatever you want to call it. But I think with Vietnam that hurt most of all. ; - INTERVIEWER: So even if Watergate hadn't occurred, it was moving toward investigation. 7 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET MR. HALPERN: It would have been. No question. No question. Because if I remember it correctly, the P&P and L&M teams were concentrating on Southeast Asia and looking into what the US Government as a whole was doing, not: just CIA, but they didn't like anything that was going on in that area and I think that is what began gnawing away at the thing and broke it apart. INTERVIEWER: OK. MR. HALPERN: You know in terms of an operation these guys did a magnificent job in terms of their objectives. They, in effect, were able to stop the whole machinery of government and wreck the intelligence system in: the entire community, not just CIA. And it is going to take of couple of generations to rebuild it. If we ever can. You can't go home again. That is for sure. But to rebuild what we had at one time is going to take at least a couple of generations. Hell, it took us 25-30 years, that's a whole generation to get the thing organized and’ then it came apart. It really came apart. And a lot of this, because of the Vietnam, also had an effect not just inside the government but it had the effect of the recruits you got. Even as early or late, whichever way you want to look at it, from about 1970 on, we had been in the war in Vietnam, for five years by then. The recruits, the new people coming in, who passed all the tests and what have you, and been through the first training courses and what have you, and they were on their first assignments from the desks or some of them even going overseas. for instance. The ones that I saw, and I made it my practice sitting in the DDP's office as the Exec, to talk to as many young officers as I could. Always had an excuse: a cable who was coming up for release by the DDP, or going up to the DCI coming through the channels, IT always was able to call the guy who wrote the thing. I didn't care about the guy who coordinated, I was interested in 8 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET who wrote it. And to talk to them. If you have to stop let me know.” INTERVIEWER: No, we are fine, keep going. MR HALPERN: Anyway, I used to talk to these fellows and women to see what made them tick and it was a very difficult job listening to them many times when they had all these bright ideas about intelligence, how you could do this and how you could do that. ‘And I had to bite my tongue and say, “Well, wait a minute. You know, we tried that 25 years ago or 20 years ago and it didn't work." And you couldn't just dampen their spirits by pouring cold water every time they would come up with an idea, and yet somehow you had to try to get them interested enough to look into the history of what happened and how you | did this and how you couldn't do this and how, why certain things would seem beautiful when you dream them up and write them down on a piece of paper. In _the real world it just don't work. And we learned the hard way. All of us. Trial and error. But you hope that the next group coming up didn't have to go through that same torture if they would look at the record. And my concern was that very few people were borrowing stuff out of the registry. Very few people were interested in going back into the history of what took place and certain activities. And you can't get it all out of a classroom. : INTERVIEWER: Right. MR. HALPERN: And this was one of the things that bothered me while I was in that job for those last few years is that: how do you pass on the experiences so that people understand and learn without feeling that they are being pushed down, without feeling that they are being squashed? Because you want initiative. Half the business in dealing with human beings is initiative and I don't Know enough about the technical side but I know enough about the human side. But you have to stop them. Why spin wheels? Why push a lot of paper 9 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET through if they're going to be disapproved anyway? And yet keep them interested enough. And that's a tough job. INTERVIEWER: And were these recruits, say, ‘70's - were they much different from those that you would have had in the ‘60's? MR. HALPERN: Yes, the early ‘60's. INTERVIEWER: The early ‘60's? MR. HALPERN: Before the Vietnam war. A lot of people were coming in, and I blame the educational system for this, in terms of the teachers they had. And I discovered this to my horror, as I mentioned earlier, about the Colorado business -- the teachers there were worse than the students. Facts don't mean anything to them. For example in Colorado it seemed to be, it was perfectly “all right for the students and the faculty to use the Church Committee documents to prove one of their points about how bad CIA was or how. bad DIA was or what have you. But when I tried to use the same documents quoting different pages, that was wrong. I wasn't allowed to do that. “That's just junk. That doesn't mean anything." And I looked at them and I said, “I thought I was at a university where you are supposed to be able to argue from text." No, it was. all right for them to do it but not all right for me to do it. | INTERVIEWER: It fit -in their pattern. MR. HALPERN: Yea, and so, you know, what do you do? INTERVIEWER: Were these recruits coming in in the early '70's and so-on -- MR. HALPERN: The early ‘70's. | INTERVIEWER: Are they more’ questioning, are they .. .? MR. HALPERN: No, that was one of the things that bothered me. One of the things that struck me, both male and female, when they came in most of them, 10 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET when we got into discussions about operations or what have you, they seemed to be more concerned about when they were going to become a division chief, a station chief, and when they were going to become DDP and then eventually, “how do I get to be DCI?" And finally after all of that is over, “What about my pension rights?" — ; INTERVIEWER: That's already coming? MR. HALPERN: Yea, in the very beginning in ‘71, '72, ‘73, and at least ‘70, ‘71 and ‘72 when I was more concerned about talking to them because by '73 we were having difficulties with the Schlesinger turnover and what have you. But this was one of the things that struck me very strong, and I was bothered by ft, and these were the best of the applicants. “They had already been through all of the machinery and all ‘the screening processes and what have you and these were the shining stars from the academe, and I was concerned about that. But again, what do you do? INTERVIEWER: Were others troubled as well? MR. HALPERN: Yea, some of my colleagues were. They picked it up the same way I did except on a different level. They were doing it in the branches or in the staffs, most in the branches, or in the area units and I was looking from across the board. But it was the same idea. We used to kick this around at lunch. How do you get instilled into the new group, the upcoming generation, the guys who are going to take over from us, that there is more to this business than worrying about your pension? I tried. to tell some of them, look some of us are going to be in this business their whole career and never see- the DCI's office let alone be the DCI. And so I said, “In all organizations . not everybody can be the field marshall. Some of them have to be privates and stay as privates our whole career." And that didn't go down at all. Wd SECRET
13-00000 ‘SECRET INTERVIEWER: It didn't go down? © MR, HALPERN: No way. No way. You know it was frightening then and I guess it is even more frightening now. I don't. know what the situation is now but its a bad show. I don't know. Maybe we were brought up in a totally ‘different generation. I don't know different backgrounds... I don't know whether it was. things like the Depression or World War II or what, but we all had a different -- we all wanted to get promotions; sure, we all wanted more money: sure, we all wanted honors and titles and God knows what else and medals but. . . | | INTERVIEWER: I wondered the same thing. MR. HALPERN: You didn't sort. of aim what the hell you were doing. "Hey, if I do this right I'll get a medal." Or again, you may have thought maybe a couple of these good things I do I'll get a promotion or something like that. Yea, but that's normal. But you didn't do it for the purpose of the promotion. _And here. these people are talking to me about:: how do I get to this and how do I get to that. I guess it's called career planning or something. I have been through a lot of that, by the way, on career planning . froma personnel point of view, trying to chart out people's whole careers, and I thought that was for the birds. How do you sit there and say in 25 years from now he is going to be in X, Y, and Z. Maybe you can do it. INTERVIEWER: That will come in with Schlesinger? - MR. HALPERN: That came in with Bill Colby. Management by Objective and all of. that kind of nonsense. INTERVIEWER: I've got some questions on that coming up. MR. HALPERN: But I remember specifically, and you had better cut and paste this tape I think, but I remember, for example, when Colby‘s Management by 12 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET Objective started coming out, one of the articles that was given to us, written by a Britisher I believe, had a whole series of things -~ things not to do if you are going to go into Management by Objective. And we all looked at this thing -- we, I mean, al] of my colleagues -- every single one of these points, things not to do before you go. into Management by Objective, we had already done. So how can we go into this thing? We went into it anyway. INTERVIEWER: Damn the torpedoes. . MR. HALPERN: Oh yea. It was great stuff. INTERVIEWER: And was their a feeling -- again when you talk’ about these new, these young officers coming on in the early ‘70's -- was there still a feeling of family or is that a term that really. . .? ; MR. HALPERN: Yes, that is a good old term. “Band of Brothers" is a better term. We really felt, all of us did, we were a Band of Brothers. Oh, sure, we had arguments and fights and all of that kind of stuff, competition on who was going to get what job, who was gonna be chief of station or who was gonna do this, but we still felt ourselves a band of brothers. I like that term better than family. Maybe other people use family but we were different. We were guys who had gone through the war and had started from scratch, building an organization and building a concept which was mainly an intelligence service. And particularly us in the Clandestine Service, long before we got into this covert action nonsense but anyway we were interested in how you collect intelligence using human sources and with technical support, but anyway, we were building a service. We thought we were. An important one. And even though it only produces a very small percentage of the total take of . the US Government, we thought it was an important take. It was never going to match something like Ultra or this overhead reconnaissance. You couldn't 13 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET possibly. But we were zeroing in what we called the hard targets and the intentions and plans more than anything else. And as that kind of a group we — were all, “We came up the hard way" kind of thing. And we felt closer together as a result of that. INTERVIEWER: And did the Band of Brothers include everyone in the Agency or was it -- ? MR. HALPERN: No, it was just the Clandestine Services. INTERVIEWER: Just the Clandestine Services. MR. HALPERN: And as a matter of fact a lot of us in the Clandestine Services, I wasn't one of them, a lot of us felt that we should not be part of CIA. We should be separate. Totally separate -and not be involved with anybody else. And that was one of the fights that went on for a long time between the ODI and the DOP in that most of the DDI people felt (and the top brass particularly. felt) that the DDP should be an adjunct of the DDI, responding only to DDI requests for information and in effect be the DDI's library and research staff. You know, find out if the bridge is still standing between "x" and "y" in the middle of Uganda or something like that. And we felt differently. The DDI felt that they were the national intelligence analyst group. and we felt that we’ were the national intelligence collector's group ~~ human sources. | INTERVIEWER: Sure. MR. HALPERN: And drew big arguments on that. Big fights. And ODI always felt that we (DoP) should disseminate intelligence that we collect only to the DDI. They would decide who else was going to get the information. We thought . “that was a farce. We were everybody's collector from the President on down and it was up to the President to tell.us who else to give the information 14 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET to. And sometimes they did, like the Cuban missile crisis. And the President stopped the distribution all across. Completely. INTERVIEWER: Was there any feeling ~- you talked about the Band of Brothers in Clandestine Service ~ was there any similar feeling in the DDI? | MR. HALPERN: I don't know. You'd have to ask somebody there that could tell you. Because I am in effect the Johnny-come-lately to the DDP because [| started out in OSS and R&A, and then moved from R&A over into the SSU, the SI side -- the Secret Intelligence side. And I know when I was in R&A our feeling then was we were part of oss, the whole thing, and even though the SI people didn't always tell us what they were doing, we found out later that we shouldn't know. At least I found out later. There was a good reason why we shouldn't know. We could work with them and we worked very wel] with them jn terms of providing intelligence support for their operations in the field in Southeast Asia, which was my beat, and we would sit and work with the officers who were going out (not the agents) but the officers going out to do the job, and when I was in Ceylon (again R&A) we worked very closely together with them in terms of planned operations against various parts of Japanese held territory. And we wrote all kinds of papers for them and pulled together all kinds of stuff, and the question was in those days we felt more like we were all part of OSS and OSS was a brand new thing. At least that is the attitude I felt from talking to my friends about it, even as a part of R&A. But later when it became a bigger outfit (a peacetime outfit) it was more -- well, we were part of CIA in DDP but we felt for good and sufficient reasons that it would be better if we could'work out some decent cover 50 we'd be on the outside totally devoid and divorced from the government. I don't know, the number of times we had study groups planning on how to do this, to have a real 15 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET clandestine outfit working outside the government, with proper communications obviously and clearances and what have you. We talked about Colorado before in one of the papers -- go out to Colorado somewhere. You know, way out in nowhere. This was in the '40's -- the late ‘40's -- or go to some other part of the country and get hooked up by telephone or wire or what have you long before all of this computer nonsense. Or even get buried in New York City, Wall Street, or one of those huge monstrosities that existed even then as a private company somewhere. . And do actual company business -- be a real business, but also run your operation. Well, this has been tried so many times in terms of study groups and nothing has ever come of it. Nothing. ' INTERVIEWER: Didn't even come close. MR. HALPERN: No. You couldn't get people willing to provide you the money, the material, work out all of the legal aspects and it was really a hell of a job when you consider you have the salaries and social security and workman's compensation and how do you work out decent pensions for people and making a career out of it and all that kind of stuff. You could do it for a few (as we have done over the past years). We used to do anyway. We'd have decent proprietaries. We'd run our own insurance companies and all that Kind of stuff and provide lifetime pensions for people and work on a system that would work. But you could do it for a few and we did. I don't know what they are doing today, and I am not interested in knowing. But to do it for a mass, it would be tough -- very, very, very tough. So when you talk about brothers or family, as we got bigger the DDP-DDI split was very evident and, as a matter of fact, at one time, believe it or not, in the very early days DOP case officers on the desks were not even allowed to talk to DDI analysts because we thought, in those days, we thought the DDI analyst would be able to convince 16 SECRET
13-00000 ~ SECRET the clandestine operator enough so that pretty soon the clandestine operator was captive of the analyst and would be doing his research for him. And we had plenty of calls from DDI analysts which in effect, the answers were in the Library of Congress, for God's sake go get them. We are not going down there and get them for you and we are not going -to burden the field people with going to get those kind of figures for you. They are right there. Go get them. And we had lots of fights about that. Oh yea. - INTERVIEWER: I suppose there must have been a lot of tension? MR. HALPERN: There was. There was. Because we kept saying the DDI analyst was supposed to do their own research; do your own job. And I said in the first place, and I remember I got into some arguments with some of them, and I am sure my colleagues did too, that collecting intelligence via a clandestine mechanism is the most expensive, time-consuming way of collecting a piece of information. You have to have long lead time, you don't have a whole bunch of agents in various departments of foreign governments so that you can just press buttons and get answers out of them. And it takes time to identity what you are looking for. And our job is a selected job and you have to go for the hard targets. I am not interested in finding out the railway statistics for you or the tonnage of wheat that goes through ports, for God's sakes. We can get that from the Department of Agriculture or Commerce or something. This is a very, very expensive way to do business. This is why we had to set up actually a requirements staff which screened requirements so that we wouldn't get flooded with this nonsensical stuff that should be done by somebody in the US Government, don't get me-wrong, but not the Clandestine Service. The ; collector has got to be so fine-tuned that it is only after you've tried everything else that you go for this particular thing. And don't expect the 17 SECRET
13-00000 © SECRET answer tomorrow morning. So we had a whole mechanism just in the screening ‘process. As a result the orders went out, “Don't talk to each other.“ Well, over a number of years we finally broke that down which I thought we should -have. INTERVIEWER: When would you say what point of time was it pretty well broken down? MR. HALPERN: It began to be broken down -~ let me give you two examples. One in. 1957 and 'S8°when I was involved as the Exec then for Far East Division of the DDP. We were involved in an operation in I told my-boss I was going to do this and he said fine. I personally knew from the war -- from the OSS days -- the analyst in the DDI, and I think it was OCI, who was on the desk. And -I kept her very well clued on important developments in the operation as it was going along so that she wouldn't be caught short by things and would be able to watch what went into the President's Daily Brief and went into the daily stuff and I mean it. worked fine. But that was on a one-to-one basis. And how much she told the DDDI personally, that was up to her. I wasn't going to tell her how to run the show. But it never was on a pDP-DDI basis, you see, the two got together and said, "Here's the operation." No way. The second time we were breaking it even more was after the Cuban ' Missile Crisis. “After the Cuban Missile Crisis. 1963 now -- we have moved about five or six years. INTERVIEWER: Right. MR. HALPERN: Oes Fitzgerald was transferred from Chief of the Far East Division to take over from Bill Harvey on-the Cuban operation. Under Bill it was called TFH (Task Force W) and under Des Fitzgerald it was called. Special , 18 SECRET
13-00000 - SECRET Affairs Staff. This was after Operation Mongoose and Des had an uneasy feeling that the intelligence we were collecting on Cuba was just not being accepted by the analysts. And it wasn't. Well, it wasn't a picture and it wasn't COMINT. The analyst only believed pictures and COMINT. And maybe today they believe telemetry or something, I don't know, maybe if it's not a picture it is something else. Anyhow, if it wasn't technical ‘in one way or another, Cuban sources, the hell with them. And they were just being washed out. And Des took it upon himself Cand he was the kind of guy who would do these things without getting approval or clearances). He decided he would ask the DDI to send a senior officer down to (I say down because we were in the basement of the building) to come to us on SAS,.and Des would make available to this one man (a very senior guy -- I don't remember who; my memory has gone bad), would make available true identities of all sources, and that created holy hell within the DDP because, obviously, it went up and down the line and Des' colleagues Cas division staff chiefs) thought he was crazy, and it was just a really big battle royal on this thing, but Des being Des said, “The hell with it, I'm going to do it. They're my sources, I'm responsible, it's my operation, and goddamnit, you have to give credit where it is due." Dick Helms supported him against the argumentation by all the other senior officers. Nobody else wanted to go along with this. : INTERVIEWER: Is that right? . MR. HALPERN: So this guy came down and he sat for days, weeks, I don't know, and he had access, believe it or not. I thought he was crazy. I thought Des had lost his marbles. The one thing you protect is sources. Allen Dulles is supposed to have said, he would even lie to the President if necessary to protect a source. And that was sacrosanct. You don't telT anybody your 19 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET sources, for God's sakes. You don't even tell the guy who's sitting and working next to you who your source is. But anyway this was done and after (I wish I could remember his name), anyway, after this fellow had gone through all this nonsense and all the information, he came up with a report that simply, in effect, said to the DDI people involved, “You don't know what you are missing. These are honest, bona fide sources by and large and,” he said, "T think you are crazy for not using them." So from that point of view it starts to break down. The animosity, the differences of approach on how you work this thing, and it was a good thing from that point of view, and I must say not one of our sources was ever revealed by this man. He Kept it, you know - integrity. INTERVIEWER: Sure. MR. HALPERN: And he became one of us, in effect. OK, he knew the sources. He knew more than I did and I was the Exec. I never asked for sources. But Des also had another thing as part of this program. Des started to expand what is called the source description on the disseminations. We used to have just a one liner or something like that, the guy had access on it. And we ended up by writing a short paragraph about the source, without identifying the source, which in effect gave the reader some idea of the source's reliability, his access to this particular type of information, how long he . had been around with us, and, in effect, we're telling you this is good, bad or indifferent. ; INTERVIEWER: They were a tested source. MR. HALPERN: Yes. And without going into that numbering system or the grading system which is hard to work with. And this was a departure. And this was a test again. . And only on the task force we began that before it 20 SECRET
13-00000 — SECRET became DDP-wide and the DDP hierarchy was opposed to that too. Because if you ‘work with us long enough and you don't change these by-lines often enough, somebody can sit and pretty much zero in on who the source is. And it is a hell of a lot of extra work. Believe me, a hell of a lot of extra work. But Des insisted. Again being Des, and then when he became DDP, he put that system in effect throughout the DDP. And unfortunately he was in the DDP only a short period before he died in July of '67. So when you're talking about the time frame of breakdown, it began in '63. Des took that system into WH when he became the Division Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, as it's | called now LA. And then he took it into the DDP when he became DDP in ‘65. INTERVIEWER: My goodness. MR. HALPERN: And he remained there until 1967. INTERVIEWER: Gee. That's good background. MR. HALPERN: So best when you are talking about breakdown of the dispute, or the fight between the two, there were very valid reasons for both sides to maintain the position that they had at the time. I can see their side. Having been from R&A, I can understand what their problem was, like I "understand our problem on the collecting side. And so, but gradually, I don't know what the system is today and how it works, but anyway we began to break it down, but it took, well, it -began in ‘47 and took until '67. | 20 years. — What you've got is. two different worlds. And this is one of the reasons I keep telling journalists who talk to me, we're both in the same business. You are collecting information, and you want to protect sources. That's what we. _ are doing. You do it to get a Pulitzer Prize and we do it to protect the a United States. 21 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET It took all this time because of the very firm positions held by both sides. “It took all this time to get a better approach, a more reasoned approach, to talk to each other, and both sides still maintained their respective jobs. INTERVIEWER: And Des was a key figure. MR. HALPERN: Des was a very key figure in this and he was doing this mostly _ on his own. He had a hell of a lot of opposition. And, as I say, even his closest allies, and I was his Exec, and I thought he was crazy. And I told him so. I said you know you are giving away the store. INTERVIEWER: And Helms backed him? MR. HALPERN: Finally. It took a lot of doing, but Helms backed him. Helms said, “All right, let Des-try as an experiment. He'll be the guinea pig. Let's see what happens." And I must say if the DDI man who was chosen (it was a very senior, goddammit), he'd been around a long time and had a-marvelous reputation. And a man of integrity and all of that, and boy he proved it. But if he had broken, if he had slipped even just telling the DDI himself the identities of some of the sources, the thing would have fallen right flat on > its face. But simply because of this one individual being who he was in terms of an honest man, knew what the job was, he knew what had to be done and he kept it all to himself. INTERVIEWER: . Great. | MR. HALPERN: He knew more about our sources when he was finished with the job than Des did. INTERVIEWER: Is that right? . MR. HALPERN: Well, Des didn't know what the sources were. He knew them by cryptonyms. You know, “Radiator,” yea he is the guy from the army. You know. Or "Lamb," he's the guy that gives the stuff on the Mig-22 or 21. You 22 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET know, that's all you needed to know. But this guy knew who the sources were. He knew them by name, rank and serial number. And it was an unbelievable thing that was done. | INTERVIEWER: And no leaks: | MR. HALPERN: ‘Not a bit. That was the most important’ thing. And I guess he | knew what he was up to and he knew what the consequences of leaking were. The experiment would have dropped dead in its tracks and nobody would have ever tried it again. Ever. So it worked. But that's what finally broke it. So, as I say, you-were up: to ‘65, ‘66, ‘67 when Des was DDP. | | INTERVIENER: Okay. Earlier we were just touching on Congressional committees and there are some critics who say the Congressional committees overseeing the Agency before 1975 were "blind and toothless watchdogs: that members of | Congress were unaware or unconcerned about Agency excesses." What are your views with regard to Congressional oversight of the Agency? “MR. HALPERN: Well, in those days the four committees were not blind, were not toothless and they were not whatever the other phrase you had there.. The four ‘groups were largely controlled by senior members of Congress who really ran the Congress in those days. And their concern was: a) not themselves getting to know too. much of the secrets that went on; and b) they felt * largely, you pick good people; you give them a job to do, . you give them the tools to do it and don't muck around with them. Particularly, in this particular field. Maybe it was ignorance. I don't know. But that was the general attitude. As I say and as I have said before, I have had enough reports from my bosses. The DCI was dying to talk substance with some of these leaders on the Hill, and they did not want to listen. And that, I think, was wrong. Maybe they could have helped. Maybe it would have been 23 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET different. I don't know. But they weren't blind and they weren't toothless. They were deliberate on that part. And they didn't deliberately blind . themselves. They were taken in a little, I think, sometimes when we used to show. them all kinds of little goodies and fancy gidgets and gadgets and secret “devices and what have you, just like show and tell. And I used to have to prepare some of these things or get the stuff from the agent or from rest of the DDP for the goodies -- and we called them goodies -- to show the Hill. Well, they weren't always interested in seeing even those things. INTERVIEWER: Is that right? MR. HALPERN: Well, "He know you're doing a good job. Go. Go. Go." INTERVIEWER: These goodies might be radios or. . .? MR. HALPERN: Could be radios, could be concealment devices, secret writing devices -- all kinds. of gadgets with different kinds of bugs in them. And obviously they got smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller they got more and more.heisted into looking at them, but it also meant goodies in terms . OF good intelligence we picked up. I differ completely with Admiral Turner who said that the years he was a OCI he never saw a piece of intelligence that- was worth the life of anybody. I. differ with him about that. There was some intelligence which I think was worth more than the life of a person. I can give you an example of that later. ‘But, the committees, I think, deliberately didn't want to get involved. They weren't lined up or held us for Fools. I don't think they were fooled a bit. They knew what they were doing. They wanted it that way. And they kept it that way. ‘And even in the staffs in those days of those committee people were limited staffs who were cleared for all this kind of stuff, and they-were not interested in jogging, or pushing, or goading their bosses into unnecessary mucking around of what the hell was 24 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET going on. They just weren't. Usually the staff directors of each of the small units were the only ones cleared for most of things and sat in on the meetings. | INTERVIEWER: They were cleared by the Agency? MR. HALPERN: Oh sure. INTERVIEWER: They went through the whole, the background. . a? MR. HALPERN: I don't know if . . . They weren't given polygraphs. That's for sure. At least I don't think so. How they did the clearances I never asked. But anyway, they were cleared. So that, people say they were taken into camp. I don't think that is the proper phrase. My own feeling is there was a different attitude. They weren't out to do investigative reporting, in effect, for themselves. They weren't looking for titles, they weren't looking _ for television headlines. ' They were just trying to do an honest day's. work, quietly, peacefully and get enough information. to know about the budget then they got all the budgetary information they wanted, all the budgets went through them without an exception. . No question about that, they knew exactly “where every penny was and approved it and what have you and all these so-called covert operations were always cleared with the proper committee. The committees: had to alert. the OMB in those days, the BOB really, the Bureau of the Budget. The BOB wouldn't release money for some of our activities until they got the word from the committees on the Hill. INTERVIEWER: Is that right? MR. HALPERN: Yes, the four committees. So we didn't have a pot full of money that we could just willy ntlly use. | INTERVIEWER: Did you have a contingency fund? Modest. MR. HALPERN: Well, the contingency fund was up on the Hill. I mean, it was 25 SECRET
13-00000. SECRET controlled by the Hill. And it is today, I believe. But before you get money released by the BOB, somebody up there had to say OK. And that happened on every one of the operations I know about. In the Far East, I don't know about the European ones, I am sure the system is the same. It was a well-oiled machine. Sure, they didn't ask the kind of questions that are asked today, but they knew what the operation was. | i INTERVIEWER: There was a feeling between the Agency and the Congress that there was good liaison?- MR. HALPERN: Oh yes. It was overt. Completely. Always. It worked very well indeed. And the system worked Te) that the Legislative Counsel, whether it was Pforzheimer or John Warner or anybody else, they knew who to call within the DDP, for example. If they were sitting up on the Hill and one of the members ~~ could be a Senator or Representative of the committees -- _wanted to know something, they knew who to call, and when I had the job they usually called me for the DDP because I was able to get them the answer and it ‘worked very well. In case someone didn't know everything, they knew where to get the information. And when Congress asked you gave it to them. INTERVIEWER: Do you think this was also a reflection of the view that the Agency and the Congress both saw the Soviet threat as a real threat? MR. HALPERN: I am not sure that was part of it. It may have been. But that's a conjecture on my part. I think it was more the people we were dealing with on the Hill had. also been through the same things most of us had ’ been through. They are all part of the same generation. We were all working together in terms of protecting the country. At least we thought we were: protecting the country.. The business where some of this falls down is when we started, because we had to, start working operations more in the United States 26 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET in order to get assets to go abroad, and once you start that you're touching a very sensitive area and we all knew that. And we'll talk about that later. We'll talk about MHCHAOS. INTERVIEWER: Yes. MR. HALPERN: But until then the consensus was, you know, we've got to have a united front, we've got to find out what's going on in the world, we're getting more involved in the world, and we all need to help each other. And I don't think -- yeah, the Soviet threat was there but it was different, I _ think, it was a different -~ I mean, we weren't expecting the Soviets to march over the border except very early in the late -- right after the war in the '40's when you had the Berlin blockade and that kind of stuff. Yeah, at that time people were expecting the Soviet troops to come marching not only into Bonn but also into Paris. ‘But that didn't last into the ‘50's. Tt was a totally, sure there was a Soviet threat abroad and later a Chinese Communist threat in Southeast Asia, no question of that. And there was a matter of, I guess when Dean Rusk said many years later in the 60's, something about, there is a dirty war going on in the alleys of the world in which we don't see, but he said it's important, and, yeah, we were there. : INTERVIEWER: Has there much more cooperation? ; . - MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah, it was total. What broke it down was the Vietnam war again and I guess Watergate. When ‘74 came around, I mean the Congressional elections of '74 came, and you had a totally different bunch of guys coming in, and Congress became 435 on one side and 100 on another side. Totally independent kingdoms and principalities. And you had no cohesion and no control. I think that's when it all broke. You couldn't go to two or three guys on the Congressional Hill and say, “Here are the facts, this is what we 27 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET think we ought to do about it. If you agree, fine; if you don't agree, fine. Tell us." But these guys could sit up there and they could say, okay, they can commit the Congress. As a cohesive unit, they could get those votes when they needed them. And if somebody, some freshman Congressman said, “Hey, I ‘want to know about this." "We'll tell you later buddy, you can't vote." And “it worked. ‘Today, there is no way you could do it. We haven't been able to do it since the Congressional election of '74. But coming back to what I said earlier though, those guys who were working in the committees in advance of ‘what. later became the Church Committee on Intelligence, they were with the old crowd but they were beginning to break. apart then and they were working within the framework, and. what helped them, obviously, was a totally new Congress in ‘75. And all hell broke loose. . | INTERVIEWER: Yes, yes, and it still... MR HALPERN: And it still hasn't been put back together. Even Tip O'Neill couldn't control it. In all what, he had 30 years up there or more, and he couldn't control it. And until you get -- I'm not even talking consensus now -- but until you get back to some kind of a better hold ona Congress so that you don't have these independent kingdoms and fiefdoms and they work together more as a cohesive unit on various activity -- talk about special interest groups -~ that's where they need them up there. They have to get together. I don't care whether it's a special interest group on social security and on medicare and on intelligence and on something else and on something else but you've got to have better control. INTERVIEWER: It's really fragmented. | MR. HALPERN: It's very fragmented. You can't run a government that way. Impossible. You don't know who to talk to. And even with the Intelligence | 28 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET Committee, I remember, for example, Senator Huddleston, who was on the Church Committtee and later was-on the Intelligence Committee. During the days of "the Church Commi ttee he was talking about, “You can't just have CIA or the intelligence people talk to a couple of people up on the Hill] and that's it. You've got to talk to everybody." After he'd been on the Intelligence Committee for a while, and I've got his clippings somewhere in my stack of clippings, Huddleston said, "The Congress, the members of Congress" -- he was addressing his own buddies -- “the members of Congress have to accept us on the Intelligence Committee as your surrogates." And that is all we were trying to do. ‘In an intelligence community to have an intelligence committee be the surrogate -~- and there was four of them -- be the surrogate for the whole Congress. But Huddletson when he was on the Church committee said, “You. can't do that, you can't do that. We all have to know." Well, he found out personally. INTERVIEWER: He finally changed. MR. HALPERN: He changed his mind. INTERVIEWER: ‘That's neat. . . MR. HALPERN: So you know, that's all they were saying. And it finally, it took him a long while to-get around to it, but he finally did it. INTERVIEWER: Some get educated faster than others. | | MR. HALPERN: That's right. So when you talk about. . : The ‘74 break, I think, was a big thing, a big thing. And I think if the election of Congress in '74 had gone a little bit differently, and there hadn't been that total break and disorder up on the Hill, the disarray I call it, which all began with the Vietnam business and aided by the Watergate - INTERVIEWER: And Nixon resigning in ‘74. . 29 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET MR. HALPERN: Yeah, he did in '74. He was pardoned in, what,-August of ‘74. But I think if the election had gone differently, and there had been some control under the Congress ~~ more cohesion -- the Church Committee and Pike Committee might have been prepared a little better. I don't know. I'm just guessing. Obviously we can't rewrite history. INTERVIEWER: No reruns. MR. HALPERN: No reruns, no reruns. None at all. ° INTERVIEWER: Okay.- How about some indications that younger Agency officers were troubled by certain domestic practices such as mail openings in the years before 1974. MR. HALPERN: That's correct. INTERVIEWER: Were you aware. of these tensions? MR. HALPERN: Oh sure. They were all over the place. When the MHCHAOS program began, I think it. began in what -- I'm trying to think now -- ‘69, ‘70 something like that? INTERVIEWER: Yes. ' MR. HALPERN: ‘70, something like that. Anyway, yes, this was very much felt by all the officers, well not all but.a good majority of the officers. They didn't like the idea of following Americans abroad unless we had some real hard evidence that such and such was happening with an. American and Soviet — agent or whatever. But then you had the old question of the chicken and the - egg. How do you find out whether the guy is alone until you follow him? _ Where do. you begin? How do you get to the point where you know he is involved until you start somewhere?- Obviously it got out of hand in terms of the number of people we started to follow and look at. But it basically began as | "away of getting support and finding assets in this country (leftists assets) 30: SECRET
13-00000 SECRET who could go abroad as bona fide leftists as reporting.mechanisms. It was all targetted abroad. We never targetted it here in the United States. I think the record of the Commi ttee proves that, even the Rockefeller Commission or what have you. And this was something new, we'd never tried before on a massive scale, and we worked very closely with the FBI on this. And most of the files we opened up. were names the FBI gave us with duplicate copies of what they had in their files on a lot of these Americans with leftists “leanings and what have you. The officer corps in the DDP didn't like it, thought we were. going beyond our charter, obviously thought we were trying to become a Gestapo, in effect, in the United States. And that was never the case. The appeals from various officers from various levels, and it was. intensive argumentation, both here and abroad, the appeals went up the line. There was no intention of trying to dampen down the arguments or the objections or the concerns. The appeals went up, not once, but several times | -- right up to Helms, the Director -- each and every time these things were examined again, looked at again, and orders came down to continue in terms of: our target is abroad, not the United States. Everything we are doing here has © to be geared to something abroad. And we even changed procedures on a lot of this stuff.. It was tightly held information, the cables were tightly held, and MHCHAOS itself as an indicator. (The MH was just a digraph of the DDP-wide activity.) Everything was done on special channels, special cable channels, special pouch channels. It wasn't given wide distribution at all. Well, everyone knew the program was going on. We had many a staff meeting about this, DDP staff meetings. There was a lot of tension, no question about . that. INTERVIEWER: And was the tension just with the young officers or. : .? 31. SECRET
13-00000 . SECRET MR. HALPERN: No. It was up and down throughout. INTERVIEWER: Throughout? MR.HALPERN: Including some of the old hands who didn't like the system, didn't like the program. And even those who understood that this was basically geared abroad as a counterintelligence operation, just didn't think that we should be involved in it. We preferred to have the Bureau or somebody else get involved in it. But again, you talk about turf battles and equity or what have you, a lot of the liaison services abroad -- the foreign liaison _ services. -- we had a deal with. Many of them didn't want to work with the Bureau and only wanted to work with us. And you can't have both agencies suddenly hitting the same foreign service and asking the same questions. It just gets silly. So there were lots of problems on this one and the officers, as I say, even some of the old hands, didn't like it. They wanted to go back to doing the normal collection job and not go looking for what amounts to, you know, Bolsheviks with bombs under the. bed. And that tension was there and I think it continues, and even under Bill Colby who modified the program even more in ‘73, in late or middle ‘73 with Schlesinger and Colby. But the program by and large continued in a slightly reduced fashion and a different terminology and with much more emphasis on doing that over there than in the States. I think it's the kind of thing that, you know, you're damned if you do and you are damned if you don't. I don't think we ever convinced everybody that what we were doing was within bounds and, obviously, we had the information, the information wasn't going anywhere. Nobody was going to court on it, nobody was going to get shot, nobody was going to get put in jail. I. mean, we were just pulling it all together. INTERVIEWER: Would you say dozens of officers knew about this? 32 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET MR. HALPERN: Oh, hundreds of them. INTERVIEWER: Hundreds of officers. MR. HALPERN: Sure. I think everybody in the DDP knew about it. They didn't see the traffic, but they knew about it. | | INTERVIENER: They knew about it? MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah. It was common hall gossip and lunch room gossip and what have you. And as I say, there was lots of opposition to it by senior officers as well as -- well, in the first place a lot of the senior officers . thought that we were taking our time-and effort and our assets away from the important job, which was the Soviet target. You know, it takes time, it takes people, and it takes money. And you only have so much that you can do in 24 hours a day, and you can't do everything. That's why you end up with what we used to call a Related Mission Director for the priority - trying to do things in some kind of priority order. And you can't just pick the easy ones. You know, you would get a bad report card if you pick only the easy ones. You've got to pick some of the hard. ones too. INTERVIEWER: Where was it thought that these orders came from, relative to . .? | : MR. HALPERN: Oh, they knew, people knew where the orders came from. They knew it was a Presidential directive. Nothing was hidden from them. Oh, no. question about that. This was a part of the Johnson presidential requirement. What he was looking for was evidence of Soviet or domestic upheaval in the United States. We couldn't find it. And no matter, and every time we told him that, he said, “Intensify your efforts." You know, and as Dick Helms has said, you know, “I only have one president at a time.. That's where I get my orders." So what do you do? And if Dick said that I'm-not 33 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET going to do it, there would be a new DCI in 24 hours -- or thereabouts. INTERVIEWER: And I think your point that it went up and down wasn't just the younger. . . MR. HALPERN: No, no. It was up and down on the entire hierarchy. There were pro and con argumentation and what have you. Now they say a lot of the older hands are saying, you know, “We haven't got time to do everything for God's sakes. Which is more important: the Soviet target or to find out if there are a couple of bucks coming into the country? People are going to be in the streets anyway whether they get Soviet money or not." I mean, it doesn't take _ very much to get people into the streets in this country, as you can see. And that is part of the breakdown. And that is Vietnam. Not Watergate. You know, Kent State didn't happen until 1970. We'd been in the war since ‘65 basically. And I-remember arguing with my National War College colleagues, the military and the State Department guys and what have you, and I said when we went in. . . Let's see -~ the Marines went in in March of ‘65 in Danang. The class didn't start until August of ‘65. I was with the class of '66, so we'd been in there a few months. And we went to a briefing in one of the secure rooms down in the bowels of the Pentagon. And this was DCSLOGS (Deputy Chief of Staff Logistics) DCSLOGS, and they had a big briefing for us. We were all senior officers in the War College with clearances and what have you, _ and they were telling us -- this is October of '65 -- they had the usual Colonels with pointers attached showing us the charts for what they were’ planning for Vietnam. And the graphs were going like this for five years. The number of troops that were going to be in Vietnam -- five years! I looked. around at my buddies and I said, “What the hell is going on here? We just got there! How the hell you are planning a five year war? You guys are crazy!" 34 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET I said, “This country -- the only time it's had a war longer than four years was the American Revolution. You are not going to have the support of the American people if you go that long. It's crazy! You can't plan five years ahead." They had half a million men. “Five year plan. This wasn't out in public, obviously, in October '65. If the American public or the Congress knew about that, there would have been a revolt right then. And I told them, I argued with my buddies who were members of the State Department _ not military, State Department. "Oh, Sam, you don't understand the American people. They'll go along. with you as long as you do it. It'll be slow, sure." I said, "No way. You mark my words. If you plan that way, it's crazy. If you're going to go fight a war, fight a war. Don't tickle them." Anyway, what you had there’ in ‘65 when we went into the war, and I think Johnson thought with the American Flag Flying nobody was going to dare do anything with him, and everybody melted in the background. But by '70 you had lost the. consensus in this-country. Totally. And Kent State just added to it.. I don't blame Nixon for Kent State. Obviously nobody can. Crazy National Guardsmen with young kids, sensitive triggers, and unfortunate deaths. But that just added to it. - : INTERVIEWER: And you have all the street rioting and civil rights issues. “MR. HALPERN: Civil rights is another one in ‘68. But that wasn't really part of the Vietnam problem. That was a totally separate issue. And when you add it all together, it was just bad. So that when Johnson says, "T want to find out about Soviets supporting all of ‘this stuff," I think he was crazy. But -he _ wouldn't listen. And so we had to keep going. And so the Officer Corps in the Clandestine Services didn't like being taken away from their job. And we didn't like being. . . I know this was a big problem too, the Vietnam station 35 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger -- it was crazy. We even had what was called a Vietnam levy. Des Fitzgerald decided, when he became DDP, he was going to have each.division and staff charged with producing so many bodies. And I mean bodies. | INTERVIEWER: To go over. | MR. HALPERN: Yeah. To go to Vietnam. “Because it got bigger and bigger and you had to have men all over the bloody country. And so he wanted some good, | some bad, and some middle. But he didn't want all bad. You know, and that kind of stuff. And so, we were putting our assets into one little place and it was the most important thing, sure, I understand, but that wasn't the main target or what the hell CIA was in business for. ~We weren't, at least the — clandestine side wasn't supposed to be out there fighting a war. It's crazy. And so the people were objecting to that. The officer corps was objecting to the Vietnam levy. On: top of that comes CHAOS and CHAOS really takes us away from more of our normal activity and who the hell is going to worry about the Soviet target in terms of intelligence collection. And by that time, more than just Soviet targets, a lot of other targets too. So yeah, there was a lot of: opposition. _ INTERVIEWER: Okay. Do have any feeling about the Presidents. Do you feel . _that they knew about the mail opening program? MR. HALPERN: Oh; in a general way. INTERVIEWER: Ina general way. MR. HALPERN: Yeah, Presidents don't ask detailed questions. They don't normally ask that kind of stuff. They just want to know, they want to see a piece of paper. They want to know what is going on.. And if he is bringing in . something hot, he might ask, “Hey, how'd you get this?" But, let me give you 36 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET another example, not a President but a Secretary of State, Dean-Rusk. We put out at one point, Des was DDP at the time, we put out a very good report from an asset from behind the Curtain, if I can still use the old phraseology. And so, it was a good report. And suddenly we get a call, the DDPs, not the office but the DDP mechanism, gets a call, a requirement he get a cali from somebody in the State Department asking for the identity of the source. The guy comes hot footing it up to me and says, “Sam, the State Department wants to know the source." I said, “Who in the State Department? State Department wants to know. Tell me who.“ “Secretary wants to know." I said, “Oh, okay: You have whoever. you were talking to tell the Secretary to call Des Fitzgerald or Dick Helms. It's simple.“ “I can't say that." I said, "Well, if you can't, I will. The man is crazy. We don't give sources." And so, I go in and tell my boss that such and such is going to happen. He might get the call from Dean Rusk on the secure line. I tell him what the story is, and he says, "Okay I will wait for the call." And sure enough, I happened to be in the office on something else when the call came later that day, and it was Dean Rusk. And I could tell from the conversation what is going on. And it points: out that Dean Rusk didn't want to Know the identity of the source, never asked for the identity of the source, All he wanted to know was how good is this piece of information. And Des said, “I'll put my arm in the fire up to the ‘shoulder blade. It's a good source." Knew what he meant. End of conversation. You know, Presidents don't ask, Secretaries of the State don't ask for details that they shouldn't. They know that. And they've been around _ long enough. I mean, I don’t know about Jimmy Carter, but the other guys don't. And so, I think Presidents knew in general terms that there was mail opening, wire tapping, and that kind of stuff. Well, they engaged it 37 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET themselves for God's sake, not the mail opening but the wire tapping, and bugging offices or bug somebody elses or tell somebody to bug somebody. Hell, it started with Roosevelt himself, you Know, nothing new. | . INTERVIEWER: Was the maf] opening program Known very extensively in the Agency? . MR. HALPERN: No. TA give you an example. I didn't know it. INTERVIEWER: You did not know it? MR. HALPERN: I did not know it and even when I was Exec to the DOP I knew some operational cryptonyms, and all I know was that they were good sources of information. I never asked -beyond that. And nobody ever told me beyond that and I had no reason to know. I-didn't. As a matter of fact, to give you an example of how naive I was, when I was called back, right after I retired in early '75 to help on getting ready for the Congressional investigations, which we didn't even know was going on at the time (this was January of ‘'75), the newspaper stories were talking about mail openings and that kind of stuff. And I was silly enough and foolish enough to say to the security guy I was dealing with ~- the security officer (the Office of Security ran HTLINGUAL) -- that what we were doing was in support of trying to get information about how the Chinese or the Russians were operating and what it took to get . documentation and all that kind of stuff -- what you needed. Hell, perfectly | honest. I didn't know what the hell was going on. And all I know is that the security guy said, “Yeah Sam yeah yeah that's a good idea. We'll think about that yeah Sam that's a good idea yeah yeah we'll think about that." They never said anything at that: point that they were running a real mail coverage and what have you. And I didn't know that I was doing the normal, you know. This is what you were in an operation for. But it was more than that, 38 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET obviously. So, it was not widely known. INTERVIEWER: No. No. | . MR. HALPERN: Information. You might have had access like I did to information and you knew a good source or a bad source. INTERVIEWER: And you might know the information came from HTLINGUAL. MR. HALPERN: No. I never heard the cryptonymn. INTERVIEWER: Never heard the cryptonymn. Okay. MR. HALPERN: Didn't even need that. All I knew is that it was a good source. INTERVIEWER: Okay. How would you characterize morale in the Agency in the two to three years just prior to the Church and Pike Hearings. MR. HALPERN: Oh, I think it was largely unsettled because in ‘73 you had the . turnover under Schlesinger. INTERVIEWER: Right. MR. HALPERN: And it was unsettling, totally unsettling. In the end of '72 when Schlesinger was announced as the new man on the block and everybody knew Helms was out, from. there on it was utter turmoil and debacle. Both in the DDP and God knows, where else. INTERVIEWER: The worst you had seen? | MR. HALPERN: Oh yes. Totally. Never had anything that bad before. Unbelievable. It was bad. And we had had reduction in forces before throughout the Agency from time to time. We had a "701 Program," it was called, one of them I remember. And several others from time to time. You had reduction programs and it was bad in those days. But nothing like ‘73. Absolutely nothing. All heil broke loose. INTERVIEWER: Bad in the sense that he was going to cut a thousand or. two _ thousand? 39 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET MR. HALPERN: Bad in terms that the leadership had no trust in us. INTERVIEWER: Which leadership are you referring to, Sam? MR. HALPERN: .. Schlesinger/Colby, obviously. Leadership no longer had any trust in us. They were treating us like dirt. No appreciation of what we had done or what we could do. No reason and no appreciation that we even exist. They wanted to wipe us out. Then, of course, the personal aspect of it -- my job and where am I going to go from here and do I get a pension or don't I get a pension -- and so on. And it was awful. Unbelievably awful both here and abroad. And I don't know what happened when the Halloween Massacre under Turner came around. That I guess must have been equally dramatic. But in *73 none of us had ever seen anything like that before. When, you know, everybody's life work was suddenly up for grabs. And it was just a horrible mess. | INTERVIEWER: Well, was there a feeling: that President Nixon, while Helms was Director, that President Nixon was supportive of the Agency? MR. HALPERN: Yes, yeah there was. Largely because, I don't know if it was Nixon, but it was Kissinger who supported the Agency. And most of us knew that most of the foreign policy was coming out of Henry anyway. But with Nixon's support of course. And he had Nixon's chops to do what he had to do or wanted to do. But by and large we worked very closely, as an Agency with Kissinger. We provided all kinds of support, assets, did all kinds of things at his request and so on. I was on the phone to Al Haig, for example, although I never met him, but was on the phone almost daily when he was still a Colonel on the Kissinger staff doing all kinds of things. And exchanging papers with him via the new (I forget what it was called in those days) long distance xerography but it was totally encrypted. We had one machine up in. 40 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET “the Ops Center and: he had -one machine up in his Ops Center in the White House, and at first we were standing at the machines separately waiting for the piece of paper (nobody else was allowed to see the paper). So, you know, we worked together as a team. -And the Agency, I mean at least the Clandestine Service side of it worked very closely with them. And I remember right after Nixon was sworn-in in January of ‘69. INTERVIEWER: ‘69 when he came in? MR. HALPERN: Yeah, he came in in '69. There was a meeting -- Nixon, Mitchell, Kissinger, Helms, and Tom Karamessines in the White House. INTERVIEWER: Was Rogers there? MR. HALPERN: No. INTERVIEWER:. No, Rogers? MR. HALPERN: You mean the Secretary of State? No. Who is he? He didn't count. You know that. I mean the history books are full of that now. No, Mitchell was there. I don't know why but he was the Attorney General but 1 don't know why he, at. least, the Attorney. General nominee. But anyway, he was there. I got this from Tom. As Tom's Exec, Tom came back and reported on the meeting. And there was a very close bond right there established. Nixon then Kissinger asked a lot of questions as to our capabilities, our assets and what we could do to help and what have you on different aspects, and Tom was asked to give the details. Dick knew some but he didn't know all the details . because he was out of the job for a number of years. “When they came back, they had marching orders. It worked. INTERVIEWER: So that in '73 when Helms is out, that's the big big change? 4]. SECRET
13-00000 SECRET MR. HALPERN: ‘Yes. As I say that began in ‘72 right after the election. 7 Nixon had his own raid but that is another story. But there was when Schlesinger came in it was just a traumatic, really traumatic, experience. INTERVIEWER: Was Schlesinger known to the Agency? MR. HALPERN: No, just by reputation. INTERVIEWER: Just by reputation. And that was? MR. HALPERN: Bad. -Because of the things he had done in the Atomic Energy Commission and the Bureau of Budget. ‘And his whole approach. Totally — impersonal. The new. “machine man" kind of thing, you know, the mathematical brain or whatever -- oh, I guess machine is a better stated cause. INTERVIEWER: So that reputation was known and therefore. .. MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah, not only known but it was, you know -- immediately the _ phone calls went out all-over town asking, “What about this, who is this guy, . what's he like?" And everything we got back was bad. _ Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. . INTERVIEWER: And then Colby will support Schlesinger while. .. MR. HALPERN: Oh, he not only supported him but he was one of the guys who. made inputs of the information. for whatever attitude Schlesinger had on the whole thing. Now Schlesinger 's attitude about what he did totally changed since he's out of government, since Helms’ out: of government, and ‘everybody . else. It was 180 degree switch. INTERVIEWER: For Colby?.. MR. HALPERN:- No, for Schlesinger. INTERVIEWER: Schlesinger. - 42 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET INTERVIEWER: Yeah. And I tried to tell them. See I was Exec to Colby for about 3 months, and I tried to tell my friends -- who wouldn't believe it -- don't blame Schlesinger for what is happening to the DOP. Blame Colby. It was all Colby. He's the guy who was pushing this. And in effect even says so in the book, if you read the book, where he says he told Schlesinger he'd take care of cleaning up the DDP. You know, he knows that function. Well, yeah that's true. . INTERVIEWER: What three months. were you serving Colby? MR. HALPERN: February, March, April and part of May of ‘73. When I was his Executive. INTERVIEWER: And did the tensions simply grow after Schlesinger and Colby are working away. . . MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah. It lasted until. . . Well, Schlesinger left early. He left in June of 73. And it lasted even afterward. The thing didn't get settled down for a long while. INTERVIEWER: Continuing on? MR. HALPERN: Yeah, it continued. Became public. . INTERVIEWER: And then people being separated from the Agency? MR. HALPERN: And I saw how some of those separations of some senior officers were done. And believe me, it was brutal. Brutal and awful. INTERVIEWER: Brutal in the context of? MR. HALPERN: No sense of personalities. No sense of humanity. No sense of the dealing with individual problems. We used to be a Band of Brothers. INTERVIEWER: Right. | MR. HALPERN: I think I said that before. 43 SECRET
13-00000 INTERVIEWER: MR. HALPERN: INTERVIEWER: MR. HALPERN: INTERVIEWER: MR. HALPERN: INTERVIEWER: MR. HALPERN: INTERVIEWER: MR. HALPERN: better having INTERVIEWER: MR. HALPERN: subjects. It was awful. SECRET Yes. That stopped with Schlesinger and Colby. Now that stopped throughout the Agency or . I don't know about the rest of the Agency. But it stopped in the clandestine . . . Let me talk about what I know about. Sure. I can conjecture about that other ... Right, yes. . My “conjecture is almost as good as yours. Maybe a little bit lived there all these years. | Sure. But, no, I am talking basically what I know about clandestine I mean, even old friends were just, you Know, ignored, looked down upon. ‘Given no consideration whatsoever. In the old days we took care. of each other as a Band of Brothers does. We helped each other. INTERVIEWER: MR. HALPERN: INTERVIEWER: MR. HALPERN: And this included what sorts of things? You mean the helping? Uh huh. Oh, if a guy had a family problem, we'd worry about his next assignment so that the family problem was taken care of. If a guy had-a medical problem he didn't want people to know about, talk about, we helped him with that. People with husband and wife problems, we'd help on that. There were even problems with kids. We'd help with that. Drugs, somebody 44 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET impregnating somebody -- what do you do about that Kind of thing. We'd try to look out after each other. That didn't mean we didn't have professional rivalry and all of that. There was a lot of that, believe me. Who got what job and who got what promotion. But basically, when the chips were down, we were helpful to each other. We tried to find interpretations of rules and regulations to assist each other, even financially, so that you weren't so out-of-pocket on a lot things and the government might be able to help. If somebody had a problem, you know, if he was abroad for example, and something happened to a family member back here, we'd suddenly call the guy back on TOY -- we had a big important problem to worry about and discuss with him. You know, that kind of stuff. INTERVIEWER: Yes. MR. HALPERN: All perfectly legal, and it was all, we used to, as a matter of fact, we in the DDP used to look at some of our support officers and administrators and what have you in terms of how well they were able to interpret the regulation in order to help us out. with a job, whether it was a personal thing, or a professional, or an operation or what have you, and I remember one of them. I'd pick up the phone and say, "Charlie, here's my problem: I've got to get from point A to point B and I've got to do it fast." “Jesus Christ. All right. I'll call you back." And within the hour, or whatever it took him, he'd say, “You go from A, to A Prime, to A Prime 2, to A Prime 3, and then you end up in B over there, and you'll get there and ~ you'll be fine and it won't take you any time. You'll just go. Just do it my way." I said, "Fine. You ‘prepare the papers. I'll sign them." And that's . the way it worked. You know, a Band of Brothers. We knew what we were doing 45 SECRET
13-00000 - SECRET in terms of trying to get the job done and stay within the bounds of the Agency. . - INTERVIEWER: And if somebody came up for retirement, and they might need some. . . MR. HALPERN: I think, we'd try to, well, in the early days when you didn't ~ have the bulk of people suddenly coming out, you'd even try to help them find a job. Pick up the phone, call friends, connections, what have you. And it was done. Now later, when it came into the hundreds, you couldn't do it, obviously. And then everybody fell by the wayside. But it was a totally different attitude; instilled right away when Schlesinger came along. Some of his language is even being quoted’ in the newspapers and magazines. I don't know if he said the words that way but anyway things like: “I am not interested in people, I am interested in the United States taxpayer." Well, we were interested in the taxpayer too, but that didn't come first. Maybe that was wrong but at least we didn't think so. Considering the time and effort most of us put into that place, I don't think Uncle Sam was ever on the short end of the stick. INTERVIEWER: And so someone being separated might not know he was being separated until... , | MR.. HALPERN: Until it hit him. INTERVIEWER: Until it hit him. “MR. HALPERN: Yeah. I remember Colby, for example, taking home with him, which he shouldn't have done but he did, stacks of personnel folders to, you know, be the great decider. This guy goes, this guy stays. INTERVIEWER: ‘So the morale was not very good? 46 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET MR. HALPERN: Oh, it was nonexistent. Nonexistent, less than nonexistent. INTERVIEWER: Gee. MR. HALPERN: ‘73 was a bad year. A very bad year. INTERVIEWER: ‘74? MR. HALPERN: Well, I don't know. In '74 it probably got a little bit better. Things were settling down a little bit under Colby. And we weren't quite so much under the gun. About that time most of the people had been separated. - INTERVIEWER: And was that harshly, that separation issue, is that Agency officers were coming back from Vietnam. MR. HALPERN: Partly that. ‘But only partly. We had a program under Tom Karamessines and under Helms. We knew that we were going to have to bring back a lot of people from Vietnam gradually, and we started actually, believe it or not, we started earlier than most. people give us credit for to plan for this kind of reduction in force in Vietnam, the Far East Division, and: gradually try to sort of spread the officers back to their proper divisions © and areas, and we knew it was going to take a long time. And we knew we were going to have to reduce the total: strength -- we were getting cut budget wise anyway and personnel slot wise. But it was a long range program. We were . going to do it over a period of time. We weren't going to do it in a day. And it was a totally different approach. One with humanity, one totally without humanity. And I think we were right in feeling that we owed the guys, after all of their years and effort, some consideration. And, you know, there are perfectly legal ways and means of using the personnel rules and regulations and financial rules and regulations to ease the passage. 47 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET INTERVIEHER: And make it more gradual. MR. HALPERN: Yeah, and make it more gradual and make it easier on people, and what have you. And, look, even Schlesinger had to go to Congress to get the humber of retirees’ positions opened under the CIA Retirement Act. He had to get those numbers raised to take care of the mass of people he was suddenly getting rid of. And he didn't even know that initially. And that was finally brought to his attention, that a lot of these people could take us to court if you just throw them out without giving them the CIRA benefits. And so they went to Congress, and Congress upped the figures (with a little bit of . doing). I mean, that was one of the things, you know, just sheer humanity. INTERVIEWER: Sure. | MR. HALPERN: You know. INTERVIEWER: The Ramparts article on the Agency and the National Student's. Association. - MR. HALPERN: ‘67. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Was that very harmful to the Agency? MR. HALPERN: Yes. Very much so. | | INTERVIEWER: The flap was? . MR. HALPERN: It was a big flap obviously. We had to cut back on a lot of operations. . | | INTERVIEWER: Involving students? MR. HALPERN: Well, the students was only one of it because if you remember the Ramparts exposure went far beyond student activity. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. MR. HALPERN: It covered all kinds of things ~~ labor unions, women's organizations, religous groups -- you name them and we were involved in some . 48 SECRET .
13-00000 SECRET way or another. And practically all of those had to be dismantled. The DDP, then Des Fitzgerald, just before he died as a matter of fact, came up with a term.call "Surge Funding." S-U-R-G-E funding. And what we were able to do, all legal.and all checked out with Katzenbach and the Attorney General and everybody else, was in order to ease the way for a lot of these activities that we were involved with, we gave them extra money, a pile of money kind of thing, you know you are on your own from now on. Here, get going. Start up. And 50 we really did a big dismantling job. And it was very, very painful. Not only for the people involved in the activities, and including the officers who were the case officers running the thing from inside, but it hurt the ' overall effort. And one of the things, for example, even Congress finally recognized the need and picked up the RFE and Radio Liberty ~- or Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty -- and is now run by the government instead of CIA funding it. It's still the same money from Congress, except they now call it something else and they have a broadcasting committee that oversees it. You Know, no difference except it doesn't have those nasty letters -- CIA -- involved. INTERVIEWER: Right. MR. HALPERN: So that's the running of it. And that used to be one of the biggest costs. of our covert action operations. Those and the any paramilitary activity you get into. That's where the money goes. INTERVIEWER: Sure. MR. HALPERN: Intelligence operations don't cost much, propaganda operations don't cost much and so on.- So it did have a tremendous impact, no question. ‘67 Ramparts. INTERVIEWER: And this was fairly new in Helms' term of office wasn't it? 49 oo SECRET
13-00000. SECRET MR. HALPERN: Yes, Helms was the DCI then. Yes, '67. INTERVIEWER: ‘Okay. How ‘about, the question is raised sometimes: how are reforms and real or potential abuses processed within the Agency in the decades before 1975? MR. HALPERN: In practically every case that I know of, at least it went through the entire chain of command. Usually the IG was involved, and then the Legal Counsel got involved. And people were demoted, people were fired, people were reassigned. It all. depended on what the gravity of the situation was and there were all kinds of different activities including some people who did nothing more than try to swipe.a few bucks. And some of those went to court actually. INTERVIEWER: Is that right? MR. HALPERN: And, in those days, we could do, with the help of the judge, have the trial in camera so it didn't get a lot of publicity. But we went — through all the ins and outs on a lot of this stuff and. depending on what the situation was, the General Counsel would take it over the Attorney General if necessary. ‘tt all depended on what happened. But there was every effort made first to try to clean it up inside the organization, inside CIA if possible. And if not you went outs ide and got whatever help you needed and invoked whatever laws were necessary to make sure something like this didn't happen again, and people were told. Usually you didn't get the names of the individuals involved, we always tried to protect that. And it wasn't just because of privacy or anything like that, it's the nature of the business. You don't talk about names. But the kind of activity were usually wel] ' publicized at staff meetings and passed down the line. So you tell people so these things don't happen again. You can't always be sure they don't, but you try. 50
13-00000 SECRET INTERVIENER: And how about the comment I had read earlier that Helms was betrayed by Nixon, that if He Ims had gone along on Watergate and all that type ‘of thing he would have kept his job? MR. HALPERN: Well, that sounds, it's a plausible theory, but I don't think so. I-don't think it was in the cards because my own feeling is that Nixon - _ was ready for a change, and he was ready to just clean house. Because look at the rest of his changes on: personnel throughout the government after the ‘72 election. I mean, it was just all those crazy things. He just felt he wanted to have. a new team. I personally don't think that that. would have made much ~ difference with Helms. IT mean, Nixon and Helms in terms of keeping him on the job. I think he was ready for’ a new guy anyway. | INTERVIEWER: Did you ever hear how Schlesinger happened to be chosen? MR. HALPERN: No, I don! t know, except that in ‘70 or '71 he was the deputy in _ OMB and he wrote a directive, well, he wrote .a study and not a directive, changing the intelligence community relationships and the Director's relationships. to the intelligence community and therefore I think he was considered an expert on the intelligence community and national security policy and so on. And when they were looking for a new boss, T would think that there he was sitting over at Atomic Energy which Nixon probably didn't know what he was doing over there anyway. And so he did in 1970 or ‘71, I think it was ‘71, a study and a report and moved him over. INTERVIEWER: Had it ever been mentioned that maybe he was Kissinger's choice? | MR. ‘HALPERN: I haven't heard that. I would doubt it. I would doubt it. Very much. I just hadn't heard that one before. INTERVIEWER: “Okay. All right. MR. HALPERN: That‘s a new one. I presume some of your other sources 51 SECRET \
13-00000 ~ SECRET mentioned that to you. . INTERVIEWER: I don't know. There was: simply speculation. MR. HALPERN: No, I don't think so. I would be very surprised if that turned out to be the fact. INTERVIEWER: Okay. MR. HALPERN: Henry doesn't take credit for it in his books. That's for sure. INTERVIEWER: And he would. MR. HALPERN: “And those are nice, big, two heavy tomes. If you forgot, I've got them right down here. | . INTERVIEWER: I haven't worked my way through all of them yet. MR. HALPERN: He was supposed to have written a third one you know. But he never has. | INTERVIEWER: Is that right? .A third one is coming? MR. HALPERN: The third one is going to be on intelligence and national security. | | INTERVIEWER: Oh really. MR. HALPERN: But he never did it. INTERVIEWER: . It has not been written? Not yet anyway. MR.HALPERN: Not yet. - INTERVIEWER: How about the Schlesinger memo of May 1973 regarding improper . | practices in the Agency? MR. HALPERN: That's Colby's memo. Schlesinger put his name to it, but it's Colby's memo. ; | | INTERVIEWER: Okay. So, written by Colby? MR. HALPERN: Yes. INTERVIEWER: And signed by Schlesinger? 52 SECRET.
13-00000 SECRET MR. HALPERN: Yes. INTERVIEWER: And the results of the memo are sometimes called the “Family Jewels" or "693 List"? MR. HALPERN: That's right. That's right. INTERVIEWER: How.was that memo received? MR. HALPERN: Well, I think in several ways. One of the ways was some people were shocked and surprised that anybody would put it all on a piece of paper. Number 1. Some accepted it as just another order. and filled out all kinds of stuff. I accepted it-in terms of reading the words that were in there. I never responded to it. Because it didn't apply to me, as far as I was concerned, because none of ‘the things that I had ever done were, as far as I was concerned, beyond the pale, beyond the law, beyond interpretation of the law or anything like that. And so it depended on how you wanted to read and interpret the language. Because if I remember correctly it said something -about things that you did that you thought were beyond the charter or outside the regulations or something like that. But I don't remember anything I ever did beyond that, so I. didn't respond to the thing. I never answered. it. And — I'm sure that I wasn't the only one who didn't answer it. : INTERVIEWER: Was there much talk about it at the time? MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah, a lot of talk. Obviously. What's this all about? Why? All that kind of stuff. INTERVIEWER: Was it. thought that it was related to a management style or related to Watergate or related to. . .? MR. HALPERN: No, I think it was written in terms of the Watergate business, in terms of a CYA-type activity - "Cover Your Ass" Activity. I heard, again obviously, I talked about it to a lot of people, and they talked to me about 53 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET it. And I told them what I was doing. I told them I wasn't going to reply to the thing, I didn't need to as far as I was concerned, but I left it up to each individual that talked to me to make it up in his own mind. I don't know how many did or didn't, but I think it was in terms of a CYA thing, in terms of: here's a new man on the block, Schlesinger, and he wants to know what happened since Genesis. You know, doesn't he have anything else to do? He's . got a whole Agency and a whole new world to conquer. What the hell is worried about all that stuff for? So, I think it was basically in terms of, at least the guys I talked to or talked to me, it was a CYA activity on the part of Schlesinger who didn't want to get blind sided by something that might have happened that CIA would. be accused of. But the attitude was, what the hell is he worried about, it is not on his watch. If there is. something is wrong, and even if CIA is accused of it, it's not on his watch. Nobody can hold him responsible for it. If it happened, even two years ago, what the hell. I mean, so. It might have happened under somebody elses aegis, and CIA takes the heat, but he could say, you know, it wasn't me. I wasn‘t around. So that was the general attitude. And as I say, a lot of people responded like good soldiers and wrote all kinds of tomes about things they thought were wrong, and not all of them were accepted. I mean that 690 whatever thing. .. INTERVIEWER: Yes, it's a list which is simply the number of pages that. .. MR. HALPERN: Yes, and these things were each on a page if I remember correctly. And these were the ones that Bill Colby finally accepted as going quote beyond the pale unquote. But even then when Bill issued. his kind of after action directives, there were a whole bunch of stuff. “He said, you know, these don't count. Even though I've got them, these don't count because they are not beyond anything -- they are perfectly legal and all that kind of stuff and perfectly proper. In some of these he said, we are going to stop 54
13-00000 SECRET these completely, some of these we are going to modify (and CHAOS was one of them). He didn't stop it completely. At least not initially. And these, he said, have no bearing. So his own orders, later after he got all this stuff together, when he finally tallied them all up, they were just, you know, “no," "maybe," “yes."— . INTERVIEWER: At the time the memo came out, was it known that Colby was the author or the drafter of it? Do you recall by chance? MR. HALPERN: My friends wouldn't:believe me. I knew. But .. INTERVIEWER: You knew that he drafted it? MR. HALPERN: His hand was there all the way. Now maybe he didn't do all the drafting, but it was his initiative or what have you. | INTERVIEWER: And your friends thought it was Schlesinger? MR. HALPERN: Yes. Oh, Schlesinger was getting all of the rap, which I thought was all wrong. All wrong. From the firing of everybody -- ora lot ' of people -- to this kind of stuff. And it was Bill who was the guy who was pushing Schlesinger into this kind of stuff. And Schlesinger was willing to be pushed, don't get me wrong, and he wanted to do a house cleaning and a sweep, and all that kind of stuff, but without Bill.it wouldn't have gotten half as far. I'm sure. | INTERVIEWER: Why was Bill doing that? MR. HALPERN: That's a good question. People have asked me that continuously and I don't know. Some ‘people have said that partly it was because of his daughter's problem. And you know she died very early on when he was DDP OO DDO; sorry: I get my terminology confused by the dates. And I don't believe that because his daughter's psychological problem was there long before, even 55 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET when he was in Vietnam and she was in Vietnam. So I really don't know. Other people say that Bill was just being a good novice. Some people said he's going to end up in the monastery some day, even though he's got a new wife and all that, new company, and what: have you. But, I've had all kinds of interpretations, but I don't even know if Bill knows why. INTERVIEWER: And at that time it was as much a mystery as . 2 a) MR. HALPERN: Well, at that time everybody thought it was Schlesinger. INTERVIEWER: Oh, I see. | — MR. HALPERN: That Schlesinger was the Big Bad Wolf. And sure he was but he . was aided, and abetted, and goaded by one Willian Colby. And why Bill did it, I just don't know. | | INTERVIEWER: Was there any. sign of that before Schlesinger came in? In other -words while Helms. was still there? Was Colby... . MR. HALPERN: Not to the same extent. But Bill first came -- when I first got to know him'-- was in i956. INTERVIEWER: That early? MR. HALPERN: 'S6, yes. ‘56. Des Fitzgerald met Bill Colby when Bill was a case officer in. the Rome station. And Des came. - back thinking Colby walked on water. “The greatest thing since little apples. And he wanted him in the Far | ‘East Division right away. Well, he made some arrangements, and he got Bil] . into the Far East Division and assigned him as Deputy Chief of Station of Saigon. ° The Chief then was Nick Natsios. And Bill went out as Deputy Chief. And Vietnam then became his career -- God knows how many years. Ten years or more. And. we in the Far East Division -- we the case officers and the operators in: the. Far East Division, the troops -- while Bill was here in 56 SECRET
13-00000 _ SECRET Washington getting acclimated to what FE was all about, who the people are and what have you and the various talks and the various comments and what have / you, and later while he was out in Saigon, we regarded him as a great "nation builder" -- quote unquote. That he was not a clandestine operations officer in terms of espionage or counterintelligence. He never understood counterintelligence. Even to this day I don't think he understands counterintelligence. And I don't think he knew what a recruitment of an agent was -- even the fact that I haven't recruited many. myself. But if you look at his book, he: says the first agent he recruited in Italy was a member of the . Communist Party. He recruited him as a reporting source, as strictly an intelligence agent, not as a propaganda CA officer. | And. you read his book and he talks there about his, Bill's, problem -- whether this is the right thing to do, aad: how can he live with himself, and manipulating a human being and all that kind of stuff. And it's very clear. that he is not an intelligence operations officer. He is a great boy scout and he is a great guy for quote. nation’ building unquote. | | | | INTERVIEWER: When you say nation building, what do you mean, by that, Sam? MR. HALPERN: He wants to help other countries become like the United States. He wants, you know, the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson . . _ INTERVIEWER: Democracy. MR. HALPERN: Yes, and everybody vote. -One man, one vote. Without any regard at all for the history and the social mores and background and customs of the country. Where votes in most cases don't mean anything. And it's silly. You work by chieftains and what’ have you and tribal systems and the whole business.. INTERVIEWER: Sure. . 7 SECRET
13-00000 - SECRET MR. HALPERN: But Bill wants to build nations. And its very laudable and maybe some government agency ought to build nations. And maybe he ought to be in the AID; or ICA in the old days, or the Red Cross or wherever. But not as a clandestine operations officer, trying to collect intelligence and recruit human beings to be your agent, your spy. A lot of us in the old FE Division on the working level thought, there is going to be trouble with this guy. INTERVIEWER: Did you meet him in ‘56 then? MR. HALPERN: Yes, sure. Yes I was Des‘ Exec then too. INTERVIEWER: I see. MR. HALPERN: In FE. So, a lot of us thought this was a problem guy but Des wants him around, and Des is the boss, so what the hell. There's nothing we can do. You know, maybe he'll learn something under Nick we used to say. Nick was a tough old Greek, old hand and he knew the business... In fact, he was a oet. | INTERVIEWER: So it was thought that maybe he'd change. MR. HALPERN: . Yes, but he didn't. Bill never changed. And so a lot of us ~- well, for example, Bill, when he was Division Chief in FE -- I wasn't even in the Division at that point -- but Bill had an idea, for example, on how the OCI's Daily Intelligence Report should look. He thought it ought to be like a tabloid newspaper and even had a dummy made up for this thing. Well, it was. laughed out of court at the time. Bill kept that dummy until he became DCI and he put it into effect. It became what is now called the National Intelligence Daily although I am told it is no longer in the newspaper format. That was changed as soon as Casey came aboard. But that is Bill for . you. Once he gets something in his head, you don‘t change him. 58 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET INTERVIEWER: Tenacious? MR. HALPERN: Oh, very, very. INTERVIEWER: Well did you have much contact with him after ‘56? MR. HALPERN: Oh, I didn't have too much contact with him in ‘56 until 1961 when I was shot down by Dick Bissell and Des Fitzgerald. Bissell was then DDP and Des was Chief, FE. I was enjoying life in Tokyo -- my one and only overseas full time tour and I was having a good time in Tokyo.. And suddenly I “got shot down to a place.called Saigon. Which I had known about before during -World War II and all that kind of stuff, but anyway, I got shot down ona special operation to work with the ASA teams, which is the Army version of NSA (Army component rather). ‘And this is because Ed Lansdale, who was then in General Erskine's office at the Pentagon, had a bright idea. This was before the US was fully committed. There were 3,000 Americans -~ men, women and children from all agencies ~~ including the military -- in Saigon in the | summer of ‘61 when I got down there. Saigon was still a nice, sleepy, old French town. It was a Jovely place. There were parts of Saigon that you couldn't go. And you couldn't go to parts of Chalons because there were VC all over you, but anyway, it was anice area. But this was a crazy idea that. “Ed Lansdale had sold the brass in Washington and it didn't make any sense, but anyway, there we were. And I was shot down to work as liaison officer between the station and the ASA teams. I got to make some very good friends, as a matter of fact, as a result of that and Bill Colby was Chief of Station. INTERVIEWER: Oh? | MR. HALPERN: And one of the things we did, and the first thing, the first place, I built the first war room, or officer room Cif you want) in the — 59 SECRET
13-00000 © SECRET Embassy. It didn't even have one at the time. The only one that was in town was the one on G-2 under General McGarr. And what the hell was the G-2 officer, Colonel someone, I can't remember. Anyway, so I built a war room for Bill so we could plot and have handy our own operations (we were running into the North at that time and none of them worked but we tried) and at the same time decided to take a look at what the hell the target was, what the enemy was. And I built a second war room or had built rather a second war room in the Embassy where me and my military friends, the head of the ASA team, the SSO in Saigon, I forget his name, Major something or other, and we got sent _down to us from Japan, from the Army in Japan, an order of battle specialist whose specialty was actually the Chinese Communist, the PRC army, a military breakdown, and he came down to go over the order of battle aspects of the VC. And I had put up on the wall, all four walls in this room that we built in the Embassy, a 1-50,000 set of maps of South Vietnam only. And then we took all of the information, from any source whatsoever, good, bad, or indifferent, ~ including COMINT, and all the liaison junk we were getting from the South Vietnamese government, any of our own reporting, the US, all agencies and we actually physically plotted every piece of information on maps. And the order of battle specialist made his usual 5X8 order of battle cards and correlated to the maps.. So that you could look at the map and go to the card or take the card and go to the map. And we came up with a figure of VC effectives in the field of over 18,000. That doesn't sound like much today, but this was the summer of ‘61. And the agreed-upon figure was 10,000. Everybody in the US Government used the figure of 10,000. I think they've been using it ever since the war began with the French. But anyway, 10,000 was the figure. And ~ 60. SECRET
13-00000 SECRET we came up with almost double. All holy hell broke loose. Bill Colby -- and I was on TDY from Tokyo. Dick Bissell had offered to have my family come with me and all that kind of stuff but I said uh uh. I'11 go down from Tokyo, the family can go home. And they did. But when this 18,000 figure hit, the G-2 in Saigon refused to accept it, General McGarr refused to accept it, Ambassador Nolting (I guess it was) refused to accept it, and Bill Colby” refused to accept it. And I said to Bil] -- and they wouldn't let us send the information out. They just refused. They thought it would be best to transmit the information to our respective Headquarters. That is the NSA type, the SSO type, and back to CINCPAC and so on. And I said to Bill, I said, "Bill, this is silly. First of all, I'm here TOY. I've got my own ticket, airplane ticket, I've got my own passport. I can be out of here unless: you shoot me on the way out. I'l] be at Tan Son Nhut whenever I want to. And you know me well enough, Bill. I'll get to the first available CIA station, which is either or I get into the Commo shack, and my message will be in Washington within minutes. And I think you know that my relationship with Des is such that he will at least listen to me -- he may not accept what I am telling him -- but he will at least listen. And I know in: the meantime you can say, ‘Get the guys with the white coats and what have you to get Sam. He's gone crazy, he's mad, he doesn't know what he is talking about, he's gone beyond the veil.' I know all of this, Bill. But I think Des will give me a hearing even wrapped in one of those --" INTERVIEWER: Straight jackets. 61 SECRET
13-00000 “SECRET MR. HALPERN: Straight jacket. He looked at me and he knew me well enough and I knew him and he says, “Okay, Sam, what do you want to send?" "I want to send. back we got 18,000. You know, and tell them how we got it. And give | _ them the facts. I'm not trying to make policy. I'm just here to get the information. We're the intelligence officers, that's what our job is." He said he-can't send 18,000. I said, "What is this? Some kind of a Persian rug | merchant bargaining or something? What. do you want to send? We can't go with 10 anymore. That's gone. We've got 18." Well, to make a long story short, we ended up, just like Sam Adams later, many years later, but he was in the hundreds of thousands, I was in the tens of thousands, and so we ended up whereby, I think we said something like -- we compromised, no question about that -- something like 14, 15 effectives, plus support troops, just like Sam, it's exactly the same play as Sam Adams except much smaller figures and much earlier. This was 1961. But the total figure, if you add it all up, you ended up with an 18,000. That much T got through. But again it was a stretched-out thing. So when the message finally went out, it went out in several channels: I mean, to CIA, the military and to State Department. Everybody got it. When it got to CINCPAC I'm told that almost like a bomb hit the place. And the next thing we knew was a message saying, "Colonel so and so from CINCPAC Staff is arriving to discuss this latest nonsense, “ or something like that. it was just, you know, crazy. And this Colonel! had been on the Vietnam desk for CINCPAC, but he served in Vietnam ~~ with the French when they were there. And he was the expert as far as CINCPAC was concerned. So when we were saying 10,000, we were in effect flying in his face. We were . . becoming idiots. It was off base. We didn't know this guy from Adam. And to 62 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET show you how we felt, me and my buddies, these three other military guys, when ‘the Colonel arrived -- I was the only civilian and these guys were all majors. They were, you know, “There's a colonel coming." So I was the guy -- chosen to, and I. volunteered too. Okay, we meet this guy and we bring him - in. And I said, “Colonel, here's the war room, there are the maps, there are the order of battle cards. All the information is cross-indexed, so if you look at the cards you can find it on the map, if you look at the map, you'll “find it on the cards. We'll just leave you here. See where we went wrong." We went off and got drunk. And I mean drunk. It was a bad one. But anyway, we said, "The hell with this nonsense." I got my military buddies out of the range of fire. And the four of us went off. We came back, I think it was the next day, but anyway, when we came back the Colonel said something to the a effect of, “I wouldn't have believed it." And I said, “We didn't make it up. It's all there. You had it all in Honolulu. Everybody in Washington has had the same information. We didn't make up any new stuff. It's the same stuff _ everybody is using. We just added it up.and you guys didn‘t. That's all. Everybody was using pieces; using the magic figure it appeared was made up some years ago. Times have changed. The enemy has doubled its strength right under our very noses." That was my one nice big session with Bill Colby. That's what we started out on. And so that's when we finally sent the messages out after this Colonel was here, then we sent the messages which had | that 18,000. It was a long total, but anyway. And Bill and I have been on a Fighting relationship ever since, I think. I never mentioned it to him and he never mentioned it to.me again. It was done and that was it. Then I left. INTERVIEWER: You left? 63 SECRET
13-00000 ‘SECRET MR. HALPERN: Oh yeah, I left at the end of ‘61 -- well, not the end because I arrived back in Washington. Well, even after that, Bill Colby made me in effect the third man down in the station because he and his Deputy,| | who is now dead, were just swamped with paper -- release of documents, release of cables, relief of dispatches, what have you. They were working 20 hours a day and it was getting crazy. I said, “Bill if it is one thing in the world I can do -- and everybody knows I can do it ~- I can move paper for you. Get it out of here. And you know damn well you'll see the ones you are supposed to see. And iet me get rid of the junk." And so he gave me. releasing | authority. And I sat there as a station officer, because I said, "Bill, you know, my job with the military is finished. And, you know, what do I do next?" He wanted me to stay on and I didn't feel like staying on. And so I sent a wire back to Washington, and he agreed. I said, in effect, “My job is done here, I did what you asked me to do. What is my next assignment?" Just like that. And they finally said, “Come on back to Washington." And I came back to Washington and briefed everybody. But anyway, that was my relationship with Bill. I knew him well enough then. He's just a different opinionated, very firm in what opinions he holds, he holds, period. And it's a hell of a job to try and get him to change his mind. I'll give you a simple thing. He was running air operations, dropping agents into North Vietnam. And one night I remember we were in the communications shack (communications room). And he had sent an “Ops immediate" and didn't get an answer. The © plane was warming up on the field, waiting to go. And they had to get a “yes" . or "no" to go. I said, “Bill, they haven't answered in over an hour, for 64 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET God's sakes, hit them again.“ He said, “Oh no, you can't do that." “What do you mean you can't do that? Send another message. What the hell, it doesn't cost you anything. It doesn't hurt. Tell them you are still standing by." And he said, “Well, they know that." And I said, “Bill, send them a message. The message could have gotten lost in Manila." He said, “Nothing like that ever happens at Clark Field," actually. He said, "Nothing like that happens.“ Well, in this case it did, it actually did get lost because of the way they had to handle, “man handle," these tapes in those days. And I've been there and saw the way these guys were working, down to there skin, I mean, they didn't have their shirts on, even undershirts. “And it was sweaty and hot even with the air conditioners going in those days Croom air conditioners). And these big perforated tapes were around their necks and what. have you. One of them got lost and if it happened to be an "Ops M" then, it was too bad. | | INTERVIEWER: An Ops M? "MR. HALPERN: Operational Media was the precedence. You had “Routine, “ "Priority," “Operational Media slash" something like that. INTERVIEWER: Okay. MR. HALPERN: There were several routing precedences, basically. And we got to call them Op M simply because you didn't want to say Operational media all the time. And one of them got lost. You know, they weren't "Flash" messages, which I hope won't get lost ever. But I finally had to convince Bill just to send another message. back saying, "I need an answer." And it took a hell of a long while. It took longer than it should. It took almost two hours for me to tell him, "Get the goddamn message out." And we got a 65 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET message back, and the first thing it says is, “Didn't get your reference. _What are you talking about?" So we had to hit them again. You Know, explain what happened. And, but that's an example of. . . He's reluctant. You. know, if he's got a firm view of something, it's tough to get him to change his mind. INTERVIEWER: When did you work with him again after that? MR. HALPERN: Oh, actually -- oe INTERVIEWER: Saigon. MR. HALPERN: That was ‘61 and I guess the next time I worked with him again very closely was when I was for three or--four months his his Exec. When he came back from Saigon, and Dick make him the Executive Director Comptroller, I had some dealings with him because I was the Exec in DOP and just working with him. It wasn't that close in terms of the way I did in Saigon, the way I did ater in his own office. . . I-just saw him the other day as a matter of fact at a meeting. I was in town. We're still friends. We say hello to each other. INTERVIEWER: And you were his Exec for three or four months. MR. HALPERN: Yeah, he took over from Tom in February of '73 and I was reassigned out of his office, I think it was May '73. So it's March, April, May -- three months for sure -- and a couple of weeks in February and a couple of weeks in May. So it's roughly three, three to four months. . INTERVIEWER: So you were there when that memo was being prepared? MR. HALPERN: Yeah. INTERVIEWER: Uh huh. MR. HALPERN: That's why I keep saying, I keep telling my friends, "You're blaming the wrong guy!" 66 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET INTERVIEWER: You have reason to know. MR. HALPERN: Yeah. And you see part of my problem too was, and this was true later when Bill took over, and even that summer, and later when he took over as the DCI, he was talking in terms about one Agency. He wanted one big Agency. He didn't want this split between DDI and DDP and the DDA and the DDS then and now they have S&T. One big Agency. Everybody know everything. And I said, “What are you going to do, tack all the cables up on the bulletin board? Put all the operations up on the bulletin board so everybody can read all this stuff?" And this lasted for a little while, like a couple of months, I think. And finally it even finally began to sink inona guy called Bill Colby. Jesus, there have got to be some compartmentations somewhere. And we've got to stop all this, everybody know everything. He wanted one Agency, one Agency. All does not run a... That was part of Turner's problem. Read Turner's book. And read my review of Turner's book if you haven't. I'l] give you a copy. Turner could never understand it. He couldn't understand why he had all these different Directorates, which he for some crazy reason called branches. And he still talks about it as branches. He didn't understand that | they're simply separate activities: Each one of those things, except the DDA, can be its own independent Agency. Literally. And the DDA simply supplies the men, money, material (the three m's) for everybody. And at one time, at. least in the early days, 80-85% of what the DDA did for a living, they did for the DDP. INTERVIEWER: That high a percentage? MR. HALPERN: Yeah, and that was before DDS&T came along. INTERVIEWER: Right, yeah. 67 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET MR. HALPERN: And I said, in those days, I said, "Well, why the hell don't we just absorb them, make them part of us,.you know, as part of our command?" And that led to another big hoorah, but we never did get command. But they did. Eighty-five percent of their activity was for us. INTERVIEWER: Did you, at the time Bill Colby was talking about one big Agency. oo | | Oe MR. HALPERN: ‘73, '74. INTERVIEWER: Yeah, why? MR. HALPERN: Well, because of what we were talking about before. The difference of views, the different cultures involved, in both what the collector and the analysts. And then of course you had the new thing called technicians -- technical people -- which is a totally different aspect, even for us in the DDP. Our technicians were our TSD types or the commo types. And we did some SIGINT of our own and that kind of stuff, but with the use of the commo guy, the operators of the machines. We weren't into overhead. reconnaissance and things like that, for God's sakes, and other black box activities, except even the black boxes, they asked us to deliver in many parts of the world. We had to do the drops, we had to get. them in either by hook or by crook and things like that into the right location and all that kind of stuff. So there was a marriage there. But basically, as I said, each one of these three Directorates could honestly, and you could come up with good rationale for making separate Agencies of each one of them. And sO when Bill talks about one Agency, one big family, he was trying to merge us all | _ together and make us, like Turner says in his book, he wanted to make everybody be able to do everybody else's job. Well, that is kind of silly. 68 SECRET
13-00000 eel SECRET And as I point out in my review of his book, I said, “You don't take an. artillery: officer and make a.submarine captain out of him. Or vice versa. Sure, you can do it over a period of training, but if a guy wants to be a sub captain, he goes into the sub service. He doesn't join the artillery. And vice versa." And I said, “You Know, people are not that changeable." © INTERVIEWER: Were you surprised when Colby tried to do this? MR. HALPERN: No. Not really. I am never surprised at anything Bill Colby wants to do. Never. INTERVIEWER: And that dates back to ‘56? MR. HALPERN: Yeah. That dates back to 56. And I wasn't the only FE officer who saw it in '56. Believe me. INTERVIEWER: Is that right? That early on?. MR. HALPERN: You could spot it. We did. I am not unique in this. Talk to some of the old FE hands and see what they tell you. . dust don't take it from me. . , INTERVIEWER: “How about the, we will come back to that later, how about, did , you have much of anything ‘to do with the Rockefeller Commission? MR. HALPERN: No. I didn't have anything at all. None of it. I read their ‘report. I'l] show you my copy. It's all marked up. They've got so much misinformation in there, it's not even funny. I mean, even they're screwed | up. I mean the nature of the business. It's like Robin Winks, he's got a lot - of misinformation in there, Ranelagh got a lot of misinformation. People just can't get . . . If I wrote a book, I'd have a lot of things wrong if I started to go outside of things I personally know about. You know, all you can do is conjecture. And how do you sort the wheat from the chaff? You are going to have a hell of a job. | 69 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET INTERVIEWER: I think so. Okay. How about moving towards the Hearings. One . writer said about Mr. Colby that Mr. Colby believed salvation for the Agency lay in cooperation with the investigations, while other intelligence professionals thought intelligence secrets were forever. . MR. HALPERN: I'm with the second group. INTERVIEWER: You are with the second group. MR. HALPERN: Yeah. And I will refer you to Colby‘s own book in which he says -- this is before the Church Committee was created —- January the 15th, 1975. Colby went to testify in public before the, I think. it was the Armed Services, it might have been Appropriations. I forget now. I think it was Russell or Vinson, I forget the exact person. But anyway, and he says in his book after he testified, after he testified in which he exposed for the first time, even though the law didn't require him to do that, by the law, as a matter of fact, you're supposed keep secret the organizational structure and breakdown of CIA. Colby blew it for the first time, exposed the whole organizational structure in public and went far beyond even that. for the first time in public testimony. And he says in his book, on the way back from the Hill going to his office in Langley, it suddenly dawned on him that he might stop off at the White House and alert them to what he has. just done so that the news doesn't - hit them cold. And in ny book, that in effect damned the hell out of Bill . Colby. Because as a serving. officer, as a serving DCI, his first port of call even before he went near the Hill would have been to go into the President's office, I don't care who the President is, his boss and say, “Boss, this is what I've been asked to do, this is what I intend to do. Is it okay with you?" He never did. By the time it got to the White House, it was too late 70 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET to do any kind of damage control or approach it a totally different way, and .the President may not have wanted to, because Ford wasn't the strongest guy in the world, may not have wanted him to say anything. He may have wanted him to invoke Executive immunity or whatever. But Colby by doing what he did, by testifying first, cut the feet out from under the President. The President had no choice except to continue. And after that Colby just went on and on and on and.on and on. And never held back. And he had every reason to hold back, particularly in the public hearings. Executive hearings, it might have been different. But in public hearings, you know, in ny book he went far far beyond what he needed to do. INTERVIEWER: Was there ever any talk’ when these. . . MR. HALPERN: And I was out of the Agency by then. INTERVIEWER: You were out? MR. HALPERN: By. ‘75. INTERVIEWER: When the materials were gathered, “Family Jewels," ever any talk about why that didn't get over to the White House or apparently he had briefed, he Colby, had briefed some committee, but did not fill the White “House in. MR. HALPERN: I don't know.. I don't know. I was back in the Agency in January ‘75, because I retired December 31, '74. My sidekick and buddy, Seymour Bolton, who is now dead, unfortunately, may he rest in peace, also retired December 31, '74, but he went back to work right after the new year. To start, we didn't know that a Church Committee and he didn't know that a Church Committee was being created and what have you, but he knew that there 7 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET was going to be problems in terms of the two Hersh articles. And Seymour convinced several of the powers that be in the Agency, including Bill, and then he finally convinced me to come on back to the Agency to help out, pulling together the stuff, because they kind of felt that I knew where the poop was. I knew roughly where it was hidden, perhaps even what safe it was in, and maybe what the hell the color of the paper was. And so I agreed to come back, and so T'was in there in January of '75 and stayed on until about March, I think, maybe April ‘75 when it dawned on me, that this is silly, a waste of time on my part because I was getting responses to my queries from all the Directorates, I mean, I was getting substantive responses from all the Directorates except. one -- the DDO. And I knew damn well where the hell the information was, that they had the information. In most cases I did. And I wasn't getting it. And the rationale I was given by several of the officers ~ ¥n the DDO was that, "We're not sure" -- or roughly like this ~- “We're not sure what Bill Colby is going to do with this information. We don't trust him. What'do you want comment for?" So I mentioned this a couple of times to (Bill and he kind of said, “Okay, okay." I thought, “This is crazy." And I finally wrote hima letter, and I sent it to his home, not to the office, because I know what the hell happens with paper shuffling. Because I've done enough of it in my day. And I said to Bill, "I quit for a very.simple | reason. You are no longer the DCI." I said, "I agree with the guys in the DDO in that nobody knows what you are going to do with this information. But ' in my book you are still the commanding officer. “And it is up to us as troops to give you the information you ask for. What you do with it is up to you. It is your conscience, not. ours. So since you are not acting as the DCI and 72 SECRET
13-00000 © SECRET insisting that you get the information you need or you want, there's no point in me hanging around. I'm retired and I'm going out of your life.“ And I walked out. | | INTERVIEWER: My goodness. Was it Scotty Miler also, didn't he retire in December? | . MR. HALPERN: 31, 1974, and Bill Hood did too and Ray Rocca did too. Well a Jot of quys went out. I think there were over 200 of us from the DDO that went out December 31, 1974. Largely, there was a lot of reasons, but one of the big reasons was the fact of the numbers, the retirement numbers. Just turned out to be right because there was a big increase coming up and if you “left by that date you got a little bit extra and that kind of stuff. So everybody walked out at the same time. I was surprised when-I got the figures from the retirement people what the hell I would be getting. So I figured I | might as well go out in December then, too. And this -was long before the Hersh articles appeared that we put our papers in. INTERVIEWER: That you had made your decision? MR. HALPERN: Yes, we all did. Of course, you had to have your papers in at a certain time anyway. And in my case, see, I wasn't on the CIARDs initially.: And I had to write a special memorandum to try to convince the powers that be in DDO and in personnel and in the Director's office that the things I had | done which were not. overseas -- I didn't have enough to qualify. I had to explain and get their approval for the activities I had done earlier done a lot of it in the States, even while serving in Washington.-- to equate X number of years abroad that [ needed. And I forget the exact figures. But - anyway, and that paper had to be put in long before the Hersh article appeared. And low and behold, they wanted to get rid of people and I was a 73 SECRET
13-00000 “SECRET - super grade. I was a GS-17. They figured they would get. another slot, and so they let me go. They made me a member of CIARDS. And as a result of being CIARDS, when I told the retirement people what would happen if I was CIARDS, then they gave me a new figure on my retirement which went up by a goodly proportion. I said, “I have no idea." INTERVIEWER: -What is CIARDS? MR. HALPERN: CIARDS js that Central Intelligence Agency Retirement and . Disability System. INTERVIEWER: Okay. MR. HALPERN: C-I-A-R-D-S. It's the name of the bill in 1964 which set up this earlier retirement for certain people with certain qualifying service: And so it's called CIARDS. And I can take it right out of the. title of the act. It has been amended a number of times since then. ~ | INTERVIEWER: What would you say the most difficult demands were in conducting the Congressional investigations in '75 as you may have: sensed at the time? — MR. HALPERN: Sensed is a good word and also when I testified. T always felt that when proper people in Congress ask questions, you gave them the answers. | ~. That's why I'm opposed to this Ollie North/Pointexter nonsense and what they did was wrong in the way they, you know, handled the Congress. And Bill Casey was wrong on that. Congress, for good or bad, for good or evil, they are the ones who set it up. They are the ones who make the rules. You've got to live by. the rules. Otherwise, you'd’ have chaos. And so the biggest problem I felt, and still feel: today, and felt at the time that I was testifying, is that yeah, I am giving you the. truth and it is up to you, Mr. Congress, to keep that information privileged. I don't want it all over the street. And one of the worst things that I thought that Frank Church did was after every 74 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET. Single executive session up on the Hill, including the one I was at, he had a television show right after the meeting broke up. They were waiting for him , outside the door with cameras and lights. And we, you and I, as American . citizens paid for all of the electricity involved because they were all plugged into the walls. But I saw it there as I came out. Fortunately, nobody ever stopped me going out. I don't know what the hell, what it was, but maybe it was because I looked so nondescript or so ignorant or whatever, because when I left that meeting, I thought there they were in the hall and walked right by them. And they were waiting for some big shot. and I wasn't a big shot. A little shot, or a little punk anyway. And I walked. ‘in, walked ‘right by them, stepping over all the wires and all their, legs because they were sitting there leaning against the wall like this, you Know, and snoring some of them. And I went into the men's room, and I didn't have on my award pin from the Agency and had just an ordinary dumb old. blue suit, I think it was. And I went right by them, went into the. john, did my business, came out, walked by them the other way, and got out of there. And that night I see Frank Church on television telling about all this stuff they had just heard. Not once, he never mentioned my name. My name was never mentioned. except, I was told later, in the late edition, a late city edition of The New York Times in New York, in one of the stories my name appeared. And I. was in the | executive session.: Nobody should have known my name. Somebody gave somebody, somebody inside gave somebody ‘outside, my name. And it was there on one line. Except I have gone to look at The New York Times index a couple of times and they've got my name listed.in that year, '75, but the page number is - all wrong. So it's one of ‘those historical things that you will never find. “You'll never find it-unless you know exactly where to look. The index will 75 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET not lead you to my name, even though it says that you should find it there. It's not the only time I have had trouble with The New York Times index. So when you talk about the biggest problem, the biggest: problem is security and leaks. That is the biggest problem on the Hill. And the Hill, I think, is beginning to realize that, maybe they have, and I think the more they talk about the joint committee with a smal] professional staff, they will be going in the right direction. I've argued for it and have written about that, too, about a single committee, a joint committee, for years now, and maybe they'll get to it. It's going to be tough but maybe they'll get to it.. | INTERVIEWER: What was your feeling in the executive session in which you were being questioned? . MR. HALPERN: I felt that I vas dealing with a bunch of nincompoops and idiots. INTERVIEWER: On the part of the staff? | MR. HALPERN: Staff and the Senators present. Goldwater was the only one that I thought had a feeling for what was going on. Schweiker was an ass. Huddleston and Mondale were totally incompetent on this particular subject, maybe because he was new. I testified in June of "75. I would have thought by that time they would have gotten some briefings from their own staff as to what the hell was going on. About what was going on. I'1] give you an | example. I mentioned somewhere along the way, I forget what the specific was, but I mentioned something about female case officers. And I was interrupted. by Mondale and Huddleston with kind of a learing Kind of a question. “And what do female officers do?" I just looked at him and I said, “What any other case officer does. They do exactly the same thing. No more, no less. They're Chiefs of Station, they're Deputy Chiefs of Station, they're ordinary Case Officers, they pound the street, they write reports, they handle paper, 76 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET they do everything everybody else does. They recruit people. They handle people, they manipulate people. What else did you expect them to do?" You know, the whole approach was, “Female case officers?" That really set me off and if I hadn't been constrained to where I was, I would have really let go in my better language, and I didn't. I tried to hold off. INTERVIEWER: How did they happen to have you come and testify? MR. HALPERN: I don't know for sure. I think it was because Helms was being called back so many times for the various committees, that he was almost like a yo-yo from Teheran as Ambassador. And I think he practically had a commuter ticket on some of the airlines the way he was coming back and forth. And on one of his trips, he asked me to brief him, and Tom Karamessines, a matter of fact, about the background on the Cuban Missile Crisis and some of the activities during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The whole Operation MONGOOSE thing. Particularly MONGOOSE which was very hot at that particular point. And a few other details. The brass isn't suppose to remember details. That's what they got guys like me around for. That's what I get paid for. So I talked to Dick and talked to Tom and gave them as much as I could. And I just guessed that somewhere along the way in their private discussion or private testimony the stuff that wasn't the public stuff, before you get in front of the public television and what have you, Dick must have said or Tom must have said, “and if you want any more detail get a hold of Sam.“ Or something like that, I guess. And so sure enough, I get the call. I didn't care. I got nothing to hide. Because I'm proud of what I did all these years. And so if they don‘t like it, that's tough. Change the system. And that's how I think I got picked. And I remember when the Church Committee began, one of my retired colleagues, and his wife who is also a retired colleague, his wife was 77 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET on the Committee staff. She arranged a dinner party with several of the new staff types - this is the Church Committee not the Pike Committee. Seymour Bolton called the Pike Committee guys a bunch of young whippersnapper, snot-nosed kids. Really. The staff on the Church Committee was a little bit better. Anyway, at this dinner party, my wife came along too. But anyway, I was the target of the night, obviously, and everybody zeroed in on me, before dinner and after dinner and everything else. In terms to the approach to this whole business, where do we go from here and how. And 1 pointed out that . they were in a totally different environment than they've ever been before, telling them this was a.different kind of a game, and I said, "You are going to be surprised at the fact that you are not going to find very much paper around. And you are not going to find whole treatises like you do in law cases and what have you." And I said, “You are going to see my name and my initials on literally thousands of pieces of paper. But I'd be willing to: bet you're. not going to find more than a smattering of any substance before that initial or before that name. You are going to find all kinds of references to ‘as we discussed’ and ‘why don't we talk about this' and, you know,' let's see what we -can do about this', ‘why don't we talk about this sometime in the future’. You are going to find very meaningless comments." And the guy said, "Don't you guys ‘ever put anything in writing?" I said, “We can, but if we can avoid it, no.“ And he said, “Well, how do you get approvals for projects?" .And I said, "You write a project, and that you'll find. You'll find lots of stuff, lots of projects that we did. Some of them are one pagers, some of them are ten pages. But that's not what makes the whole place operate." And the whole purpose was to try to get me, I suppose, to tell them how to find things and what to look for. You know, I don't have to tell them. First of all, I 78 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET wasa't witting there under oath, in the first place. And when I got under oath, yeah I told them the truth. They didn't like to hear it. I got into a big shouting contest with a guy called Gary Hart. He was sitting in the background. He wasn't even _- he was sitting with the staff, asa matter of fact. I guess that was part of his popularism or something. And he made some remark in the ‘back there and I shouted back at him. I didn't give a damn. I made some remark about the Operation MONGOOSE we were talking about at the time and I said this was, as far as I was concerned, this was American foreign policy made by the President. And this voice in the back, I later found out it was Gary Hart, said something about, “Hey, well that doesn't make American foreign policy." I said, "As far as I'm concerned if the President says that - is what we are doing and the Attorney General agrees, that's what we are doing. That's foreign policy." You know, and Church cut off. INTERVIEWER: . Was Mathias there, do you remember at all? MR. HALPERN: Yes, yes he was there. He didn't bother me much. I think it was Mac that was there. . I know Schweiker was there and I know Goldwater was _ there. INTERVIEWER: Tower? . MR. HALPERN: Yes, Tower was there. He didn't say much. INTERVIEWER: No. —_ MR. HALPERN: It was mostly Church and, of. course, F.A.O. Schwarz as the Staff. Director. Yeah, that was a funny one too. I'd been called to talk to Schwarz on the Staff first in the morning, a crack of dawn kind of thing. And I got down there. And this was ih the old, oh, what the hell is ‘the building, the Senate building, not the Rayburn Building, the other one. INTERVIEWER: Cannon? . 79 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET INTERVIEKER: Did not? MR. HALPERN: Did not. There were four people that I knew of. Oh, I think the deputy knew that the case officer involved was meeting with AMLASH sure. But that was strictly as an intelligence operation. And maybe as a political action operation. But not assassination. There were four people who knew about the assassination aspects. I think I mentioned to you. The case officer, me, the doctor to whom I introduced the case officer to prepare the pen, ‘and my boss, Fitzgerald. Those were the four. And I don't even think that Des told Helms about the pen. That's a technical. detail. How much else — he told him, I have no idea. I never asked him, he never mentioned, so we went on ahead and did our business. But yeah, there was anxiety in terms of trying to maintain a secure operation, a sensitive operation, and that was it. I mean, we were really trying to hang onto what the heck we were doing. INTERVIEWER: How about when the Hearings occurred. Suppose those Hearings, this is an iffy question -- MR. HALPERN: “Go ahead. INTERVIEWER: Had occurred back in '62 or ‘63. MR. HALPERN: Well, it would be into '63 because that's when we started. ’ INTERVIEWER: Okay, ‘63, '64. You think the quote outrage unquote would have been different? MR. HALPERN: It's hard to say. It would depend upon the circumstances in which the Hearings were held. And what kind 102 SECRET
13-00000 _. SECRET again, I don't know who his staff officer was or who was briefing him beforehand. INTERVIEWER: When you say worst, you mean; informed or not informed? | | MR. HALPERN: It seemed to me il] informed. INTERVIEWER: | 111 informed. | MR. HALPERN: I11 informed. And by the time they were talking - to me, as I say, I think it was June of '75, hell, I'm a junior . officer of all of the brass that went up. to that place for debriefings or testimony or what have you. I would have thought by that time they would have had a better appreciation _ of what the hell the world is all about. And how foreign policy is made and conducted. And what international relations is all about. And just, I'd send them back to International Relations 101 in Political Science 101 or some junior college somewhere. It was just pathetic. I'm.no great brain. But at ‘least I went through City College in New York where I had some decent professors who taught me what the hell the world was | like. - INTERVIEWER: What about the Pike Committee? MR. HALPERN: I had nothing: to do with the Pike Committee. INTERVIEWER: Nothing at all? MR. HALPERN: Thank the Lord! Nothing. All I know is what I heard from friends of mine,” including Seymour Bolton who had a lot to do with them because he was the Agency contact with them. And both committees as a matter of fact. He and Scott 115 SECRET
13-00000 SECRET INTERVIEWER: MR. HALPERN: INTERVIEWER: .MR. HALPERN: Oh wow. There's American foreign policy. . Yeah, exactly. Right there. " You know, Bill didn't have to sit around with a lot of people, a lot of staff. I'm sure he went “and got whatever he needed to do to get the thing approved and 128 SECRET