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2025 RELEASE UNDER THE PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY ASSASSINATION RECORDS ACT OF 1992

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NO. 279

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The Special Investigations Group Of the CI Staff (CI/SIG)

CI/SIG (the Special Investigations Group) did not exist

prior to the establishment of the CI Staff in early 1955.

Its

major functions as described in CSI No. 70-1 of March 1955 are

much more modest than the functions ascribed to it in a write-up

by the Staff in early 1973. The 1955 description of functions

is as follows:

"Special Investigation Unit

"Major Functions

"Performs the CI investigation and analysis of any

known or potential

security leak in the Clandestine

Services

organization, whether

in headquarters or in

the field,

rom the standpoint of its effect on (1)

In performing this function, maintains alone soing

and (2) the cover of personnel.

relations with the Security

Office, the latter being

primarily concerned in such cases from Agency

security rather than an operational security stand-

poirt."

By 1973 the description of tasks which had been assigned

to CI/SIG or which they had absorbed during the course of

events over a period of nearly two decades provides a much

broader range of functions and responsibilities.

They are listed

as follows:

"CI/Special Investigations Group

'1. Conducts research into the long-range validit)

of CIA

operations in terms of know

or potential hostile

capabilities, including penetrations, and of Agency security.

in such cases.

Carries out coordination with the Office of Security

"3.

Maintains and uses sensitive counterintelligence

holdings, including certain Comint and defector materials,

to match these against operational and personality data

and thus to derive operational leads.

"4. Coordinates and cooperates with counterintelligence

and security elements of other departments and agencies of

the USG to detect, tabulate, and take counter-action against

hostile plans or approaches

abroad for

the recruitment of

American officials (American

Targets Program),

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Plays a direct role in sensitive counterintel-

ligence liaison with closely

allied foreign intelligence

services on hostile penetration plans and operations.

"6.

Reviews compatibility between cover and

assignments

of CIA staff members.

Maintains central data on leaks to the news

media and assists the Office of Security, as necessary,

in determining the sources of leaks.

"8. Maintains central data on the nature and

extent of known compromise of Agency staff personne:

io intelligence services, whether liaison or hostile.

Prepares studies of individuals, including

• journalists whose foreign intelligence connections are

"10. Carries out additional and sensitive tasks as

assigned by the C/CI."

The first chief of the Special Investigation Unit (SIU) (as

it was called in CSI NO. 70-1) was Birch O'Neal, a former FBI

officer who had transferred to CIA after World War II,* In the

mid-fifties SIG had rather slim picking and appears to have spent

most of its"time investigating various aspects of the ECMÁYPONLY

complex (the (Boris Morros case) as it affected US interests based

on information the Agency acquired from foreign sources. Then in

1962 SIG received its biggest shot in the arm with the defection

of Golitsyn who brought with him several dozen leads to American

citizens including some supposedly in CIA. The handling of these

leads was assigned to SIG by Angleton, including the information

emanating from Golitsyn, which related to foreign countries.

Thus

O'Neal and his assistant, Jean Evans, played a major role in

directing the handling of the Golitsyn leads (or "Serials" as

Angleton invariably called them).. The activity continued through-

out the sixties reaching its apex in the period 1964-65 when the

HONETOL investigations (of CIA staff officers) was at its most

*The term Special Investigations Group (SIG) became common

usage in

the sixties but no exact date can be assigned for

this change.

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98

Esrael, and a contract agent in New York. In addition to the

Office of the Chief (including two special assistants and a

Secretariat) the Staff was composed of seven "Divisions" and

four "Groups.")

For fiscal year 1958 the CI Staff budget was $f, 650,000.

The sum of SI, 800,00g was allotted for Fiscal Year 1959, and

$2,000,000 was to be requested for 1960. Specific figures were

quoted in the appropriate sections for projects or support,

such as travel. Otherwise the budget was almost solely for

salaries of Staff personnel.

The survey next gave brief attention to deception, agreeing

that it had to be carefully compartmented and that it best

belonged in the CI Staff. On the subject of the Special Investi-

gation Unity however, the survey took its first serious exception

to the organization and operation of the Staff stating:

"Hence,

in order not to contaminate a senior staff

(C1 Staff) with Agency employee investigation and/or

exploitation

this should be done by individuals with

CE ability within a special section of the Office of

Security. It is

"Recommended that:

1a.

The DD/P release for assignment to the Office

of Security several individuals, as may be approprlate

of proven cE ability to handle and exploit all cases of

CE aspect involving Agency personnel;

Statt; and D and its function be eliminated from cI

"c. The DCI approve the above recommendations."

The survey tean took special note of the Projects Branch of

CI Staff, the section that handled the

mail opening project.

How it was operated

and viewed in 1959 is not without interest

in view of its subsequent role in the "Family Jewels" issue when

it was revealed to the Rockefeller and Church Committees.

Thus

it is revealing to note the 1959 survey found nothing wrong with

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the mail opening program except they worried about its security

and also thought it would be more effective if expanded. This

is how the survey described the project in 1959:

The Project Branch conducts a project of

censorship within the US of mail from

is called HTLINGUAL.

developed by the office of security at the ce was

Security at the request

of SR Division in 1952.

Its purpose was to identify

and to obtain samples of handwriting and basic back-

long established correspondence

go to rain tane bot ad pere ordinates.

sustain any communications with secret writing,

which would likely pass the Soviet censors and

be picked up in the U.S.A.

The interception is done

at the central Post Office in New York,

letters are delivered to the Agency for processing

As the need for Soviet communication

camouflage lessened with the increase of legal

travel to and from the USSR the Project was re-

oriented and expanded toward direct CI and FI

in September 1956, and it was taken over by the

At present this

groupyncludes five

employees in New York and fifteen at Headquarters.

in New York are under the Office of Security;

those in Headquarters

under the CI Staff.

yearly cost is the total of the various salaries.

The primary purposes of this Project are to

Ce information; operational leads

positive intelligence that can be gleaned from the

The operation in New York photographs

out of a total of

dividuals in the U.S.A. via

These films

forwarded to Headquarters

and examined in the

"Projects Branch and some 10,000 of them

are selected

on the basis of Agency interest in the areas of

origin in Russia.

These 10,000 negatives are then

and the names of

are recorded alphabetically me tM cards.

the addressees

From the

IBM cards RI makes a continuing record and a copy

of this record of names is returned to the Projects

About 1,000 of these intercepts are opene

per month in New York by the office of

Security,

the letters verifaxed and copies sent to the Projects

Sranch at Headquarters.

There is a watch list of

some 500 names on file both in

the Branch at Head-.

quarters and in the Security Office in New York and

any letters coming from or going to any of the names

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this list are opened.

This watch list is revised

and neuco, ames to a he

It is made up of names of interest

princi-

and the Security Office,

There are trained linguist-analysts in the

Branch who extract information

of interest from the

intercepts,

the disseminability of this information

is determined by the Chief of Projects Branch.

present the rate of dissemination from Projects Branch

average of about 150 per month and the

number is increasing.

Sixty percent of these dissemina-

tions are positive intelligence.

The disseminations

are controlled by the Deputy Chief of CI Staff.

"g.

SR Division has obtained valuable operational

leads from this Project, and the FBI wants as much•

information as it can get by this means.

There are 40 individuals in CIA who are

officially cleared to know about this Project.

Director

DD/P) and the Chief,

FI Staff.

The DCI, DCI ane the 1G

Staff also have access. to the Project.

It would appear

present results that much

more-value could be obtained from this Project if more

intercepts were opened.

Project Branch is

at present

handling four times as much volume as it did in the past

with the same number of personnel and at the same cost.

'Its staff at Headquarters is capable of handling 2,000

per month with the present T/O, but the New York staff

could not supply that number of opened intercepts unless

It is felt by the Branch

that a rate of 4,000 intercepts per month would be a

good future goal.

It is estimated that this would

require an increase of one interceptor, one secretary

one letter opener in New York and an addition to

Project Branch at Headquarters of four linguist-analysts,

four clerical personnel and one reports officer.

The Office of Security; which works with

Project Branch, is agreeable to the gradual expansion of

It would be in favor of expanding at

present to the extent

of opening more intercepts,

taking samples of thesé intercepts

for S. W.

This could"

be done by the aforementioned increase of Security

personnel in New York without an immediate increase in the

Headquarters staff.

It would be

operationally much more

feasible if a secure room could be obtained in the Post

Office in New York for their sole use..

Since the DCI

made the original arrangement for this operation with

hiet Postal Inspector

any changes in

peration should be made in the same way.

This is the

only level at which such arrangements could be accom-

plished securely."

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versus area division prerogative in the conduct of operations.

Noting that there might have been some immediate reasons for the

CI Staff to take on operational aspects in its efforts to increase

CI activity, nevertheless it concluded these reasons were not

necessarily based on the best operational and organizational pro-

cedures and methods. The normal staff functions, the survey

opined, could be carried out effectively with a much smaller but

highly experienced staff whose impact and counsel would more

favorably be received by the operating elements of the DD/P. The

team also concluded that there had been insufficient attention

given to penetrating hostile intelligence organizations and

recommended that:

"Chief, CI direct the efforts of the CI Staff: toward

the development of programs for

the aggressive pursuit of

penetration activity against hostile intelligence services."

In a forward to the report, the Inspector General of the day,

Lyman Kirkpatrick, directed special attention to

one particular

aspect of CI work.

"The Special Investigation Division assists the

Office of Security in using DD/P assets to trace leads

concerning ClA employees.

This is probably a necessary

assist to the Office of Security but should be handled

with the utmost of discretion and security.

It would be

very seriously damaging to the efforts' of the CI Staff

if it ever became known that it was engaged in any

An analgous

situation

created

abroad that

CIA reports on other US Government employees.

Thus within ClA the Office

Security must be the

unit to bear the stigma of being concerned with fellow

sole

employees."

Unfortunately this sensible warning was not heeded by CI

Staff management, or by the management of the Clandestine

Service

as

a whole for that matter.

Instead,

in the mid-1960s the CI

Staff, with SIG in the vanguard, hypnotized by the allegations

of Golitsyn, launched HONBTOL - the active investigation of.

numerous Agency employees (five in particular) - with

generally

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had written a provocative analysis that found Nosenko bona

fide and challenged as incorrect the Monster Plot

assessmenta to the contrary. Even more provocative, he had

provided a copy directly to then DDCI Richard Helms when

stymied within the soviet Division in promoting his view.

Kalaris first learned of this well after McCoy joined the

staff, when McCoy himself told him. Angleton, on the other

hand, was certainly not unaware of this part of Mccoy's

background, and it is likely that he and Rocca and Miler

interpreted Kalaris's selection of McCoy as evidence that

Kalaris was out to discredit them.

Kalaris, originally having been summoned home to take

over temporarily until a replacenent for Angleton could be

found, had a title in the beginning as "Acting Chief,

CIOPS." In March, Nelson told him, "we haven't found

anybody yet," and as time went on it looked increasingly as

if he and colby were not going to find anyone. But by this

tine Kalaris was becoming intrigued with what he was doing,

and with the potential of the job. He went back to brasilia) o

to see his fanily in late March, and when he returned he

told Nelson he would take the job on a pernanent basis.

In

June, the "Acting" was dropped and Kalaris became chief,

CIOPS.

What Kalaris Found...

The StatE of Affaire

As he looked around, Kalaris found what struck hin as a

desolate situation. Mountains of traffic were coning in to

the staff, but none of it seemed to be of much importance.

The staff had no relationship with the Soviet Division or

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any of the other geographic divisions. If the divisions had

any significant cases, kalaris was unaware of them because

the divisions were giving hin nothing of substance. Mecoy's

arrival in the staff made this picture unmistakably clear

1 , since, fresh fron SE Division and a position therein that

made him privy to virtually all the division's sensitive

cases, he was able to tell kalarie what he was missing on

the sE front.

It also before long became evident that there was an

element of a two-way street in this situation. Soviet-East

European cases were discovered in CI Staff files that the

area divisions had never been informed of or had only

limited information about. These included such cases as

MORINE

la past FBI source of voluminous GRU operational

documents who was known to the soviet Division but whose

operational leads had been shared neither with that division

nor with the other geographic divisions in whose territory

the soviet agents were working) : [KITTYHAW) (a KGB officer

who had contacted CIA during a visit to the United States

several years back and who figured in a double-agent game

being run by the FBI): GRIDIRON (Leslie Janes Bennett,

former senior officer in Soviet counterespionage in the

Canadian RCMP who had resigned from that service in 1972

under a cloud of suspicion engendered by the Angleton staff

and its guru Anatoliy Golitsyn--a case never briefed to

either SE OF, Ua DivISion; and gaPtyor, also known as fazONE

‹Constantin Dumitrachescu, a Ronanian intelligence officer

who defected in (israel) in 1972 and subsequently came to this

country and was debriefed by CIOPS officers, but whose

information and leads had not been furnished to the area

divisions) .

Many of the people in the staff had been hand-picked by

Angleton. They had been in their jobs for a number of years

and were well settled into their way of doing things. so

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DILALI BENDLIAVY NUKUHA

well in fact that: most had given up hope of ever going

anywhere else or accomplishing anything new.

compartmentation was a way of life, and management was

remote from the rank and file. Kalaris was appalled to

learn that his chief of support, who had worked in the staff

for four or five years, had never met Angleton; he had only

seen him fron a distance. The overall atmosphere seemed to

Kalaris to be conditioned by doublethink and mirrors.

Compartmentation in the Angleton staff had been carried

to such extremes, however, as to become counterproductive.

With Angleton not disposed to be forthcoming with his

successor, and Rocca and Miler taking their lead fron him

land Hood already having left the staff and the Agency some

months earlier), it was difficult for the kalaris team to

find out what the staff had been doing. Like the blind men

and the elephant, the personnel below the top leadership had

never been exposed to more than their own narrow slice of

staff activities, and accordingly even with the best of will

they were limited in what they were able to tell the new

management. The MORINE case (see below) provided a vivid

illustration of this point.

Mccoy, with his soviet Division background, was

particularly struck at the almost total absence of soviet

expertise in the staff. There was no Russian language

capability and no realistic area knowledge, and what

experience there was in Soviet matters was dated and

limited. This was the case not only in R&A, but in the

Operations Group as well.

NO. 279 F.10

One of the first things kalaris had to do after

assuming office was find out what was in the safes and

vaults in the Angleton premises. This ultimately took

months, as there vere several vaults and many safes

= containing among then lasge quantities of paper. All this

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• .

had to be reviewed, and not only for the purpose of

determining what it was all about. significant segments of

this naterial, it was discovered, were unique to the CI

Staff and had never been integrated into the DO file and

records system. Infornation from the nail-intercept

progran, for example, was indexed inside the CI Staff, but

reflected nowhere outside. Other material largely

duplicated files maintained by other elements. Sone files

contained mostly press clippings. Decisions had to be made

and action taken, item by iten, on indexing, transfer of

files, determinations of what needed to be retained and what

could or should be destroyed, etc. As the magnitude of this

task becane evident, arrangements were made for personnel

Iron IMS to be detailed to the staff on a long-term basia to

go through the material.

In a vaulted area across from Angleton's office a

couple of sales were found for which no combination could be

located, and which accordingly had to be drilled by

specialists fron the office of security. Kalaris rejects as

untrue the image conveyed in Mangold's book about Angleton

that has him personally leading SWAT teans of safecrackers

as they went about opening the Angleton safes, * but it is

correct that he was present during the drilling. He had

never seen this operation perforned before, and was

interested to observe how it was done.

some curious and some disquieting things turned up as

the new team gradually made its way through the CI Staff

premises.

--on the lighter side, in one safe two Bushman bows and

some arrows were found. Concerned about the possibility

that the arrous might be poisoned, Kalaris had them sent--

* Tom Mangold, Cold warrior, Simon a Schuster, 1991,

pp. 327-330

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very carefully--to OrS for examination.* When they were

returned, with a judgment that they were harmless, Kalarie

gave then to Angleton as a personal memento.

Cy Staff Memo

CI 136-75, 10 July 1975

io

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--In a nore serious vein, files vere found on the

assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother

'Robert f. Kennedy. These included autopsy pictures of the

remains of Robert Kennedy. Although Nosenko's account of

the KGB's involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald and his denial

that the KGB had anything to do wich the murder of John

Kennedy might reasonably explain an Angleton interest in the

John Kennedy assassination, neither Kalaris nor Blee, with

whom Kalaris consulted on this bizarre finding, had any idea

why Angleton had the pictures. Neither could they think of

any reason why it was appropriate for CI Staff files to

contain then.

They vere accordingly destroyed.

--Angleton's dogged pursuit, inspired by Golitsyn and

his theories, of soviet intelligence penetration of cIA had

led to secret investigations, stretching over a period of

many years, of over forty serving CIA officers. Known as

the HONeTOL cases, and later sometimes referred to in the

popular literature as the Great Molehunt, this activity had

produced

extensive files in the CI Staff.* In addition,

several hundred files were found on American citizens who

were not CIA personnel but on whom Golitsyn analysia had

similarly cast some sort of KGB shadow. Anong the most

noteworthy of these vere files on W. Averell Harriman and

Henry Kissinger. Most of these files were composed entirely

of newspaper reports and a few fBi reports.

--classified materials, in quantities that ultimately

filled several packing boxes, were eventually found in

Colitsyn's possassion at his upstata you torry sara house.

some of chis material consisted of personnel-type files on

CIA staff officers. Golitsyn, who resisted returning these

documents when Kalaris sent people to retrieve then,

* The term "HONETOL, " used as an acronym, allegedly derives

fxon a combination of parts of the last name of FBI directoI

John Edgar Hoover and the first name of Soviet KGB defector

and Angleton guru Anatoliy Golitsyn.

11

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•

maintained that Angleton and Miler had given these files to

him to review and to keep as long as he needed them, and he

was not finished with ther yet. Ultimately, all the files

that were found were retrieved fron Golitsyn, though it has

never been possible to be certain that this represented all

the files that he in fact had.

P. 14

-A potentially explosive find surfaced in June: a bag

of mail from the mail-intercept--HTLINGUAL--program. It had

been the public exposé of HILINGUAL and the MACHAOS program,

infiltration of donestic leftist and dissident groups in

search of insidious foreign sponsorship, in a front page

story by seymour Hersh in The New York Times on 22 December

1974 that had precipitated colby's decision to force

Angleton's retirement, and led to establishment in 1975 of

the Rockefeller Commission on CIA Activities in the United

States, and the Church (Senate) and Pike (House) connittees

to investigate CIA and its activities. Both these programo

had been CI Staff responsibilities. CIA was receiving

letters from citizens who believed CIA had intercepted their

mail, a CI Staff representative had just finished briefing

the Senate Select Committee Stall on the subject, t and Colby

on 10 July would

be making a statement on the mail-intercept

program before the Postal Facilities, Mail, and Labor

Management subcommittee of the House Post Office and Civil

Service Committee. The bag of mail was a hot potato.

Kalaris's memorandum to ADDO Blee dated 3 July 1975 tells

the story.**

27,16-7

"1. In the course of preparing for a move of CI

Project materials from one vault to another, we found, on

top of a shell, a dispatch (dated) 27 March 1972 from cos

panana City to Chief Wi. This dispatch forwarded 114 items

mailed from the soviet Union to various persons in the U.5.y

•Ernest TalKerdana) CI 088-75, 17 June 1975

* CI 113-75, 3 July 1975

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These had been in a package delivered to a doctor in the

(Canal zone), Who turned them over to the Elstion unich in

turn forwarded then to Headquarters. The dispatch was

passed to CI Staff by Wl Division in 1972. A note on the

dispatch

indicates that CI Staff took no action other than

to process the materials into its files; but the cl project

continued to hold the originals. At the time CI project

theorized that a mailing label on a package exon olympus 29

corporation] in New Hyde Park, New York, to the [canal Long]

doctor had fallen off the package for the doctor, and been

erxoneously fastened to the package containing the soviet

mail.

"2. This is the only case as far as we know in which

the original mail has been held by this Agency, In all

other cases we exanined the nail, opened it surreptitiously,

photographed it, and put it back into the nail channels for

delivery to the addressee. Thus, this presents us wich a

peculiar problem. The letters have all been opened with a

letter opener. We do not know at what point along the way

the letters were opened.

"3. We solicit your advice. There seems to be at

least to courses which we night pursue. We could send

these items to the people to whom they are addressed, under

cover of a letter explaining how we had acquired the mail

and apologizing for our delay in forwarding it. Another

course of action would be to reinsert the mail into the

postal system by forwarding it under cover of a memorandun

to the U.S. Postal Service, In the memorandum we would

state that the mail came into our hands overseas, and was

inadvertently held. The menorandum would further state that

this Agency does not know at what point the mail was opened.

"Attachments: 114 Items

¿ [Hungarian custom's (sic) Declarations?

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1 U.S. Registered Mail/Return Receipt

85 Post Carde

25 Letters

¿(Swedish Custom's (siC) Declaration"

--The person who brought the letters to kalaris, the

supervisor of the summer employee who actually found them,

was knoun to be an Angleton loyalist, and Kalaris could see

a trap unfolding in front of him if he mishandled the

matter. The deliverer could be expected to tell Angleton

just what was done with the letters, and Angleton to find

ways to exploit any ill conceived decisions.

After due

deliberation, the staff of the senate conmittee vas

informed, and on 16 July, not quite two weeks after the

initial nemorandum on this subject, the DCI sent the mail to

the Postmaster General undex cover of a letter explaining

the situation.

The Postnaster General in turn sent a copy

of this letter, along with the actual mail and a letter of

his own, to each addressee. The Postmaster General's letter

referred to "apparent interception and acknowledged

retention of this mail by the CIA," and described the natter

as "a serious violation of your rights" and "abuse of the

mails."* In due course some of

the recipients wrote letters

to the DCI asking whether CIA had dossiers on them.

In April a folder with some/ MORINE material was found

in an RiA safe and delivered to McCoy, who, believing that

he had stumbled upon an overlooked vein of

counterintelligence gold, brought the matter to Kalaris's

attention. MORINE in fact had not been overlooked by

Angleton, but this was not apparent at the time. The

discovery of this folder led to a menorandur to Nelson a few

days later, entitled "Skeletons in the CIOPS Closet, "

CI 180-75, 15 August 1975

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the staff, on its own and without coordination with the

divlaion, had passed to foreign aison) a copy of a r16S

containing division-controlled NOFORN infornation.

Paper and Records: Disposal and Reintegration

The paper-and-records problen was high on the agenda of

issues that needed to be addressed. The quantity that the

Angleton vaults and safes contained was almost overwhelming,

and much of this had never been made available outside the

staff. Integration of this unique data into the Do records

systen not only made conmon sense; it was an obvious

prerequisite to the staff rejoining the directorate.

Kalaris had no problem in principle with the concept of

keeping certain information within the staff, as se did with

its RESTORAGE system, but the Angleton team had gone

overboard, Whether for reasons of bureaucratic style or

fear of penetration of the Agency, information of all kinds

and from all kinds of sources had been held privately. All

this had first to be revieved to identify what was

appropriate to retain and what was not, and the appropriate

then made retrievable.

In the wake of the Rockefeller Commission investigation

and the Church and Pike conmittee hearings, the Agency and

the do were busy writing regulations and providing

guidelines to operating elements on

what was and was not

proper activity, particularly vis-ä-vis US persons. For

the CI staff, this heavily involved definitiong of subjects

and activities that nerited staff atrention. Executive

orders would later provide a franework, albeit often

maddeningly imprecise, for these questions, but the first of

those addressing US foreign intelligence activitites, E.O.

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11905, Was not issued until February 1976.* In the

meanwhile, advice from the Hill and the lawyers supplied the

framework. And there appeared to be hundreds, perhaps

thousands of files in the Angleton staff that had been

created and maintained according to criteria, e.g.,

anticonmunign, that did not fit these guidelines.

Establishment of a guideline that counterintelligence

files were not to be established and maintained solely on

the basis of items in the press provided for elimination of

a large percentage of the material that had been collected

by the Angleton staft, prominent anong this being files on

HenrY Kissinger, W. Averell Harrinan, and some 30-40 US

congressmen, among others. Common sense provided other

working guidelines such as, for example, the simplistic role

of thumb: if a file has some linkage to reality, retain it;

if not, destroy it. People fron RID were brought in to help

decide what should go into the overall records system, and

what did not belong there, Some of them effectively noved

into the staff. And they were not the only outsiders to do

this. In July 1975 the Department of Justice sent some

lawyers to review the HILINGUAL material, and when they

discovered that there were 27 boxes of it in one of the

staff vaults it was decided that the best place for them to

do their work would be right there. Three dests were set up

for them in the vault.

some statistics from monthly reports at the time give a

glinpse of the Augean task of dealing with all of this paper

and records.

- January 1976: Five Branch personnel spent 2-1/2

days reviewing all files held in the branch for a count of,

= Signed by President Gerald R. Ford, February 18, 1976.

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how many of these files were on US citizens. Total count

was 1,018 Elles on Americans.

-- March 1926: All (41 linear feet) Golitsyn file

material held in records center has been recalled and a

review begun. In May six more feet were acquired from sE.

NO. 279

P.19

-- JULY: CI/RGA Index currently containe about 255, 000

cards, down over 11,000 in last ten months.

- August: Golitsyn material has now been

consolidated; about 15 linear feet have been destroyed.

- September: Approxinately 40,000 cards vere

destroyed; they duplicated a nore complete index maintained

by SE/CI.

'-- October: CI/R&A index has been purged of all cards

duplicated in Do main index--over 12,000 cards were removed

and destroyed.

- February 1977: Four ISG analysts were assigned to

RiA to assist in the processing and integration of CI Staff

records into the DO central systen.

The "HONETOL" files appalled the new CI staff in their

I numbers and, as they were read, their scope and the

hollowness of the reeds upon which they had been built.*

HONETOL had not yet become notorious to the outside world,

but inside it was perceived as a problen of major

proportions, If, on the one hand, these files actually

* The tern "HONETOL" meant Golitsyn leads to a penetration

of the United States--CIA as well as other us institutions.

This led to two kinds of files:

the leads themselves, as

Golitsyn provided and described them (e.g., a file on

the

lead "Sasha"); and files on suspects, i.e., persons

suspected of being the subject of a lead.

Actual leads were

very few; suspects were very many.

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contained evidence of a penetration of CIA, this clearly was

of vital importance. It, on the other hand, they did rot,

It was important that this be recognized and the files and

suspicions appropriately dealt with. Julian for a laujer

by education who joined the staff in late summer 1975, was

assigned to study these files. A procedure was developed

whereby he reviewed each one by one, and prepared a summary

of its contents. This went forvard to Kalaris with, in each

instance, a reconmendation on the cover sheet for

disposition. On file alter file these cover sheets ended up

saying the same thing; that the file had been revieved,

that the conclusion had been reached that there was nothing

of merit in it, and the file should be destoyed. The review

of the file on Richard Kovich, for example, which was eight

pages long, was dated 22 December 1975.* Kalaris,

concurring, sent it to ADDO Blee with a handwritten note

that the naterial in this case would be packaged and held

with instructions that it should be destroyed as soon as the

senate released CIA from its embargo on destruction, and

that the funnary neno and cover sheet would constitute the

only future record. The HONETOL files received steady but

not priority attention. It took somewhat over a yeat for

Fox to make his way through all of them. Nothing of merit

was found in any of them.

A special approach was developed to get the MORINE! data

into central indices. As a result of the conpartmentation

applied to MORINE in the Angleton staff, much of the

existing MORINE infornation was squirreled away and not

immediately appreciated. The rejuvenated exploitation

program produced a flood of ZRTAPPY correspondence with

field stations, but this was slow to yield indexable

material. It was not until the end of 1975 that a focused

* Richard Kovich was one of the three CIA staff officers

most severely affected by the hONeTol witch-hunt.

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analytical effort on MORINE got underway. Beginning then

With the cassette material (CC CPSU) International Departnent"

trainee names), and later with country summary reports when

analysis and liaison feedback fleshed out an understanding

of GRU residency personnel and operations, MORINE' data vere

provided by the staff to SE Division, which in turn conveyed

chem on to RID undez SE Division document (SX) numbers as

AESTORAGE information. Names of GRU officers, code names

and true names (where known) of agente and developmentals,

support assets, etc. were indexed in this fashion.

***

People Responssbilities

The Kalaris staff inherited responsibility for a

handful of defectors and certain contract personnel who had

been working for the Angleton stall. This responsibility

was not particularly welcomed, but it had to be dealt with.

The defectors were Golitsyn, Nosenko, Dexyabin, and

[Basevorov, and a former soman an intalligence officer by the

name of Constantin Dumitrachescu, also known as SHRIVOT/ 1]

The soviets were well known, at least by reputation, to the

SE alumni on the stars, but the Romanian was a total

surprise. They had never heard of him.t

In early 1972 the [sraell internal service (Shin Bet)

had approached CIA through Angleton and asked for assistance

in arranging the defection and resettlement of

: 1

defection at neel e, and a deuce, it antine y

defection at the time.

obtained confirnation from the DDO, that Angleton had

arranged to bring him to the United States and had hin

squirreled away.

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This would suggest that Angleton may have lacked the

opportunity that others had had to observe the kinds of

behavior soviet defectors have displayed in sorting out who

the important players are in matters affecting their future,

and figuring out how to deal with them.+

--In the eyes of some who knew hin, Angleton viewed

hinself more as chief of an operational entity than of a

staff. Few gave him high marks as an elfective staff, as

opposed to operations, officer. His secret travels in

Western Europe, not to mention to Israel, to meet with

senior liaison officials with whom he had developed

confidential relationships constituted a form of independent

operational

activity. The proposal, ultimately stillborn,

in 1965 for Angleton to develop special counterintelligence

units in Vietnam** displayed certain parallels with his

conduet of counterintelligence

abroad as Chief of the CI

staff in the way in

which the local

station would be

effectively

cut out

and command channel and comuunications

would run direct to counterintelligence headquarters in

Washington. The proposed special counterintelligence (SCI)

units for Vietnam

were nodeled

after SCI units employed by

X-2, the counterintelligence arm of the wartime OSS--where

Angleton began his intelligence career. Perhaps those early

experiences shaped in some way Angleton's later preference

for conducting counterintelligence--by himself, without

involvement of the area divisions and stations.

..eand What TO Do About Iti Game plan

The Plan

In assessing the state of affairs in the staff, it did,

**-As described in cleveland C. Cram's history of the cI

Staff (to 1974), L001-X, PP. 1001 F]

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streamline our procedures. "*

By 1976 the office of the Executive Officer of the

staff included a Privacy Act Section with four pocitions in

addition to a three-person Records and Registry Section.

(FOIA and Privacy Act requests were handled together.) But

this by no means solved the problem. In the fall of 1977,

as Do ceiling and personnel reductions were being meted out

and the staff was trying to gear itself to getting along

with less, the DO was advised that the staff's Privacy Act

section was so strained and its personnel under so nuch

prescure that henceforth it would not accept deadlines

imposed by elements outside the staff. When requirements

were received, the section would advise the requester how

much time would be required to complete the work.

NO. 279 .23

But normal FOIA and Privacy Act requests were not all;

there were also specialty requests that had to be met. All

had the connon denominator of the staff's unique files and

records. These included such matters as:

- FOIA requests for information concerning Lee Harvey

oswald." Handling these required the creation of a task

force of 13 operations officers and analysts, plus clerical

personnel, and their full-time efforts for over a month.

- Requests for interviews and/or information from the

Senate and House Select Intelligence Conmittees, and the

Department of Justice.

-- A review of the Rosenberg case by a Federal court,

which caused problens with regard to related VENONA

* CI 131-75, 9 July 75

** Nosenko's assertion that he was familiar with the KGB's.

asseesment of and involvement with oswald in the soviet

Union had led to endless debriefing, analysis, and cross-

checking research on this subject.

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United Statea: "In each case you open a file on there nust

be a demonstrable CI interest: Please assure that this

guideline is followed meticulously. "

Double Agent franch on was charged with the

If conduct of and coordination on double agent operations

abroad. Since the vast majority of DA cases were run by the

Us military services, the FBI, Or--in some instances--

foreign-liaison services, the branch was very heavily a

coordinator rather than active runner of operations.

Farea operations Braga -- Mas charged with

coordination with the area divisions on matters of CI

interest, and with stimulating CI disciplines and practices

in the area divisions and field stations. The centerpiece

of the branch's activity vas management and conduct of the

CI Survey program. Consisting itself only of the branch

chief and two clericals, the branch staffed its survey teans

with detailees fron the area divisions and CI Staff officers

borrowed from other branches of the staff, both ops and RaA.

cauntersperations Branch - was charged with

operations designed to counter and disrupt the activities

abroad of foreign intelligence services inimical to US

interests. Charles Anderson, an LA Division officer who was

brought in to the staff by Sternfield to head the branch.

had had considerable experience in CA operations, and the

branch's activities reflected this background. Virtually

all had a clear CA character, from promotion of a book about

the Tupamaros and terrorisn in Uruguay, to a press campaign

in Europe designed to expose the Curiel apparatus as an

instrument of soviet intelligence, to a paper on the cuban

intelligence residency in chile during the Allende regime.

Primary orientation was toward Latin Anerica, with heavy

focus on terrorist organizations and activities. Anderson's

operations tended to be highly imaginative, often complex.

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PAPER: THE IMS TEAM FINALLY GOES HOME

In May 1980 the IMS analyst group detailed to the CI

staff to deal with the paper inherited from the Angleton

staff finally completed its work and returned to IMS. In

all, during the preceding four and a half years some 600 feet

of CI Staff files had been reviewed, about 375 feet by IMs

and 225 feet by CI Staff personnel

The Analysis Group main

index had been reduced from 500,000 cards in 1975 to 28,000.

DERYABIN RETIRES

Peter (Petr) Deryabin retired in January 1981 on the eve

of his 60th birthday, One of the early group of KGB officers

to come to the west following the death of stalin in 1953, he

had defected in Vienna in 1954. Since that time he had been

continually associated with, and in effect a ward of the CI

Staff.

for a number of years he, along with other defectors,

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