1975-01-03 CIA Family Jewels - Notes of Meeting at White House

8/7/2019 1975-01-03 CIA Family Jewels - Notes of Meeting at White House

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W.\SHINGT01\

RANDUMTHE WHITE HaeSE

'Pep SECREl'/SEl%I Uti EjMOtf!S-

MEMORANDUMOF CONVERSATIONPARTICIPANTS: President Ford

William E. Colby, Director, Central Intelligence':"'~' .Agency

Philip W. Buchen, Counsel to the PresidentJohn O. Marsh. Jr., Counsellor to the PresidentLt. General Brent Scowcroft, Deputy Assistantto the President for National Security Affairs

DATE ANDTIE: Friday, January 3, 19755:30 p,m.PLACE: The Oval OfficeThe White House

r SUBJECT: Allegations of CIA Domestic Activities

President: I asked Phil and Jack to analyze the [Colby] repol"t for me.but first, why don't you tell me where we are.Colby: We have a couple of pl'oblems -- one within the agency and onewith Congress. Already the two Armed Services conmrlttees. the twoAppropriations conunittees. and Muskie want rne to testify.Ithink we have a. 25-year old institution which has done some things itshouldn't have. On the dissidents, the major effort was to check ifthel;'e were any foreign connections. But we held it so close therewas unease within the Agency -~ was it really done for the foreignconnections O J : ' was it anti-dissident? We infiltrated some people sothey could go overseas. That was okay. but in the course of trainingwithintheg.roups they wrote on the dissidents. We passed the informationto the FBI a.nd they passed information to us. But wha.thappened is wewould file the reports the FBI gave us. That, together with our reportsfrotn. overseas, arnounta to about 10,000. Sowe can't deny that, but Iwill have to try to clarify it.

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IIPresident: Whenwere the names gathered? ~Colhy: Beginning in '67. It wa a formally terminated in March '74.President: Whenwas the Schlesinger directive?Colby: InMa.y 1973. Schlesinger was concerned when things popped up--the psychological profiles, and letters from McCord about CIA andWa.tergate. So, to find everything. he put out this directive. Myreport has some 0 " iti I will cover the others now. I briefed Nedziin July 1973. I gave Stennis a general briefing and Symington adetailed one. [He ahowed the President a looseleaf bcok; ]President: "Yhat did the three say?Colby: I said "Here it is; we are not going to do it again: II I then gavespecific instructions to the Department. In March 1974, we stopped thepzogxam a.ndIput: ittogethel:' with the dissident program and treatedthem as one. He mentions mail opening. We did have a New York andLos Angeles pl'ogram inthe 50' s of opening first-class airmail from

"the USSR. For e."'>2lnple.we ha.ve four to Jane Fonda.. That is illegal.and we stopped it in 1973. InSan Francisco we had one with zeapect toChina, to find aut who the conta.cts were. Some letters were opened.We did break in to some premises to see whether there were classifieddocuments.President: Were th.ese former employees, or people on the payroll?COlby: Form.er employees.Presidenb Had they been fired?Colby: Onehad just left -- he wasn't fired.President: Whowould approve such operations?Colby: I would think. only the Director, but possibly at these. timesthe Director of the Office of Security.The third area is the: fact that we sUXV"eilledSOIne people to find outwhy they had classified information. Some of the names are prettyhot. [He mentioned a couple of.reporters.] In1971 we surveilledMike Getler. He had run a stqry which was an obvious intelligence leak.rep SEeRE'T/S!,MSrmE/NODIS


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President: Whowould have approved that?\Colby: I'm pretty sure it was Helms. but whet~~r it was directed from

higher up I don't know.In1972 at the time of the India-Pakis tan war. we put a tap on Jack,Anderson and three of his associates.President: Whoordered it?Colby: Helms. Whether on his own or not, I don't know. This wasnot illegal. but (perhaps) outside our jurisdiction. We also followedsome of our employees or former employees. Unfortunately, onewas Marchetti. Again, it was not illegal, but it's a highly emotionalarea.President:' Was this outside the Agency's charter?

Colby: Helms says this is a gray area. Wehave the responsibilityto protect our sources and information.President: What would you have done?Colby: I said at my confirmation that I have the duty but not the aulhority.I would go to the FBI or somewhere like that.We have also run some wiretaps. Most of them are on our em.ployees,but not all. Edgar Snow, for example. Generally. from. 1965. theywere approved by the Attorney General. One other was a defector,but most of them were employees. I doubt that before 1963we hadAttorney-Gen eral approval.

'!'hese were from. 1951 through 1965. The last tap recorded was in1971.None of these have anything to do with the Hersh story. but he lists a.llthese activities as being part of the anti-dissident effort.Marsh: But Hersh wUl sa.ythat out of the dissidents program. came thelEG and this is where the Getter and Anderson taps are very worrisome.He will say we turn~d to the lEG for operations when we couldn't getaction fro:m.the regular agencies.

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Buchen: The direcHve was 9 May; the report. wasMay 21. Isn'tthat a bit short? rkColby: Most of these skeletons wer earound, but just inrnernor-yrather than on paper. It' didntt ~ke much to get them on paper.President: Whowould have known of the dissident operation?Colby: The Director. Karamasaines, the Deputy Director. Ober30 to 40 people were in the group.President: Who as~igned abel' over here?'Colby~ When we terminated the program, I nominated him.[General Scowcroft described how the riSe got him and what his normal,NSCduties 'Were. ]

Colby: That! s about it. We did collect the names of some Congressmen--who weren't inCongress when we got the names. [He gave the President~ a paper on this. ] An IlXII by the names means we ran a clearance forthe purpose of collaboration with them; IlY" means the nam.ecarrie upin connecti-on with a foreign country.[The President leaves. ]Buchen: The last directives are undated. Why?Colby: They were all issued a.t the sam.e tim.e.Marsh: They will try to get this all linked with Watergate. Do youthin!


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Colby: We obviously have a problem since we11lostfour of our toppeople. ~President: Tell:me about them.Colby: It has to be a highly compartmented activity.'Angleton is an unusual type and totally dedicated to his mission He'is very intense. I thought of asking him to retire when I took over.I didn't because of the human factors. He also handled the Israeliaccount. OnFriday before the Hersh article appeared. I told him.hecould move or retire.Of the other thz-ee; one had a.lready decided to retire. His deputy wetold that he wouldn+t-be the chief and he retired. The third wasyounger, but he thought apparently he might get the job and he retiredwhen he didn't.Hehns helped Hunt to get a job with Mullens when he retired.Presidenb Weplan to do three things: One. early next week, all theIntelligence chiefs will come inand I will say "You knowwhat the law.is and I expect you to obey, " Two, 11mgoing to appoint a Blue RibbonCon:unittee to look into all of this. Three. I am going to suggest tothe Hill that a joint committee is the best way for them to go to inves-tigate.

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We donft want to destroy but to preserve the CIA. But we want to :makesure that illegal operations and those outside th,e ch.arter dontt happen.Colby: We have run operations to assassinate foreign leaders. Wehave never succeeded. [He cited Castro, Trujillo, General Sneiderof Chile, at allTherefs another skeleton: A defector we suspected of being a doubleagent we kept confined for three years. .There is one other very m.essy problem: After the ITT-Chile Congres5iona~investigation, there was an allegation that our testimony wa.s'not all kosher.I don't think there was any crilninal action, but there ,vas some skatingon thin ice. There is an old rule that to protect sources and iniot'xnationyou could stretch thi~gs.But the White House hasn't been told about mybook of skeletons.

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1975-01-03 CIA Family Jewels - Notes of Meeting at White House

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