Nixon’s proclivities were reinforced by a group assembled by old line Wurlitzer-man Franklin A. Lindsay. Out of the business for years now, at least directly (he became head of the Itek Corporation, a prime contractor for equipment used in U.S. spy satellites), Lindsay took up the reins again briefly in 1967–1968 to lead a study group on the utility of covert operations, their work relevant to whomever might win the elections of 1968. That happened to be Richard Nixon. Under the aegis of Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, Lindsay’s group included old warhorses Richard Bissell and Lyman Kirkpatrick, former officials Abram Chayes and Adam Yarmolinsky, and such academics as Samuel P. Huntington, Richard E. Neustadt, Lucien Pye, Roger D. Fisher, Edwin O. Reischauer, and Max Millikin. The group finalized its report in December 1968 and gave it to Henry Kissinger’s transition team.

  Dispensing with traditional plausible deniability, the Lindsay group advised the president to concern himself directly with covert operations. In a passage that no doubt resounded for Kissinger, the report advised Nixon to assign a senior aide with direct access to the president to oversee all covert operations. Kissinger in fact got that task in his role as national security adviser. The Lindsay group viewed Richard Helms as an effective CIA director and saw no need to change leadership at Langley—again the course Nixon adopted. On the other hand, it felt the DCI should be enjoined to say “no” more frequently when proposals did not seem viable.

  No immediate program changes seemed necessary, except that the group pushed hard for public funding of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. In general the Lindsay report found that covert operations had little capacity to achieve important objectives and were best suited to tactical situations for short-term gains. Costs included the danger that Americans would see their country as engaging in “dirty tricks” abroad, the weakening of American constitutional checks and balances through their being bypassed in these activities, and damage to the international system from the evident U.S. disrespect for the legitimate interests of other governments: “The character of such secret intervention makes it difficult for the United States to justify it and reconcile it with the general principles of international behavior for which we stand.”

  Whether these activities were exposed or not, there were risks and costs, the Lindsay report concluded. And it affirmed, as had previous reviews, that large-scale operations rarely remain secret. Nevertheless a major reason to engage in these activities remained the need to do things covertly. The cautious approach here was quite evident. In a 1974 survey ranging over the many examinations of intelligence through the years, the CIA characterized the Lindsay report as concluding there was no need of additional supervision, simply stricter internal controls. Langley’s own study for the new administration made out covert operations as “designed to discredit the prestige and ideology of International Communism and reduce its control over any areas of the world, and conversely to strengthen the orientation toward the U.S. of the peoples of the free world.”

  Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms may have been gratified by the Lindsay group’s recommendation that President-elect Nixon keep him on, but in truth the Helms’s appointment was a done deal. After his first transition meeting with Nixon at the LBJ Ranch, Lyndon Johnson pulled Helms aside and told him that Nixon had asked and that he, Johnson, had commended Helms as an effective spy boss. Later Nixon summoned Helms to New York’s Hotel Pierre for a lookover. Henry Kissinger, already with the president-elect, had known Helms since the Berlin crisis of 1961 and seconded the recommendation. Although Nixon did not announce his selection until December 18, from mid-November Helms knew he would be continuing at the CIA.

  Nixon reappointed Helms, but president and chief spook were never comfortable together. Richard Nixon’s memoirs say nothing of his opinion on Helms, but there are numerous disparaging comments in Nixon’s conversations recorded on tape. Helms had met Nixon as far back as the Hungarian uprising, when he briefed the vice president before Nixon’s visit to Austria. They did not cross paths again until now. Helms had no illusions: reappointment, he writes, “did not shake my longstanding impression of Nixon’s antipathy for the agency.” Kissinger records that Nixon suspected Helms of being close to circles that included some of his worst critics. That may be true, but in fact there were few people with whom Nixon was comfortable, Kissinger included.

  The president intended to keep the CIA at arm’s length, initially even excluding its director from his National Security Council meetings. Reminded that, by law, the DCI advised the Council on intelligence, Nixon relented enough to permit Helms to brief the NSC, after which he was to leave. That clumsy procedure left the principals without answers to any question they thought up after Helms’s departure, and lasted fewer than two months. Nixon smoothed the rough edge by inviting everyone on the NSC to lunch with him after their next meeting. Helms then entered the fold, never knowing whether the president had merely forgotten his previous dictum. Later Helms learned that Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, whom Nixon needed and dared not cross, had issued an ultimatum that the DCI be included. But Kissinger demanded that all CIA material—intelligence, operations, anything—go to the president only through him.

  Nixon continued to hold against Helms and the Central Intelligence Agency what he fancied had been their responsibility for his loss of the 1960 election against John F. Kennedy—Langley’s supposed leak to Kennedy on Bay of Pigs plans—and he acted against the agency where possible. Nixon forced the CIA to reduce its overseas staff, eroding its covert capability, and he cut the agency’s budget. Later Nixon demanded that the CIA declassify documents on the Diem assassination and the Bay of Pigs which the president thought might discredit political opponents. When Helms refused, it became another black mark against him and the agency.

  But on the afternoon of March 7, 1969, Nixon helicoptered to Langley with Helms to address senior officials of the CIA in the agency’s large, dome-shaped auditorium, “The Bubble.” As is common in such ceremonial pep talks, the president painted the role of the CIA in the most glowing terms. “I look upon this organization,” Nixon declared, “as not one which is necessary for the conduct of conflict or war, or call it what you may, but in the final analysis . . . one of the great instruments of our Government for the preservation of peace, for the avoidance of war, and for the development of a society in which this kind of thing would not be as necessary, if necessary at all.”

  Referring to the “call it what you may” war, Nixon said: “I think the American people need to understand the need for this foreign policy option.”

  But there was little hope by 1969 that the public attitude toward covert operations would be as permissive as when Nixon had been vice president, before the Bay of Pigs, the Congo, Vietnam, the National Student Association, Radio Free Europe, and so on. The 303 Committee approved continued funding for selected Soviet emigré groups and activities early in the Nixon administration. Then came the Green Beret murder case in Vietnam and revelations of the Laotian secret war. In October 1969 Kissinger issued a directive in Nixon’s name requiring covert actions normally approved by the 303 Committee to be reviewed every year. Two months later, extending Kennedy’s and Johnson’s practice, Nixon reaffirmed that ambassadors were the leaders of the U.S. missions in their countries, to be kept in the picture on all CIA activities.

  As became the standard in the Nixon White House, the president’s men then kept ambassadors, and much of the rest of the government, in ignorance of what the chief executive had in mind. Thus in opening relations with the People’s Republic of China, for example, Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig, his deputy, made a series of 1971 secret trips to prepare Nixon’s way for a ceremonial visit to Beijing a few months later.

  The China secret affected CIA directly. In December 1971 Beijing suddenly released Richard G. Fecteau, one of the agency officers captured back in 1952, as a goodwill gesture. Langley had no idea why this happened, and the second CIA prisoner, John T. Downey, stayed in jail, though with a reduced sentence. When the CIA learned of Nixon’s China trip it begged for help on its other prisoner. At the time Downey’s mother, ill, had little chance of surviving until the man’s sentence ran out. Meeting with Chinese leader Zhou Enlai on February 25, 1972, Nixon indeed mentioned Downey. Zhou commented optimistically on a possible release, though he noted the absence of precedent for this between nations with no diplomatic relations. Nothing happened. By November Downey’s mother had been confined to an old-age home. NSC staff asked Nixon to revisit the issue. The president used a news conference to admit publicly for the first time that Downey and Fecteau had been CIA officers and apologize for their presence in China. Beijing released John Downey in March 1973.

  For more than two decades, since the inception of covert operations in Harry Truman’s time, it had been assumed that a certain duplicity went with the territory. This formed the essence of the concept of “plausible deniability.” But the rationale had always been to prevent knowledge of the actions becoming available to the targets, in the case of minor endeavors, or the American public in larger ones. No one ever intended to deny information to leaders in the U.S. government. Propelled by the growing controversy over covert operations, however, Nixon and Kissinger contrived to do exactly that, elevating duplicity to a virtual management principle. Since the inception of the technique, the problem of controlling covert operations had been a thorny one. We have seen the efforts of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Nixon too made his changes. According to Kissinger, the change came because the 303 Committee had been identified in a 1969 news story.

  In fact the reconstituted NSC Special Group expanded to include the attorney general John N. Mitchell, Nixon’s close friend and former law partner. Undoubtedly Mitchell joined the Special Group as a personal watchdog to keep an eye on Kissinger, whom Nixon did not entirely trust. Other Special Group members saw little reason for his inclusion. Mitchell rarely spoke at meetings and instead played with his pipe.

  Nixon formalized the change on February 17, 1970, in National Security Decision Memorandum (NSDM) 40. The Special Group became the 40 Committee. The NSDM also rescinded NSC-5412/2 with its anti-Soviet rationale. Instead Nixon’s directive stated, “I have determined that it is essential to the defense and security of the United States and its efforts for world peace that the overt foreign activities of the U.S. Government continue to be supplemented by covert action operations.”

  Under NSDM-40 the Special Group was to approve “all” major and politically sensitive covert action programs and the joint reconnaissance schedule, and to review covert programs annually. The review requirement responded to criticisms of the Johnson-era 303 Committee and represented one of the few substantive changes in NSDM-40. To fulfill CIA’s role, at Langley the DO’s Missions and Programs Staff developed the justification and objective memoranda for 40 Committee approval. This staff also became the center for operational planning. A reorganized covert action staff also replaced the previous one in the area of political and psychological operations.

  Having carefully set up this framework, Nixon and Kissinger proceeded to ignore it. The most frequent occasions for 40 Committee meetings became those for project review. U. Alexis Johnson, back on the group again, writes, “It is true that during the Nixon administration the President and CIA bypassed the Committee on sensitive topics.” When Nixon gave his first go-ahead on covert arms to Cambodia, he ordered Kissinger to say nothing to the 40 Committee. At the very same time the Special Group had on its plate a similar clandestine arms initiative, to supply rifles to the King of Jordan, so this was not a matter of excluding a certain type of activity. Everyone from the Special Group to the secretary of state lived in ignorance of the Chile initiative called Track II, even though the group considered almost two dozen other aspects of covert action in Chile. Similarly the 40 Committee would not be consulted on the project shortly to be described, a paramilitary effort among the Kurds of Iraq.

  Among decisions that can be traced to the 40 Committee, those on collection figure prominently. Overhead and satellite reconnaissance targeting, submarine incursions into foreign territorial waters, and the Glomar Explorer’s attempt to raise a Soviet missile submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean were discussed by the 40 Committee. A project to spend $10 million to influence the Italian elections in 1972, much like the budgets approved for Chile, went through the full approval process, by then pretty much routinized. Another routine function was the approval of subsidies to certain foreign leaders—reportedly half a dozen were on the CIA payroll, including King Hussein of Jordan. Thus it came as no surprise when secret-war managers were asked to approve $20,000 to be handed to President Bokassa of the Central African Republic, who had received certain documents (believed forged) impugning American motives and threatened to break relations with the United States. The 40 Committee was used on everyday decisions but not for the big plays.

  Henry Kissinger chaired the 40 Committee. He set the meetings and agendas, assisted by a single CIA staffer. Only principals could attend; Henry was the ultimate arbiter. The first official manual on covert operations, prepared by the CIA in 1972, observed that only about a quarter would be considered by the 40 Committee. Excluded were not only many minor, unimportant operations but virtually all the major, sensitive ones.

  One technique Kissinger used to minimize the committee’s impact was to have as few meetings as possible. He liked to poll by telephone on the dubious theory members had better uses for their time. Beyond the question of what could be more important than running the nation’s covert action program, it cannot have escaped notice in the Kissinger NSC that phone calls permitted fewer records to be kept, and allowed Kissinger to take on other officials one by one. Avoiding meetings also prevented the kind of give-and-take that would have allowed officials to realize what was going on. In 1972 the 40 Committee met only once. In 1973 and 1974 it adopted more than three dozen decisions without meeting to discuss any actual covert action program.

  The essential activity became focusing covert activity more tightly on exact foreign policy goals. In Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, action continued on something like the old scale, but across the board, spending declined in most geographic and functional areas. Mostly due to Vietnam, the cost of paramilitary operations reached a peak in 1970, but after 1972 it declined even in the Far East. By 1973 the CIA director could report that only 5 percent of the agency’s budget was spent for covert action. At the same time a relatively high proportion of projects—over a quarter—were defined as major operations. How Kissinger supposed the 40 Committee could review every major operation every year without ever meeting can only be imagined.

  The Special Group had never been so moribund. This might not have been so costly had other oversight mechanisms functioned more effectively. They did not. The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which Nixon reconstituted by executive order on March 20, 1969, remained the sole alternative. Maxwell Taylor, the first chairman, was in declining health and left after about a year, succeeded by Adm. George W. Anderson, under whom PFIAB became decidedly more political. In the style of the Nixon White House, PFIAB members like lawyer Franklin B. Lincoln, Los Angeles Times magnate Franklin D. Murphy, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and former diplomat Robert Murphy took their concerns directly to the president. In the six years of Nixon’s presidency the board met with the president only eight times. Nixon sometimes convened smaller groups, but at his behest, not theirs. A senior PFIAB official recalls that the board exercised no watchdog function. An NSC staffer of the period observed that in her experience, in two and a half years across the hall she never saw the door open to PFIAB’s suite in the Old Executive Office Building.

  The board retained some classy, dedicated members, in particular Gordon Gray, William O. Baker, and Edwin H. Land, who worked selflessly and hard, but they labored in isolation. Gray headed a small subcommittee on clandestine collection. Baker and Land continued to focus on technical issues. Possibly PFIAB’s greatest achievement during this period came in their area, where Baker and Land fought for a next-generation photographic satellite with digital readout capability, opposed by the air force.

  Governor Rockefeller headed the subcommittee on covert operations, and there is little indication he ever saw one he did not like. Bob Murphy once suggested assassinating Ho Chi Minh—the CIA rejected that out of hand. (Murphy often played the devil’s advocate, saying things just to see how people would respond.) The aged Ho died late in 1969. Agency officers were highly critical of Murphy. Some said, in a play on the title of his memoir, that Murphy was a warrior among diplomats. Admiral Anderson, a nitpicker, went after the CIA on its Soviet estimates, which he regarded as insufficiently alarming, and put his effort into writing alternative, more somber, papers. Staff thought Anderson’s presence a bad influence. Later additions to the board included California governor Ronald Reagan, who seems to have left no tracks; scientist Edward Teller, very active but held in contempt by Baker and Land; and Texas governor John Connally, who propelled PFIAB into its first-ever study of economic intelligence collection and had powerful influence on the president.

  Richard Helms dealt straightforwardly with the board. Typically PFIAB staff would tell Helms before a board session about the nature of the meeting, and the CIA director would come prepared to discuss the subject. Helms showed up with a single aide, in stark contrast to the military, whose generals appeared with full entourages. Henry Kissinger and Gen. Alexander M. Haig usually sat in on PFIAB’s meetings with the president. Kissinger, or sometimes the board’s executive secretary, prepared information papers for Nixon before the meetings.

  Richard Nixon used the board for chores that might have little to do with intelligence. Early on the president assigned PFIAB to assess the Russian-designed AK-47 assault rifle against the American M-16. Later tasks included examining the capabilities of the Soviet SA-7 “Strella,” a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile, or commenting on a U.S. sale of tanks to Turkey. There would be a six-month-long study of the intelligence failure on North Vietnamese supply shipments through Cambodia. Sometimes Kissinger made the assignments, but he carefully emphasized that he acted for the president. In June 1970 Nixon met the board, opening with a long soliloquy on foreign policy in the Middle East, then asked PFIAB to make an East Asian inspection trip and render a report in the style of those that British consultant Sir Robert Thompson had supplied to Nixon about Vietnam. The board did just that and had one of its smaller group meetings with the president on July 18. Admiral Anderson had focused on military affairs, Gordon Gray on intelligence, Frank Murphy on pacification issues, and Robert Murphy on political matters.