Project Feature, a product of White House determination, had been a dismal failure. Those who attribute causation of the Angolan war to Moscow and Havana typically downplay the effect of the initial CIA program, which inflated Holden Roberto enough to think he could break up the national unity coalition before independence. Apologists also fudge the timing: the attacks that broke up the coalition preceded Soviet arms. Thus they overplay the Cold War aspect. U.S. intervention brought the Cold War to Angola, not the other way around. While Langley made operational errors in its effort—like supposing the initial program would have no fallout—the major mistakes were of policy. Conceiving Mobutu as an effective ally and siding with the South Africans were decisions that undermined the entire project. The CIA correctly anticipated the Soviet response to U.S. intervention and opposed the paramilitary program it was nevertheless ordered to conduct.

  Those who argue the CIA could have won in Angola if only Congress had not cut off the money flow cannot get around the weaknesses of cooperating with Zaire and the deadliness of the alliance with the Afrikaner regime. In addition, U.S. ignorance of Angolan conditions and its fixation on Roberto (given his lack of popular support) created more obstacles to covert success. The United States lacked an infrastructure for a decisive intervention, and geography precluded backing Roberto and Savimbi except through other states. Scale of the program is not the real question: the proper comparison is between the $100 million or so spent by Moscow in 1975 with the CIA’s $32 million in Angola, $100 million in Zaire plus the funds committed by South Africa (substantial), Zaire, France, Britain, and the People’s Republic of China. Those numbers are not currently discoverable, but the total likely outweighs the Soviet-Cuban expenditures.

  The story of Angola is that Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger heard lots of advice to steer clear yet chose to head straight for disaster. As for America and democracy, the Ford administration acted against it. There is no doubt that Roberto’s FNLA, Savimbi’s UNITA, and Neto’s MPLA were in an uncomfortable coalition, but at least they were in coalition and had the opportunity to fight out differences at the ballot box. Giving Roberto the advantage of CIA political action helped spark a civil war, and wading into that conflict not only proved shortsighted but placed the United States on the wrong side of African nationalism. In addition the Ford-Kissinger decisions further complicated their problems right in Washington, D.C., creating important new restrictions for the secret warriors.

  The events of the Year of Intelligence touched off a struggle to regulate U.S. intelligence, an effort that has ebbed and flowed ever since. “Oversight” is the game, which the executive branch, claiming there is too much of it, has on the whole played more successfully than Congress. Legislators on Capitol Hill, having created reporting requirements through Hughes-Ryan, strengthened their monitoring by replacing the secret CIA subcommittees with permanent committees in both houses of Congress.

  Oversight did not bring the end of covert action, however. On February 15, 1976, newly minted CIA director George H. W. Bush refused to say whether the Angola project had ended. In a later interview Bush commented, “What happened in Angola was that a properly conceived program, one signed off by the policymakers and reported in accordance with law to the congressional intelligence committees, was leaked and once it was leaked it was aborted.” He then went on, “I think there is a role for covert action somewhere between inactivity and sending in troops.”

  During the Ford administration there were also covert actions in Portugal and in the Malagasy Republic, where an American ambassador who had been a career CIA officer was expelled following a puzzling series of musical-chairs military coups. Former agency officers take credit for putting in place a constitutional government. But the 1975 constitution promulgated for the democratic republic permitted only a single political party and remained in place until the fall of the government in 1991. To this day the Malagasy project continues classified.

  Oversight simply meant that covert actions were reported and justified by a “presidential finding,” formally known as a Memorandum of Notification. Hughes-Ryan specified that all significant or anticipated actions by the CIA not for intelligence-gathering purposes be so covered. The executive tried to limit oversight, particularly where covert operations were concerned. In December 1975 special counsel Mitchell Rogovin of the agency gave the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence a detailed explication of CIA’s position, in which Langley construed a statutory basis for its activities. The argument was that covert activities lay within the “inherent powers” of the president; they had been conducted by presidents long before a CIA existed, thus the agency was not attempting to assert new powers. Rogovin also referred to the “such other functions” provision in the 1947 act, arguing Congress had never objected to these practices and had always approved agency budgets.

  These claims are undercut by the legal opinions of the CIA general counsel rendered on several occasions since 1947. Congress obtained a copy of a paper prepared in 1974 for the general counsel’s office, which took much the same position as had counsel Lawrence Houston: the National Security Act “functions” language applied to intelligence gathering; extending it to covert operations strained the law. The paper added that covert operations were an implementation of policy, a shared power under the Constitution.

  Paradoxically, by laying out reporting requirements for covert operations, the Hughes-Ryan Amendment could be seen as authorizing them in the name of Congress.

  Whatever animosities Bill Colby had attracted, he had at least been a CIA professional. When George H. W. Bush took the helm at the end of January 1976 there were grave doubts. A Republican politician from Texas, Bush overcame those doubts, appearing at staff meetings in shirtsleeves and professing an “aw shucks” attitude. His mixture of quick appreciation and practical problem-solving won many converts. Richard Holm, for one, had been a Colby supporter but came away a fan of Bush. Genuine concern for the rank and file plus the international awareness Bush had honed as ambassador to the United Nations and to Beijing were the roots of his success. Although not a great manager of the CIA’s analytical role, or major advocate of covert operations, Bush’s sensitivity to public relations and connections returned stability to Langley, with an impression of White House support and a regeneration of agency morale.

  In a move that curried favor among one agency faction, throughout his time as DCI Bush resisted Justice Department demands to turn over materials pertaining to Chile and ITT, the evidence necessary for its determination on whether to prosecute Richard Helms.

  Within weeks of Bush entering the director’s suite, President Ford issued an executive order on the intelligence community. Billed at the time as a major reorganization, in fact the move amounted to minor tweaking, its main purpose to head off congressional action on a CIA charter. The executive order responded partly to the excesses revealed during the Year of Intelligence, partly to a set of a dozen suggestions Bush had made as he prepared to take over. In early 1976 Ford’s Executive Order 11905 became the first public regulation ever to describe the function of U.S. intelligence and restrictions on it. The order prohibited assassinations, enshrining directives Colby had issued. It replaced the 40 Committee with an Operations Advisory Group, placing decisions in the hands of cabinet members, not deputies. The attorney general continued as a member while the White House budget director became an observer. Telephone concurrences, at least, were prohibited. Covert operations were defined as those intended to further U.S. policies abroad. Ford also put fresh people on PFIAB. The CIA would concentrate administrative functions under a new deputy and elevate its community role with a second.

  At Langley, Director Bush turned the improbable trick of raising morale while purging the leadership. Inside half a year Bush changed eleven of the top fourteen CIA officials. Some he transferred, a few he promoted, others retired, and Bush brought in a couple from the outside.

  When he spoke of “excesses,” Bush typically referred to outside investigations of CIA, not his agency’s activities, deploring the effects of the Washington spectacle on CIA relations with foreign services. To reinvigorate those associations Bush tried to convey an impression of receptivity and keep hands off foreign operations. On his watch the intelligence services of the Southern Cone nations moved strongly on Operation Condor—and assassinated Orlando Letelier in Washington. Nor did the docket stop there. In fact during the Bush period actions against dissidents in the United States were carried out by the intelligence services of Iran, the Philippines, South Korea, and Israel. The CIA itself recruited Panamanian Manuel Noriega.

  There remained the matter of the Directorate for Operations. The DO still seemed bloated from the Vietnam War. The question of realigning it remained a major agenda item. A consensus on the need to do this had existed at the CIA since Schlesinger’s time. In 1974 a management study for Colby had advised the agency to shed its covert operations mission. Another, completed in 1976, recommended cutting the DO by 1,350 officers over a five-year period. That spring deputy director William Nelson sent Bush a memo about moving ahead on reductions. As Nelson later described this incident to journalists:

  There were a lot of people in the [DO] who were marginal performers. The low middle. We needed quality, not quantity. I told him that the lower 25 percent should be identified and should be encouraged to seek other employment. . . . I said we owed these people a lot but not a lifetime job.

  Bush would think about it, he told Nelson, but he put the paper in the round file. Although Director Bush never disavowed reductions, he made no move to initiate them. A few months later he selected E. Henry Knocke over Nelson to be deputy director of central intelligence. Nelson retired. That opened up the DDO position, for which Bush chose William Wells.

  A broadly experienced officer from the old OSS cadre, Wells had been close to both Bill Colby and Tom Karamessines, and had spent his agency career on Far East operations after selling kerosene lamps in China before the big war. Representative of the very group who stood to be phased out, Wells happily went along with Bush doing nothing to reduce personnel. As associate DDO, meanwhile, Bush elevated secret warrior Theodore Shackley.

  In a memoir published at this time, Ray Cline advocated taking the covert operations function away from the CIA and giving it to the Pentagon. George Bush opposed that course in interviews, insisting the mission belonged to the agency.

  By far the most serious situation to confront Bush during his time at Langley was the Lebanese civil war. Fighting broke out there in the spring of 1975 and was stilled temporarily by Syrian mediation and then intervention; but a year later the Maronite Christian and Muslim sects were back at arms. Next to Indochina, this had become Langley’s biggest headache. In 1975 division chief David Blee promoted his deputy, Clair George, to chief of station in Beirut, then considered a prestige assignment. George, a skilled street man, relaxed as a ballroom dancer where many spooks played tennis. He needed all his dexterity in Beirut, a maelstrom. On June 16, 1976, the new American ambassador, Francis E. Meloy, Jr., died under a hail of bullets on his way to his very first meeting with the president-elect of Lebanon. With him perished his driver and the embassy’s economic counselor. George scrambled to figure out whether the murders had been some insane mistake or an act aimed at the United States. It turned out that Meloy had been abducted before being killed. The next day President Ford held an NSC meeting to consider evacuating Americans from Lebanon. Director Bush briefed the CIA’s latest information, which looked pretty bleak. Ford decided to pull out.

  The evacuation would be carried out by the U.S. Navy. The CIA scored a coup here because it had established a relationship with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and PLO security forces now furnished protection for the maneuver. Bush had already ordered evacuation of CIA families from Beirut; now Clair George had to pull out the agency officers themselves. The operations center at Langley set up a special area just to monitor the pullout. In the middle of the night Bush came to watch along with anxious DO officers. The move was completely successful. For a time the Beirut station worked out of Athens. That fall the Arab League placed a deterrent force in Lebanon, which became the origin of a Syrian occupation that endured for three decades. The CIA returned to Beirut.

  Jerry Ford faced the Lebanese crisis in the middle of his political campaign for the election of 1976. He lost that election to Governor James Earl “Jimmy” Carter of Georgia. During the hard-fought campaign Carter several times indicated suspicion of the CIA. A climate of apprehension prevailed at Langley when he came to office. As for George Bush, the director made a bid to stay on as DCI, but Carter wanted his own man in charge. There would be a new broom at the head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Much of 1976 passed as Congress set up machinery for intelligence oversight. Legislation containing intelligence charters was considered during the Carter administration in 1978 and 1980, but it never passed. Meanwhile congressional support for regulatory action on intelligence peaked during Carter’s middle years. When charters were taken up at hearings, the vast majority of CIA professionals testified against excessive restrictions on covert action. Witnesses at various hearings included such figures as George H. W. Bush, John McCone, Richard Helms, Bill Colby, Hank Knoche, Dick Bissell, Tom Karamessines, David Atlee Phillips, and Gen. Richard G. Stilwell. They undoubtedly believed they had achieved a signal victory in avoiding CIA charter legislation.

  Outpacing a laggardly Congress, the White House seized the initiative on intelligence reform. President Jimmy Carter continued Ford’s practice of intelligence regulation through executive order with one he signed in 1978. The assassination ban continued. The decision-making body became the Special Coordinating Committee of the NSC, with essentially the same membership. The covert action definition narrowed somewhat to include only those “conducted abroad” in support of national foreign policy objectives. Typical activities approved by the SCC during the period included the provision of training and special communications equipment to the leaders of Egypt and the Sudan for their personal security, and an anti-Cuba propaganda campaign in the Horn of Africa.

  Hank Knocke stayed on for six months into the Carter administration. He later recalled that when presidential findings were signed, copies went to the congressional oversight committees. “I never presented a finding to any of these committees,” says Knocke, “but what there wasn’t a whole range of questions and answers covering an hour or two. And usually a lot of fulminating—like, who in the world wants to do thus and so?”

  The White House created a fresh mechanism to monitor operations, called the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB). Much later, in the heat of the Iran-Contra affair, it would be revealed that the IOB, essentially moribund, had never conducted an investigation. Two of its three members though, former ambassador Robert Murphy and Leo Cherne, came right out of PFIAB, Cherne having been its most recent chairman. James Farmer ran the IOB for Carter. The Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board itself was abolished by the president.

  At first the Carter administration had no great appetite for covert action, postponing the day of reckoning between congressional oversight and executive power. President Carter nevertheless defended executive primacy. He supported legislation to repeal Hughes-Ryan and reduce CIA reporting to the two specialized intelligence committees of Congress. Carter also made use of a gambit innovated by Kissinger and Ford—blanket findings to justify in advance all covert operations concerning terrorism, narcotics, and counterintelligence. From the oversight standpoint, once this device became accepted it shrank the scope for program review in these areas.

  As in many matters during his years in the White House, Carter was frustrated in his first choice for CIA director. Theodore Sorensen, Carter’s nominee, had to withdraw when his nomination ran into strident congressional opposition. Next Carter turned to Adm. Stansfield Turner, a naval officer, then NATO commander in Italy. Turner and Carter had been classmates at Annapolis. Although regulations forced him to retire from the navy to accept the offer, Turner took the DCI job. A novice at intelligence, the admiral provided strong, reformist leadership.

  Despite being able, Turner was an outsider at Langley and remained unpopular. He gained no friends when, like Porter Goss early in the twenty-first century, Turner showed up with a coterie, mostly former naval officers, as his inner staff. One, Rusty Williams, did a global evaluation of the Directorate for Operations, visiting stations, poking into all manner of things. The rumor mill buzzed with accusations that the DCI’s man regaled the front office with innuendo about people’s escapades on station.

  Any chance of Turner’s being accepted evaporated with the staffing reductions he needed to meet budget limits. Although the DO passed its evaluation, those personnel studies from the Bush era had still to be faced. When the director asked Bill Wells what ought to be done, the DDO did not oppose reduction. Admiral Turner actually cut back planned staff reductions by more than a third. To cut the time of hysteria, the DCI shortened the layoffs from five years to two. While more than eight hundred staff slots were dropped, the DCI insisted these be almost entirely from headquarters. (Some sources report a quarter were field positions, Turner says none.) The remainder were support jobs.

  Most of the reduction came from early retirement and attrition, with real firings minimal. The admiral actually forced only about 150 officers into retirement—Cord Meyer being one example—and fired just 17. Although the DO declined from its Vietnam War peak of about 7,500 to roughly 4,750, that total is rather close to strength in the mid-sixties (5,500). There were actually more reductions under Schlesinger and Colby than under Turner.