"To this day", wrote General Vernon Walters in 1978, "I believe Mr Nixon harbours the idea that someone in the CIA tried to do him in, or acted in some way against him." Walters had been deputy director of Central Intelligence, 1972-76, during the Watergate scandal. He did not share Nixon's view of the CIA that was to dog his relationship with the agency for the five turbulent years of his presidency.
Nixon was different from his immediate predecessors: he was not part of the governing consensus. His non-collegiality alienated insiders. He was a president who exercised to the full the prerogatives of his office, thrilled with power, determined to mold a Nixonian elite which he hoped would displace the old east coast, Ivy League, liberal establishment, the Washington "fat cats". He was passionately antagonistic to the Washington power structure:
"I won the 1968 election as a Washington insider, but with an outsider's prejudices. The behind-the-scenes power structure in Washington is often called the iron triangle: a three-sided set of relationships composed of congressional lobbyists, congressional committee and subcommittee members and their staffs, and the bureaucrats in the various federal departments and agencies. These people tend to work with each other year after year regardless of changes in administration: they form personal professional associations and generally act in concert."
Nixon urged his cabinet members not to recruit their staffs solely from eastern schools and companies but to look to the south, the west and the midwest:
"We can't depend on people who believe in another philosophy of government to give us their undivided loyalty or their best work ... If we don't get rid of those people, they will either sabotage us from within, or they's just sit back on their well-paid assess and wait for the next election to bring back their old bosses."
This was the siege mentality which faced the CIA director, Richard Helms. Helms was lucky to escape the purge. He was, after all, a Johnson appointee and he was regarded by Nixon as "one of those Georgetown types". But Helms was an effective administrator and he was well thought of in Congress. The touchstone of Helms' modus operandi was that he was there to serve policy, not to make it, and this self-effacement ennabled Nixon grudgingly to accept him.
Unlike Johnson, Nixon was not gregarious. He was a loner who preferred to work and to think in comparative solitude. Rather than deal directly with the heads of agencies and departments, he used close and trusted aides like John Ehrlichman and H R Haldeman. He also relied a great deal on Henry Kissinger who served first as his national security adviser and then as his secretary of State. Helms dealt almost entirely with Kissinger and his deputy, Alexander Haig, and not with Nixon who preferred to remain removed from direct contact.
KISSINGER
Nixon made it clear that he wanted Kissinger to take charge of intelligence and that the national security council staff in the White House under Kissinger would control the intelligence community. This was the beginning of a shift of power away from the CIA to the NSC. It was both a personal shift of power by the President in his own interests and an institutional shift. From this point on, under successive Presidents, the agency began to lose influence to the NSC staff and the President's national security adviser, who in turn has paralleled and at times challenged the director of Central Intelligence for the de facto position of the President's chief intelligence officer.
R Jack Smith, deputy director of intelligence, 1966-71, gave a vivid description of the change in atmosphere when Nixon came in to the White House in 1969:
"It was just as though the shades in the White House were pulled down all of a sudden. THey came in with the assumption that everybody outside the White House was partisan to one degree or another, on one side or another, and was trying to grab a slice of the White House power. They were antagonistic right from the outset. If the CIA has any work to do at all, it is work on behalf of the President. The President is the man the agency serves. If the President feels that we are just another of the contenders out there with policy axes to grind, then it is hard for the agency to do its work. We suddenly had to work in this chill compared to what we had had before".
Helms felt this chill right away. It was customary for the DCI to open NSC meetings with a briefing on the subject being discussed and then to attend the rest of the meeting to answer questions or deal with points as they came up. In December 1968, before Nixon's inauguration, Helms was told by Kissinger that in future he would have to leave the NSC meetings after his initial briefing. This was a major threat to the agency's position in the intelligence bureaucracy. The NSC was the preeminent policy organization in intelligence and foreign policy matters. The exclusion of the DCI from NSC meetings would severely limit the agency's influence and status in the Washington scheme of things.
Helms raised the matter with the new Defense secretary, Melvin Laird. The President would be vulnerable from a statutory point of view to criticisms that he was making strategic decisions without the advice of his chief intelligence officer. Laird agreed that the DCI should not be excluded from NSC meetings, and Helms stayed. But it was a taste of things to come. Similar proposals were made to other heads of agencies, all designed to concentrate power and authority in the White House.
Kissinger, who was Nixon's right hand man when it came to cutting out the agency (and the State Department and the military), employed an oblique approach. He would never say directly what he or the President wanted but instead demanded general analysis. "Send me what you've got, and I'll know what I like when I get it," was the Kissinger line. Backed by the President, Kissinger insisted on being given the raw material of intelligence analysis - the cables, agents' reports, communications' intercepts, photographs and technical intelligence. With the NSC staff, he made his own interpretation of the material separate from the CIA, and briefed the President accordingly. Nixon, who prided himself on his grasp of foreign policy and his knowledge of other countries, always read the detailed briefings that circulated before NSC meetings. This meant that Helms was dealing with a President and a national security adviser who were unusually well-informed.
This state of affairs led to two factors which linked the agency's ability to perform. First, being knowledgeable, Nixon and Kissinger kept the CIA on the defensive. Second, with the exclusion of outsiders from the policy-making process, the CIA, along with other agencies and departments, was often in the dark as to just what policy was being followed.
The secrecy with which Nixon and Kissinger surrounded their policy objectives and their efforts to achieve them had a dangerously isolating effect on the White House. Every major department and agency in the Washington bureaucracy resorted to intrigue to find out what was going on. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff instructed a navy yeoman working in the Joint Chiefs liaison office in the White House for copies of Kissinger's cables and other secret documents. A naval officer monitored telephone calls between Nixon, Kissinger and Haig. From these, as one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recalled:
"It was clear that Haig was running to Nixon and shooting down Kissinger. Kissinger was running to Nixon and shooting down Haig. Nixon from time to time would cut Kissinger off totally and not see him, whereupon Kissinger would become totally paranoid. It all made it totally impossible to carry out structured policies."
This situation affected the State Department as well as the CIA and the military. Ray Cline, who left the CIA in 1969 and became director of the State Department's intelligence and research bureau, resigned in disgust in 1973:
