James Schlesinger, author of the critical 1971 review of the intelligence community, succeeded Richard Helms as DCI. Although he was only director for five months (February-May, 1973), he was seen as Nixon's revenge on the agency and was unpopular. William Colby was one of the few people within the agency who expressed any admiration for Schlesinger:
"He had developed some strong ideas about what was wrong with [the agency] and some positive ideas as to how to go about righting those wrongs. So he arrived at Langley running, his shirt tails flying, determined, with that bulldog, abrasive temperament of his, to implement those ideas and set off a wave of change both in the practice of intelligence generally and in the organization and operation of the CIA specifically."
Schlesinger was the agency's first political director and his job was to restore the CIA as a secret Presidential arm. "The trouble with you fellows", said one of Schlesinger's aides to John Huizenga, head of the board of national estimates, "is that you're not on the team." He meant, of course, on the Nixon team. Nixon was not interested in the CIA as an established bureaucracy carrying out objective professional jobs: he wanted it to do his will.
Schlesinger was working for the Rand Corporation when his managerial expertise came to the attention of Nixon. At the Bureau of the Budget he had a reputation as a "budget cutter" and a "bureaucracy tamer", reducing the Defense Department's running costs by $6 billion. In 1971 Nixon appointed him chairman of the atomic energy commission which he completely reorganized. Schlesinger applied the same managerial ruthlessness to the CIA. About 7 per cent of the CIA's total staff were either fired or forced to take early retirement. Most departures occurred in the directorate of plans. It was a painful process but many believed that it was long overdue.
Schlesinger, like Bissell before him, believed that the day of clandestine operations had been overtaken, and that technical intelligence should now be at the forefront of agency activities. Schlesinger was also determined to tie analytical procedures to technical intelligence. The board and the office of national estimates were reviewed with the intention of abolishing them (a move effected by Schlesinger's successor, William Colby), and in the meantime lost their right to decide what to analyze. Schlesinger told the analysts that their main function was to write papers to order for the White House. This meant that estimates could more easily be controlled by Kissinger and Nixon.
These changes hit the agency like a whirlwind and there was no respite when the White House announced on 11 May that Schlesinger would be the next Defense Secretary and that William Colby would succeed him as DCI. Schlesinger's and Colby's new appointments were part of a reconstruction designed to win more support for the administration in Congress as it became more enmeshed in the toils of Watergate. Schlesinger was a respected administrator who could be expected to control the military and especially military spending. By taking him out of Langley, Nixon was signalling that he would no longer seek to dynamize the secret world. By appointing Colby as DCI, Nixon was calso signalling to the agency that he would cease harrying it and, since Colby was a longtime agency hand, that the agency would be well-placed to reassert itself within the Washington power structure. Colby, faced with an agency unsettled by the Schlesinger reforms, and with a public opinion restive over misdeeds in high places, knew that his tenure as DCI would be tricky.
WHISTLEBLOWERS
Distrust of government and politicians was one of the great changes in attitudes of the 1960's and it was intensified by the divisiveness of the Vietnam war and the unsavoury intrigues of Watergate. There was a widespread belief that the CIA's shadowy hand was involved in a range of illegal activities. This led to a greater scrutiny of the agency in the press and to the emergence of whistleblowers from within the agency itself.
In 1967, a series of articles in the magazine Ramparts revealed the CIA's connection with the National Student Association. These exposes were followed by articles in the New York Times and other newspapers revealing CIA connections with corporations, trusts, individuals, research centres and universities. Journalists David Wise and Thomas B Ross had been the first to give accurate details of some CIA operations in their book The Invisible Government (1964), while Alfred W McCoy's book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972) linked the CIA with the heroin trade in Indochina.
In 1973 there was a spate of hostile press articles. In January, the New York Times ran an unflattering profile of Cord Meyer, one of the agency's leading officers on the clandestine side. A month later the same paper revealed in a blaze of publicity that the CIA had trained police from twelve domestic agencies. Critics regarded this as a breach of the CIA's charter not to operate inside the United States and demanded a congressional investigation. In April a book by David Wise, The politics of Lying, revealed that between 1958 and 1961 the CIA had trained Tibetan guerillas at a base in Colorado, again with the implication that the agency had broken its charter. On 11 May, at the trial of Daniel Ellsberg for leaking The Pentagon Papers, the judge, furious at White House interference (Ehrlichman had telephoned the judge during the trial and offered him the post of director of the FBI) and Hunt's burglary of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, declared a mistrial and dismissed all charges against Ellsberg.
These books and articles and publicity about the Ellsberg trial were bad enough. Much worse from the agency's point of view was to come. Two books published in 1974 by former agency employees, Peter Agee and Victor Marchetti, attracted worldwide attention.
Victor Marchetti had resigned from the CIA in 1969 after fourteen years service, "disenchanted and disagreeing with many of the agency's policies and practices, and, for that matter, with those of the intelligence community and the U.S. government". Marchetti's disaffection was also prompted by his resentment at what he perceived as his exclusion from the CIA's inner circle because he lacked the necessary eastern establishment background. He had joined the agency straight from Pennsylvania State College, becoming first an analyst specialising in Soviet military affairs, and then in 1966-69 a staff officer in the office of the DCI. Thus Marchetti knew some of the agency's top secrets. Marchetti wrote his book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence in collaboration with John D Marks, a former officer at the State Department's intelligence and research bureau. Marks had resigned in 1970 in protest at U.S. policy in southeast Asia and particularly the invasion of Cambodia.
The agency was determined to fight Marchetti and Marks. When Marchetti had joined the CIA in 1955 he had signed the standard contract promising that he would not reveal anything he had learned in his job. Thus the book was in breach of contract. The agency was not claiming that Marchetti did not have the right to publish the book, only that he could not use the classified information to which he had access while working for the CIA. The CIA's general counsel, Lawrence Houston, suggested that Marchetti be prosecuted. Helms concurred and asked Nixon for his support which would be crucial once the case came to court. Nixon agreed and for two years the agency pursued Marchetti through the courts and eventually won. It was a considerable victory because there was a major constitutional issue involved: first amendment rights to freedom of speech. In the Marchetti case the agency effectively won the right of prepublication suppression.
Marchetti and Marks were required to drop 168 passages from their book. The first excision on the grounds of endangering national security was made on the eleventh page of the typescript. It was Henry Kissinger's comment to the 40 co
