Is the CIA starting to spy on Americans at home-turning talents and money
against students, blacks, others? That is one of several key questions raised in a wide ranging criticism. A direct response starts on page 81.
The following was written by Edward K. DeLong of
United Press International, based on an interview with a Central Intelligence Agency official who has re-
signed. The dispatch was distributed by UPI for pub-
lication on October 3.
Victor Marchetti embarked 16 years ago on a career that was all any aspiring young spy could ask. But two years ago, after reaching the highest levels of the Central Intelligence Agency, he became disenchanted with what he perceived to be amorality, overwhelming military influence, waste and duplicity in the spy business. He quit. Fearing today that the CIA may already have begun “go- ing against the enemy within” the United States as they may conceive it-that is, dissident student groups and civil- rights organizations-Marchetti has launched a campaign for more presidential and congressional control over the entire U. S. intelligence community. “I think we need to do this because we’re getting into an awfully dangerous era when we have all this talent (for clandestine operations) in the CIA-and more being de- veloped in the military, which is getting into clandestine “ops” (operations)-and there just aren’t that many places any more to display that talent,” Marchetti says. nThe cold war is fading. So is the war in Southeast Asia, except for Laos. At the same time, we’re getting a lot of domestic problems. And there are people in the CIA who- if they aren’t right now actually already running domestic operations against student groups, black movements and the like-are certainly considering it. “This is going to get to be very tempting,” Marchetti said in a recent interview at his comfortable home in Oak- ton, [Va.], a Washington suburb where many CIA men live. “Therell be a great temptation for these people to sug- gest operations and for a President to approve them or to kind of look the other way. You have the danger of intelli- gence turning against the nation itself, going against the ‘the enemy within.’ ” Marchetti speaks of the CIA from an insider’s point of view. At Pennsylvania State University he deliberately pre- pared himself for an intelligence career, graduating in 1955 with a degree in Russian studies and history.
— Document-
Through a professor secretly on the CIA payroll as a talent scout, Marchetti netted the prize all would-be spies dream of-an immediate job offer from the CIA. The offer came during a secret meeting in a hotel room, set up by a stranger who telephoned and identified himself only as “a friend of your brother.” Marchetti spent one year as a CIA agent in the field and 10 more as an analyst of intelligence relating to the Soviet Union, rising through the ranks until he was helping pre- pare the national intelligence estimates for the White House. During this period, Mar- chetti says, “I was a hawk. I believed in what we were doing.” Then he was promoted to the executive staff of the CIA, moving to an of- fice on the top floor of the Agency’s headquarters across the Potomac. River from Washington. For three years he worked as special assistant to the CIA chief of plans, programs and budgeting, as special assistant to the
CIA’s executive director, and as executive assistant to the Agency’s deputy
director, V. Adm. Rufus Mr. Marchetti L. Taylor. “This put me in a very rare position within the Agency and within the intelligence community in general, in that I was in a place where it was being all pulled together,” Marchetti said. “I could see how intelligence analysis was done and how it fitted into the scheme of clandestine operations. It also gave me an opportunity to get a good view of the intelligence community, too: the National Security Agency, the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), the national reconnaissance organization-the whole bit. And I started to see the politics within the community and the politics between the com- munity and the outside. This change of perspective during those three years had a profound effect on me, because I began to see things I didn’t like.” With many of his lifelong views about the world shattered, Marchetti decided to abandon his chosen career. One of the last things he did at the CIA was to explain to Director Richard Helms why he was leaving.
U. S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, Oct. 11, 197124
“I told him I thought the intelligence community and the
intelligence agency were too big and too costly, that I
thought there was too much military influence on intelli-
gence-and very bad effects from that-and that I felt the
need for more control and more direction.
“The clandestine attitude, the amorality of it all, the cold-
war mentality-these kinds of things made me feel the agency
was really out of step with the times,” Marchetti said.
“We parted friends. I cried all the way home.”
Marchetti, 41, hardly looks the stereotype of a man who
spent 14 years in the CIA.
His dark-rimmed glasses, full face, slightly stout figure,
soft voice, curly black hair and bushy sideburns would seem
more at home on a college campus. He pronounces his name
the Italian way-MAarketti.
MIarchetti’s first impulse after quitting the CIA was to
write a nonfiction account of what was wrong with the U. S.
intelligence community. But, he said, he could not’ bring
himself to do it then.
Instead he wrote a spy novel-“a reaction to the James
Bond and British spy-story stereotypes”-which he says looks
at the intelligence business realistically from the headquarters
point of view he knows so well.
The novel, “The Rope Dancer,” was published last month.
It is a thinly disguised view of the inner struggle over Viet-
nam and Russian strategic advances as Marchetti saw them
within the CIA, the Pentagon and the White House under
President Johnson.
Writing the novel took a year. Then came two tries at
nonfiction articles-one rejected as too dull and the other
turned down as too chatty-and a start on a second novel.
But Marchetti said the need for intelligence reform con-
tinued to gnaw at him, and as his first novel was about to
come out he came into contact with others who agreed with
him, including Representative Herman Badillo (Dem.), of
New York.
Now, Marchetti said, the second novel has been laid aside
so he can devote full time to a campaign for reform.
“Intelligence Business Is Just Too Big”
Although now a dove-particularly on Vietnam, which he
calls an unwinnable war to “support a crooked, corrupt
regime that cannot even rurn an election that looks honest”-
Marchetti says he still believes strongly in the need for in-
telligence collection.
“It’s a fact of life,” he said. “For your own protection you
need to know what other people are thinking.
“But intelligence is now a 6-billion-dollar-a-year business,
and that is just too big. It can be done for a lot less, and
perhaps done better when you cut out the waste.”
For instance, Marchetti said, the National Security Agency
-charged in part with trying to decode intercepted messages.
of foreign governments-wastes about half its 1-billion-dollar
yearly budget.
“They have boxcars full of tapes up at Fort Meade (Md.)
that are 10 years old-boxcars fulll-because in intercepting
Soviet (radio) communications, for instance, the Soviets are
just as sophisticated as we are in scrambler systems. It is
almost a technical impossibility to break a scrambled, coded
message. So they just keep collecting the stuff and putting
it in boxcars. They continue to listen all over the world.
They continue to spend fortunes trying to duplicate the
Soviet (scrambling and encoding) computers,” he said.
“By the time someone can break it, a decade or two has
gone by. So you find out what they were thinking 20 years
ago-so what?”‘ Marchetti said at one time a national intelligence review
board tried to cut out an expensive NSA program that an-
alysts agreed was useless. The CIA Diretcor, he said, wrote
a memorandum recommending the program stop.
‘But Paul Nitze, on his last day in office (as Deputy
Secretary of Defense), sent back a memo in which he said
he had received the recommendation and considered it, but
had decided to continue the program,” Marchetti said. He
said this was possible for Nitze because, although the Di-
rector of the CIA is officially in charge of all the nation’s
intelligence activities, 85 per cent of the money is hidden in
the Defense Department budget.
This, said Marchetti, gives the military considerable pow-
er to shape intelligence estimates. He gave as an example a
conflict between. military and CIA estimates of the number
of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in South Vietnam dur-
ing the late 1960s.
The military wanted a low figure “to show they were
killing the VC and North Vietnamese and were winning
the war.” The CIA reported far too many Communists in
South Vietnam to support this military desire, he said.
Ultimately, Marchetti said, the military won and the CIA
issued an estimate in which “tricky wording” seemed to
make its views agree with those of the generals.
“Browbeating, Pressure” to Change Reports
“Whenever you’re working on a problem that the military
is deeply interested in-because it’s affecting one of their
programs or their war in Vietnam or something-and you’re
not saying what they want you to say, the browbeating
starts: the delaying tactics, the pressure to get the report to
read more like they want it to read,” he said-“in other
words, influencing intelligence for the benefit of their own
operation or activity.
“Somehow, some way, you’ve got t keep your intelli-
gence objective. It can’t be a private tool of the military-
nor, for that matter, a private tool of the White House.”
Marchetti said there is also waste in almost every technical
intelligence-gathering program-such as spy satellites, spe-
cial reconnaissance aircraft, and over-the-horizon radars-be-
cause when either the military or the CIA makes a new ad-
vance the rival agency follows suit with something almost
the same but just different enough to justify its existence.
“The CIA People Can Start Up Wars”
The thing that troubles Marchetti most about the CIA is
its penchant for the dark arts of clandestine paramilitary
actions-an area made doubly attractive to the Agency be-
cause the military scarcely can operate in this field.
‘One of the things the CIA clandestine people can do is
start up wars,” he said. “They can start up a private war in
a country clandestinely and make it look like it’s just
something that the local yokels have decided to do them-
selves.” This, according to Marchetti, is how the United States
first began active fighting in Vietnam. It is the type of ac-
tivity now going on in Cambodia and Laos, where recent
congressional testimony revealed the CIA is running a 450-
million-dollar-a-year operation, he said.
Marchetti said he is convinced the CIA not only engi-
neered the 1963 overthrow of the Diem regime in [South]
Vietnam, which President Nixon also has said was the case,
but was also responsible for the coup that ousted Prince
Norodom Sihanouk [of Cambodia] in early 1970, making
possible the U. S.-South Vietnamese raid on Communist sanc-
tuaries in that country several weeks later.
The Southeast Asia clandestine operations years ago caused
the CIA to set up a phony airline company, Air America,CONCIEN CIA
INTELIEN CIA
which now has as many employes as the 18,000-member working staff of the CIA itself, he said. “Well, the CIA is not only monkeying around in Viet-
nam and in Laos,” Marchetti said-“they’re looking at other
areas where these sorts of opportunities may present them- selves.
“When they start setting up private air companies and
everything else that goes with the wherewithal for support- ing a government or an antigovernment movement, this is very, very dangerous, because they can do it in a clandestine fashion and make it difficult for the public to be aware of what is going on.”
Marchetti said areas where the CIA might launch future clandestine paramilitary activities include South America, India, Africa and the Philippines-all places in the throes of social upheaval. Upheaval, he said, is what prompts the CIA
Director to begin planning possible clandestine activities in a country. “That is so if the President says, ‘Go in and do something’; he’s already got his fake airlines to fly in people. He may have a program going with the police in this country or the
military in that,” according to Marchetti. In addition to Air America, Marchetti said, the CIA has set up both Southern Air Transport in Miami and Rocky
Mountain Air in Phoenix for possible use in paramilitary operations in South America. Similar fake airlines have been bought and sold all over the world, he said, including one in Nepal and another in East Africa.
He also said the CIA has a big depot in the Midwest United States “where they have all kinds of military equip- ment, all kinds of’unmarked weapons.” “Over the years they have bought everything they can get their hands on all over the world that is untraceable-to prepare for the contingency that they might want to ship
arms to a group in a place like Guatemala,” Marchetti said. “They even used to send weapons buyers around to buy arms from the (Soviet) bloc countries.” To fully understand why the CIA conducts semilegal oper- ations around the world, why it might begin to conduct
them in the United States and why more control needs to be exercised over the Agency, Marchetti said it is necessary to understand the men of the CIA.
Most of them, he said, got their start in the intelligence
business during or shortly after World War II, when the
cold war was going strong. “These people are superpatriots,” he said. “But you’ve got to remember, too, they’re amoral. They’re not immoral;
they’re amoral. rThe Director made a speech to the National Press Club where he said, ‘You’ve just got to trust us. We are honorable men.’
‘Well, they are honorable men-generally speaking. But the nature of the business is such that it is amoral.
“Most things are right or wrong, good or evil, moral or immoral. The nature of intelligence is that you do things
because they have to be done, whether it’s right or wrong. If you murder-.”
Marchetti did not complete the sentence.
Because the men of the Agency are superpatriots, he said, it is only natural for them to view violent protest and dis-
sidence as a major threat to the nation. The inbred CIA re- action, he said, would be to launch a clandestine operation
to infiltrate dissident groups. That, said Marchetti, may already have started to happen. “I don’t have very much to go on,” he said. “Just bits and
pieces that indicate the U. S. intelligence community is al- ready targeting on groups in this country that they feel to be subversive.
“I know this was being discussed in the halls of the CIA,
and that there were a lot of people who felt this should be done.”
Needed: “More Controls by Congress”
With the lack of control that exists now over the Agency,
Marchetti said, an extremely reactionary President could perhaps order the CIA’s clandestine activities to go beyond mere infiltration.
“I don’t think the likelihood of this is very great,” Mar-
chetti said, “but one of the ways to prevent this is to let a little sunshine in, to have some more controls by the Con-
gress. “There’s no reason for so much secrecy. There’s no reason the intelligence community shouldn’t have its budget ex- amined. It just bothers the hell out of me to see this waste
going on and this hiding behind the skirts of national se-
curity. “You can have your national security-with controls-and
you don’t need 6 billion dollars to do it.”
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