The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 31 (33)

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0:01 Okay. Let's get this party started. There we go. All right. How are you today, SR? I don't know where Bridget's at. She just texted me, so I know she's around somewhere. Excellent, Colonel. Excellent. We even got nice weather outside for a change. Cool. It's been rainy here today, but only when we started the grill-out lunch. As soon as we...

0:34 Turn the grill on. It started to rain. Perfect timing. And the bugs show up as well, Colonel. And what? The bugs show up. Oh, yeah. Well, our whole back deck's screened in, so we don't have bugs. So, yeah, I'm kind of spoiled that way. Now, I have a whole backyard that has bugs, but I have a whole lot less bugs now that I have chickens, too. A whole lot less.

1:08 There's pluses and minuses. Yeah, yeah. So we have a boardwalk that goes around most of the backyard because that's where my studio is in the back and the RV is hooked up back there. And so there's like, so you don't have to walk through the grass. There's like a boardwalk back around there and the chickens.

1:36 For some stupid reason. With all the grass out there. Likes to. Do their droppings on the sidewalk. I'm like really. You have an entire acre. To do that mess with. And you've got to do it on my sidewalk. So. You're moving up. In the. In the chain here. Before it was a she shed. Now it's a studio.

2:04 It's a studio. Well, it became a studio when I got my bookcases and my bookshelves from Bridget. So I'm giving her the official credit for transforming it from a she shed into a studio. And I have done some shows from there and I need to do more from there, but it's so convenient.

2:29 office is like the house, I live in a ranch house, and this was the original tiny little living room, which is turned into my office, and my I Love Me wall behind me, that's right off the front door, and so it has all of my business stuff, and

2:49 I would never like turn the camera even a little bit because my husband and I were just talking. There's books stacked everywhere here because I do a lot of research here. So I don't have to be out in the she shed studio, which is in the back of our property. So it's just a lot more convenient to do that here.

3:11 But anyway, that has its own Starlink because when we're home, we have a traveling Starlink with our RV. And when we're home, that's all on its own power and everything. So we have redundant capability here. And it has its own Starlink back there. So sometimes when there's a whole lot going on in the house, like if we have company or whatever, I go out there. So anyway, a little inside baseball there. Everybody's that.

3:41 Like, all right, all right, get on with the show. Okay, so where we left off in the Laos, the secret war that became not secret is where we pick up today. Okay, the general U.S. objectives in Southeast Asia revolved around South Vietnam. Actually, it revolved around the drugs, but whatever.

4:16 quote-unquote, building a political base for the Saigon government on pacification, unconventional warfare programs. The guerrillas made the war real at the end of March of 1965 when they detonated a car bomb just outside the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Station Chief Pierre de Silva, badly wounded, lost an eye.

4:43 Agency Secretary Barbara Robbins died while several more persons from the typing pool and at least two case officers like Da Silva were wounded. Eliezer Williams stepped into the breach to act as the temporary station chief until Langley promoted Gordon Jorgensen. During the interval, LBJ decided to commit U.S. forces to combat in South Vietnam.

5:13 and the war intensified. And by the way, I know it sounds totally gross even saying this, but there have been some versions of this story that said that while it wasn't intended to wound or kill US citizens, that the car bombing, and I'm just telling you what I've read.

5:41 was staged so to get the U.S. troops in there. I don't have any proof of that. The sourcing on the books and articles that were written about that, I don't feel were well resourced, but where are you going to find the sourcing? Is it outside the realm of possibility? Absolutely not. So just know that that floats out there. The LBJ...

6:11 dictum was the first team should go to Vietnam. And given the dominance of Cuban operations in the early 1960s, CIA's next station chief was John Hart from the Cuba Task Force. Now, again, remember that the entire Cuba Task Force was set up with people that, according to the author, weren't the A-Team. And yet they all find their way to Vietnam.

6:42 which is very interesting. And as a reminder, as I discussed yesterday, and this is well sourced, the CIA sent an entire special forces team to their death in Cambodia to trigger them to get in the war as well. So it is definitely not outside the possibility that they staged this too. Just throwing that out there.

7:10 Hart came to Saigon in early 1966. He was 45 at the time. He had a hand in Wisner's Wurlitzer operations, and he was involved in Italy, setting up the stay-behind units. He was also very involved in the stay-behind units in the Korean War. He was also involved in the Tibetan operations.

7:42 He was actually the guy in charge of the task force that moved the Dalai Lama into India. Hart had headed CIA stations in Thailand in the early 50s, which means he was setting up the drug operation, and in Morocco later, where all kinds of shit happened. The Far East Division chief, Bill Colby, had several things in common with Hart. Both had been born in the U.S. and raised abroad. In Hart's case,

8:12 He was raised in Albania and Iraq, and his dad was a member of the State Department. Both had served in Italy. Hart had been born in Minneapolis across the river from William Colby's twin city, St. Paul. And by all accounts, the Asian baron had no problem with the new Saigon station chief because he was just going to be doing the same thing he had done everywhere else. Some recall that John Hart

8:45 had little stomach for paramilitary operations, but that's bullshit because he had participated in multiple countries in multiple stay-behind operations. He opened a training center at Vontau and recruited counter-terror teams. I would argue they were terrorist teams, not counter-terrorist teams.

9:13 By the spring of 1966, there were more than 3,000 armed men in his program. Hart also emphasized political action, providing funds and specialists to South Vietnamese labor unions. He also had expertise in Vietnamese writing a new constitution. In 66 and 67, South Vietnam held national assembly and then presidential elections that the CIA

9:47 was backing the entire time. The elections had nothing to do with democracy. It had everything to do with consolidating the Western power in South Vietnam. For much of this period, Ed Lansdale resided in Saigon in one last incarnation. This time as basically serving as a de facto ambassador, but actually as a conduit for his South Vietnamese contacts.

10:17 Lansdale functioned as an intelligence collector. He left soon after the enemy's 1968 Tet Offensive. William Colby and John Hart shared Lansdale's perception that the road to success lay in winning, quote unquote, hearts and minds. And you do that by setting up the Phoenix program, I guess. Colby peddled that line incessantly.

10:45 in Washington, in policy papers and advice throughout the CIA and the national security staff, while Hart did it in theater. Both the headaches involved were legion. The U.S. did not even know how many South Vietnamese there were. They had no idea how many were in Saigon, much less what their allegiance were.

11:17 As Hart later said, quote, we had only the vaguest notion of how many people lived in the country and that there was certainly no way of taking a census because of the war, unquote. Hart tried his best. In fact, one of the pacification initiatives in 1966 was to create census grievance teams trained at Vung Tau.

11:47 They were dispersed into villages to find out not only how many people were there, but what they were saying about Saigon and who they sided with. This is the Phoenix program. This is them building those villages and setting up a computer system that tracked people, basically like the initial stages of what we now know as smart cities. Hart approved the appointment of a set of regional CIA chiefs for South Vietnam.

12:20 to coincide with military command zones. They could connect the Saigon police special branch in their areas and take care of CIA activities. The regional officers were followed by CIA people appointed for each of the different provinces. Nelson Brickham, Hart's chief of operations, came to him with even more ambitious proposals. One to keep

12:49 book on the bad guys, essentially to create a database on just who belonged to the National Liberation Front and where they stood in the parallel hierarchy. After the consideration at Langley, not only did Colby, but Helms and the new agency's special assistant for Vietnam affairs, Philip Carver, they would call this the Intelligence Coordination

13:19 and exploitation. He definitely was exploiting the Vietnamese people. It was a direct precursor to the Phoenix program. Hart, temporarily sidelined by eye problems from strenuously playing tennis, did not participate in the late 1967 meetings that actually created Phoenix, which aimed to combine the understanding of the National Liberation Front,

13:50 Supposedly developed by the Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation. The abbreviation of that is ICEX, I-C-E-X. But they also had efforts at neutralization of anybody that they deemed a threat. Under the Phoenix program, there were to be interrogation centers in each province and at the district level.

14:23 to collect more data. The new paramilitary force, the Provincial Reconnaissance Units, those were called PRUs, became the CIA's enforcement mechanism, but South Vietnamese police and military units were side by side with them in the adventure. Phoenix was up and running in the spring of 68, but by then Hart had left. He was replaced by Lou Lapham. It formed part of the

14:56 Fresh organization called CORDS, Civil Operations and Rural Development Support. Rural development. They were not developing the rural area. They were creating a tracking system to control it. That was the initial part of the pacification program. By then, William Colby had returned to Saigon, sent by LBJ as the deputy chief of CORDS.

15:30 Colby succeeded to the top job when his boss, Robert Comer, became the U.S. ambassador to Turkey. Turkey, the one with the largest stay-behind unit. As a result, it would be Colby who presided over cords in the Phoenix program. Although much would be accomplished on pacification, the Phoenix program became highly controversial because of human rights violations.

16:04 The problem of huge numbers of South Vietnamese political prisoners and its inability to develop the information necessary to attack the entire purpose was the National Liberation Front infrastructure. It's hard to attack something when you're killing the people because you're torturing them in these black site prisons. Most frequently, the Phoenix program functioned as a vehicle for Saigon officials to engage in extortion.

16:35 elimination of rivals and to consolidate their own personal power. Because they would just implicate their neighbors who had done nothing other than be viewed as competition for the people that were getting money from the CIA. And they would then turn them in and they would go to a black site prison and disappear. Most frequently,

17:06 While tens of thousands of alleged NFL cadre were quote-unquote neutralized under Phoenix, the number of senior Liberation Front officials swept up were very few. Colby worked hard to inject quote-unquote discipline in the effort. In the meantime, the Phoenix program became a political football in the U.S., leading to a series of congressional hearings.

17:38 much like those that had happened on Laos, in which Colby was beset with critics. He returned to the US in 71, his future at every turn dogged by his participation in the Phoenix program. Phoenix piled up some impressive statistics. During 69 alone, it had neutralized over 20,000 people. Under the guise of them being suspects,

18:10 for the National Liberation Front. Of those 20,000, at least 6,000 were killed. In 1971, Colby told a Senate hearing that there had been more than 20,000 killed in all, among 30,000 people that had been imprisoned and about 18,000 that had been converted into Saigon agents. Not to be outdone, the South Vietnamese claimed more than,

18:44 40,000 had been killed. But when questions arose over the legality of the program, even under Vietnamese law, authorities rapidly retreated to an admission that 87% of the supposed cadre had been killed. From 1969 to 72, Ted Shackley led the CIA station in Saigon.

19:12 Given the Cord's purpose that classic definitions of political action and that Colby's organization held formerly responsible here, room for conflict, that's Shackley, existed. In particular, the two groups participated over who would run the most promising agents recruited under the Phoenix program. The CIA had first dibs at all of them.

19:38 That led to a temptation among Cord's advisors to keep secret their best spies so as to avoid them being taken over. Possibly the most contentious matter to arise during Shackley's time in Saigon was the conflict with Army Special Forces over the so-called Green Beret Affair. In June of 1969, there was an execution or murder of a Vietnamese agent working for Special Forces at Ninh Trang.

20:09 Killed after a long, inconclusive interrogation on grounds that he might be a spy for Hanoi. The case came to the attention of the U.S. Commander General Creighton Abrams, who ordered a full investigation. The Counterintelligence Corps, the Army CIC, inquiries traced orders for the killing of the chain of command to the head of 5th Special Forces Group, Colonel Robert Renault.

20:40 He, plus a number of Green Berets, were remanded for court-martial. Their defense was the CIA. Shackley and the agency's regional officer, Dean Almey, had demanded the man be killed. Lawyers threatened to subpoena Shackley, Almey, and Richard Helms. During preliminary hearings, the agency began sending his people off to temporary duty assignments to make them unavailable.

21:10 The issue rose to the highest levels in memoranda from the CIA General Counsel, again, Lawrence Houston, with meetings between counsel for the agency and the Army, even a session of the U.S. Intelligence Board at which the murder was the only subject. No notes were permitted to be taken. All of the backbenchers were kept out, unprecedented in U.S. intelligence history.

21:37 The army then dropped all charges without ever going to trial, which basically tells you it was the CIA that did it, that demanded it, and then interfered in the accountability of the people that had ordered it and the people who had carried out. Saigon politics, per se, remained within Shackley's purview, and that would be another presidential election in 1971.

22:08 To both Colby's and Shackley's credit, their differences remained minor. Another intelligence mission principally involving special forces at the MAC SOG was a prisoner rescue under the code name Bright Light. The most spectacular mission was a raid carried out quite close to Hanoi in November of 1970. It hit a complex town near Sante where Americans were thought to be held. The raid

22:39 Operation Ivory Coast came off without a hitch, unlike the latter Iranian hostage fiasco, but it illustrated a different problem with those kinds of missions. Absolutely zero prisoners were found. Intelligence on prisoner locations in rescue missions was always uncertain. 28 more rescue attempts after Sante. Of the total 119 missions,

23:08 undertaken between 66 and 73. Fully 98 were raids. The rescue missions freed several hundred South Vietnamese soldiers and 60 civilians, but only one American prisoner. But he died shortly after from wounds that had been inflicted at the last minute during the raid by his captors. So they killed him on the way out. Raids might be spectacular,

23:42 were not about to determine the outcome of the war. That would be done on the ground in the South. And the prospects dimmed every day. Tom Polger followed Shackley as the Saigon station chief in January of 1972. He had been a European specialist with zero Asian experience. His most recent posting was in Latin America. Polger did pretty well.

24:15 but the war was too far gone. Hanoi staged a huge offensive that year, finally driving the U.S. out of the conflict, at least in terms of military involvement. The Paris ceasefire agreement sealed the fate of Saigon. Polgar presided over 30 more months of battle that pit Saigon against Hanoi. In some respects, the CIA...

24:43 CIA role actually grew with the U.S. out of the gate. But the South Vietnamese gradually lost ground. In March of 75, their defenses collapsed. Over two frantic months, the issue became the evacuation of South Vietnamese, including the agency assets. Yet again, the people that they have brought into their fold are going to be evacuated and brought back to the United States.

25:12 even though they were trained in basically what amounts to terrorist training camps. Many were left behind, along with Saigon Station records, which fell into the hands of Hanoi when the U.S. Embassy was captured on April 30, 1975. Frank Snepp, Polgar's top analyst, was left with an account of the CIA's final days in country, and others have also described these terrible weeks when a few CIA officers

25:44 saved some Vietnamese, often heroically, but the larger defeat remained a fait accompli. The fall of Saigon brought the end of the war. The secret wars in Southeast Asia represented many things to many people. To some, they were laboratories for testing techniques that they continued to use. To others, the political morass was at the edge of the

26:14 vietnam quagmire those many years later the full story of the secret operation was still mainly untold to some americans laos symbolized government secrecy used to cloak doubtful legality to many vietnam symbolized power illegitimately unleashed and inevitably defeated to most all of this seemed a terrible mistake yet even as these events unfolded the cia

26:44 had more going on, both at home and in other countries. Chapter 16, The Global Reach. Blessed with a perfect background for an internationalist, Richard Magera Helms could have been a diplomat, a banker, or a military officer. His maternal grandfather, an international banker, had lived in Brussels, or Basel, sorry, Switzerland. His father,

27:19 had been an executive with the Alcoa, the aluminum company of America. So in other words, he fit the perfect role model as a CIA agent. He had been born on Philadelphia's main line. As a boy, Helms lived in New York City in New Jersey. Herman Helms saved the family, the horrors of the Great Depression, by cashing out on the stock market.

27:50 just before the crash, almost like he knew, which afforded Helms opportunities denied to many in his generation. Herman and Marion Helms wanted their children to have an international education and move them to Europe. Just as Richard Helms finished his junior year at a private high school, Helms summered in France, spent a year at a Swiss prep school called La Rosie. Then another

28:21 At a German gymnasium, which is college, he spent his time skiing, playing soccer. And as a crew member, like boating, he was taught French and Latin and German. Helms also had a tutor during his Latin lessons.

28:57 that Williams College, the family school, required four years of language, but the quote-unquote gymnasium, again, that's a college, didn't teach it. After he traveled some to Italy, Helms arrived at Williams in the fall of 1931. Aside from inducing the college to accept his dual major in English and history,

29:28 developed a lesson for later life. As editor of the newspaper, he wrote an editorial advocating ending both the Latin requirement and compulsory attendance at chapel. The world crashed down then with demands that he be expelled for expressing such heresy. Helms had been an excellent student. He graduated maga cum laude.

29:58 and was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa sorority. And he survived without being kicked out or any repercussions for his heresy. But his bi-life was awaiting. Richard Helms wanted to be a journalist or a lawyer. He toyed with Harvard Law School, but instead took a job at United Press in London.

30:24 His later assignment to Berlin led to an unforgettable lunch with Adolf Hitler and other Nazi Illuminaries. Helms also saw the pitfalls of journalism being scooped by rival Associated Press on reporting the Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg. And he covered the Olympics where American athlete Jesse

30:51 Owens won the 200-meter dash. Helms hoped to have his own newspaper one day and left the UP to learn the business end of journalism at the Indianapolis Times, where he became an advertising manager. While in Indianapolis, he married Julia Shields, recently divorced from the founder of one of the larger grooming product firms of the time. World War II brought a sea change for Richard Helms.

31:23 A former UP boss now joining the OSS. Helms volunteered for the Navy Reserve and ended up at Harvard after all as an officer trainee. Detailed to the Navy's anti-sub warfare staff, after just a few weeks, Helms was simply detached to the OSS. One Sunday morning, two weeks of training.

31:52 Assignment to the OSS planning unit and long hours of counterintelligence programs in Washington led Helms to everything that he could get in the field. In early 45, that finally happened when he went to London, where William Casey led the OSS efforts to penetrate Germany. The London job helped Richard Helms to the inner sanctums of the operation. He was sold. This is what he was going to do.

32:24 for his life's work. He shared an apartment with William Casey and became the spy spy, a master of clandestine operations in Europe. He soon moved to Paris with Casey, continuing the work. By the end of the war, Helms was an established expert on Germany. When OSS sent a mission into the defeated nation, Helms went along. Alan Dulles headed the unit. He left.

33:00 Richard Helms as the key field officer for this initiative. Helms met many who became towering figures of the CIA during this time. And that would have been a time Operation Sunrise was going on and they were transitioning all of the stay-behind units into the future NATO. He would meet Dulles, Casey, Walter Bedell Smith, Frank Wisner, Gordon Stewart.

33:33 Ralph Kingsley, and Robert Joyce, all of them intelligence officers and diplomats that would play a big role in the future CIA covert operations. Like many of them, Richard Helms stayed on when the OSS became the strategic service unit and through the evolution process to the CIA.

34:00 Already in a senior position, Richard Helms rose to become the CIA staff chief, then a division chief for Germany, responsible for the major theater of the Secret War, and that would be Operation Gladio. By the 1950s, Helms had a reasonable expectation as being the chief of the Directorate of Operations, but then Alan Dulles picked Wisner. Helms served as the chief of operations, active and engaged.

34:32 He told a group of officers, quote, my job is to hold an umbrella over you fellows and catch the crap when you get on with your operating, unquote. When it became impossible for Wisner to continue in his director of operations role, Richard Helms, who had already twice acted in that position, had the strongest claim to the job. But Dulles selected Richard Bissell. The spy maven thought of resigning.

35:01 Near the end of his life, Dulles told Helms that not making him the DDO was his worst mistake. Dulles' choice reflected Eisenhower's preference for covert action. But after the Bay of Pigs, the man who kept the secrets could not be denied. In early 62, Helms became deputy director of operations in his own right. In the Congo,

35:32 Laos, South Vietnam, and South America. Helms showed that he could play the covert operations game as good as anyone. And he became John McComb's deputy along the way. The CIA director sometimes took Helms to meetings at the White House. With LBJ, John McComb never achieved anything like the rapport.

36:03 that he had had with JFK. Johnson remained suspicious. A man of the Senate, LBJ, probably resented how McComb threw his weight around on Capitol Hill in 1963 at the time the Senate was debating arms control agreements. He was staking out a political position and even lending CIA analysts who believed that he did. McComb's penance for policy advice also irked LBJ. LBJ

36:34 increasingly cut out FaceTime in the Oval Office for him. This annoyed McCone. By early 65, John McCone was at loggerheads with LBJ over Vietnam access, and he'd had enough, so he quit. A few days later, Johnson's aide, Marvin Watson, telephoned Helms at Langley and asked him to come over the next morning. The Secret Service ushered Richard Helms into the Oval Office, and when LBJ got off the telephone, he announced,

37:06 The startled spook that John McComb had resigned. LBJ appointed Vice Admiral Rayburn as the successor. But Rayburn, a Navy rocket specialist, knew nothing about the intelligence agency. Johnson wanted someone to back him up. Richard Helms was going to be that man. He became the deputy director of the CIA on April 28, 1965.

37:34 Returning from the LBJ ranch after the appointments were announced, the president told Helms that he and Rayburn was going to shake up the agency. LBJ liked what he saw. Little more than a year later, when Johnson decided that he wanted no more of Rayburn, he elevated Richard Helms. Rayburn displeased LBJ in a different way by doing what the president asked and keeping away from him.

38:03 The CIA director was not helped by a low-level campaign of gutter sniping from the agency people who didn't want him there. Then LBJ gives Richard Helms another admiral as a deputy, Rufus Taylor. Johnson appointed Helms on June 18, 1966. Ten days later, the Senate confirmed him. He was sworn in on June 30.

38:40 Richard Helms became the first CIA director to have dealt with a major flap over the CIA's domestic activities. Alan Dulles and his predecessors had had a problem with paramilitary operations abroad and the agency's perceived intelligence failures. But it would be on Helms' watch that the domestic attracted attention and began making massive waves.

39:06 The unraveling can be said to have begun in the spring of 66 with the publication of the New York Times article on U.S. intelligence. Both the CIA and the White House were forewarned about the series by some of the people the reporter spoke to. The agency even sent out an all hands cable instructing stations on how to respond. When the Times began publishing, stations reported back that parts of the story were getting the most.

39:35 attention in their countries. The CIA subcommittee on the House Armed Services Committee asked for and received an agency briefing on the articles. Most of the material dealt with older stories, the power of the secret intelligence in general, the Bay of Pigs, the Congo, and so on. There were hints of other issues.

39:59 Probably most important, the stories challenged some Americans who were involved in certain CIA secret activities. Key here were the officers of the National Student Association, which was purported to be a non-government and non-partisan organization. The National Student Association functioned as an umbrella group of student organizations on various campuses.

40:27 The agency's international organization division had been seen as a counterweight to the Soviet-sponsored youth groups of the 50s. Though the sensibilities had changed with the growing opposition to the Vietnam War, the National Student Association had remained very active in a cultural war inside the U.S. Into the 1960s, the CIA had paid for all of the

40:56 NSA, National Student Association's International Activities. It had arranged for its officers to occupy an office. They paid for it. They contributed to the upkeep of the senior officials in this organization. They also funded summer seminars for student leaders and used them to recruit from. By some accounts, agency cash channeled through friendly foundations.

41:27 you know, like the Carnegies and the Rockefellers and those people, amounted to over $3 million. Even at a time that when this information surfaced, membership dues accounted for just $18,000 of an annual $800,000 budget. Huh, 18,800,000.

41:56 After 1962, when the CIA's International Organizations Division merged with a covert action staff, they were still running the student program. It was literally part of the covert operations. Later investigation established that the CIA had made operational use of the students going abroad. One on a NSA scholarship was an exchange student in Poland. He had to be pulled out because

42:26 He was being accused of as being an American spy because he was. More frequently, the agency simply asked students to keep a watchful eye out and tell them what they'd seen. They were using them as intelligence operations. They would brief them on their way out. They would debrief them on their way back. By 1965, the NSA leaders were uncomfortable with this CIA relationship. The press revelations in 1966

42:57 soured everything. Shortly before the time series on the CIA, the NSA president, Phil Sherborn, told his director of development, Michael Wood, of the CIA's role. Not everyone in the organization were witting. Cord Meyer of the covert action staff made sure of that. Monitoring NSA elections, revealing the agency's backing, only associates, presidents, and vice presidents

43:28 that they approved of, that were read into the funding. When Wood learned of the connection, he was scandalized. He first tried to replace the CIA money contacting Vice President Herbert Humphreys, who did some fundraising but had little success. Association officials attempted to dissuade Wood, who saw their pleas as bribery. Wood then told

43:56 others at NSA of the CIA connection and began talking to the San Francisco-based magazine called Ramparts. That magazine had already raised eyebrows at Langley because of an expose reporting that the CIA had hired Michigan State University to furnish the South Vietnamese police, which they had. We've talked about this a lot.

44:20 We later found out Indiana University was part of this entire operation as well, which is where Dan Mederone went for training when he was the Richmond police chief. So Michigan State was exposed. Basically, their entire public security, their criminal justice, were CIA agents. And they received a USAID grant.

44:49 that trained operatives at Michigan State and deployed them forward as part of the Phoenix program in the Vietnam. Rampart saw the opportunity to make a powerful statement against covert operations by revealing the CIA NSA links. Subsequent events would test Helm's umbrella theory of management. The Johnson administration became perfectly aware of this brewing trouble.

45:22 By May of 66, within a month of the Times revelation, Director Helms sent the White House information about Ramparts to its editor, Robert Scheer. The White House wanted more, and Helms initiated an investigation of the magazine's alleged communist ties. So if you write bad about the CIA, you're a communist. They even created FBI files. There was nothing to find.

45:51 The agency reluctantly reported this to Walt Restow, who was the national security advisor. Cord Meyer, whose name appeared in this fiasco, writes of this almost as if he was an innocent bystander implicated by NSA's irresponsible youth radicals. Yeah, it wasn't me. It was the kids. We're funding them, but it wasn't us.

46:23 In fact, the CIA before the event acted preemptively to limit the damage that would be associated or directed at the CIA. A special assistant to the deputy director of operations ordered to pull together data on ramparts, progressed to schemes to wreck the magazine. Langley considered asking the IRS to audit their tax returns. Edmund Applewhite.

46:52 A 17-year agency veteran of literary bent who had once worked at Buckminster Fuller coordinated all of these schemes for the covert action. Applewhite had later said in an interview, quote, I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing.

47:16 we were not in the least inhibited by the fact that the CIA had no internal role in the U.S. Unquote. Applewhite was promoted to deputy IG of the CIA and decorated with a medal for interfering and attacking an independent media organization inside the United States because they wrote true things about the CIA.

47:47 In early January of 67, Langley picked up rumors in New York publishing circles that Rampart's piece on the agency and the National Student Association, written by Marcus Raskin, yes, that's Jamie Raskin's dad, had been scheduled and would focus on CIA subversion of American youth.

48:12 But the same time the agency intercepted a letter from an unknown organization, probably contrived, mailed from Vienna, still a spy haven. The letter alleged that the CIA employed someone in the coordinating secretariat of the International Student Conference in Brussels. They had documents from the secretariat files that seemed to substantiate the charge.

48:41 The NSA was a conference affiliate. This permitted Langley counter-spy James Angleton to assert that the entire matter was a Soviet disinformation plot. Had the CIA followed Angleton's advice, it would have been even less prepared for the coming storm. Again, the pattern, no matter what they do,

49:12 If you are working to uncover, you're a communist. Instead, Corden Meyer instructed James Kiley, his case officer for the National Student Association, to turn off the money. At least the agency would be able to deny any current relationship. On Monday, February 13th, Richard Helms was in Albuquerque after a long day of inspections. What are they inspecting in Albuquerque?

49:46 the CIA's weapons expert, Richard Helms, with the CIA weapons expert, Helms had gone west to visit the Nevada nuclear site and Los Alamos, where the bomb designers held sway. Now he got a White House cable ordering him back to Washington immediately. Helms would later say it was the darkest day of his career. Now what's interesting about him going to

50:18 Nevada during this time. We now know that this is during the unveiling, and he was there, Richard Helms, the unveiling of the modifications to the U-2, the creation of Oxcart, and the SR-71. That's why he went to Area 51 in Las Vegas.

50:44 Aids quickly found that there was no commercial flights available and it took an hour to arrange through an air branch for a proprietary. Oh, and guess who flew them back? What's next to New Mexico and Albuquerque? Oh, that would be the Marana Airfield where all of the CIA aircraft is and Intermountain Aviation. Yeah, so they used one of their covert planes to fly the CIA director.

51:14 back to Washington, D.C. Isn't that sweet? So the entire flight, Richard Helms was wondering what he had done to offend LBJ or what else could have been going wrong. When the White House took hours to return a call, Helms put in, as soon as he reached the seventh floor, Helms, who liked scotch for dinner, had several. In fact, Helms had nothing to trigger this episode. Rather,

51:49 it marked the onset of the Ramparts fiasco. A week earlier, presidential political aide Douglas Cater had been sitting in the White House office when his phone rang. In that case, it had been the National Student Association president, W. Eugene Groves, seeking an appointment. Cater, one of the original founders of the National Student Association,

52:15 A couple of dozen student idealists who had began at a conference in the University of Wisconsin in the late 40s followed the group with interest. Now he expected some declaration on Vietnam. Instead, Groves told Cater that Rampart had gone to press with an article. As soon as the man left, Cater dictated a note to LBJ. Then the phone rang again. It was a direct line from the president. Well, aren't you the lucky one, LBJ said.

52:45 You let that feller come into your office and lay a big fat turd right in your lap. Cater knew well what was going to happen. He had been an addressee on CIA memorandum about Ramparts and Robert Scheer the previous summer and had written him papers that circulated within the White House. As a former NSA member, he could also see the implication of the charges of student complicity with the agency.

53:15 Cater rushed to see the president. Johnson was impatient. Cater argued they ought to use the week left before Ramparts hit the newsstand to prepare a response. Cater made private inquiries and determined that the National Student Association funding had been approved by the Psychological Strategy Board and that no one raised a warning or monitored the runway growth of this enterprise.

53:42 Other details of the White House activity remained obscured, but the summons to Helms came the day before any of this began, when Rampart discussed its finding in a full-page ad in the New York Times and Washington Post. The front-page stories in both newspapers covered the issue. As soon as that happened, the State Department held a press conference and confirmed the essence of the charges, as Acting Secretary Nicholas Krachenbach

54:11 had explained to LBJ he would do. Reporters caught up to Allen Dulles and asked about the CIA funding. Dulles replied that the money had been spent well. LBJ never held a White House meeting on how to proceed, allowing the agencies to dangle out on a limb. But Richard Helms acknowledges that the student association flap was a CIA problem from start to finish. LBJ now instructed the agency.

54:40 It seeks all subsidies to youth and student groups and ordered a policy review of CIA relationships with educational and private organizations. Helm read in the newspaper that he would be a member. Like the Taylor Board after the Bay of Pigs, the 1967 policy review group was not impartial nor objective. Its members were Helms, Nicholas Krachenbach.

55:12 who had actually coordinated the public response, and John Gardner, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. They met in Krachenbach's office. Helms and Gardner sat on a sofa, the acting secretary behind his desk. Helms recalled sharp debate and occasional hostility. In five weeks, they hammered out a policy that the U.S. halt all covert assistance.

55:39 but develop a different way to support groups more openly. You know, kind of like what they did with the USAID, the guy that was running the USAID. Oh yeah, we do everything the CIA used to do covertly. We just do it overtly. The National Student Association would be the sole entity mentioned in the report, but they weren't the only ones involved.

56:15 No useful purpose would be served in telling you that we have been operating extensively in the United States against the law. That's an actual quote. Already, it was being...

56:41 talked about that Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and all of those things, the U.S. Information Agency, were all CIA fronts. So there's no useful purpose for the American people to know that they're being propagandized by their government. Helms shaved at the order to desist all aid with all organizations.

57:10 but he understood the rationale and believed that they had headed off a full-scale congressional investigation by taking these steps. He would nonetheless be called to testify. Georgia Senator Richard Russell, a member of the CIA subcommittee on the Armed Services Committee, took some of the wind out of the storm when he revealed that he had known all along and had approved the subsidies. Again, Congress is a crime scene. A sitting senator.

57:41 says that he not only knew about it, that he approved the funding for the CIA to illegally operate in the United States. Okay, everything's fine. Go on about your merry way. Nothing to see here. Gene Groves dismissed the Katzenbach report as whitewash, but he nevertheless faced NSA members' demands that he be impeached for the CIA link.

58:12 Doug Cater came to his own conclusion, quote, secrecy has a self-destructive potential which cannot stay the long course, especially when pitted against this country's passion for publicity, unquote. No, not publicity, truth. The secret warriors took umbrage at the revelation of the Laotian War. They had already had two years in which to learn this lesson, but they didn't.

58:42 Exposure of the CIA's role in the National Student Association marked not the end but the beginning of controversy. The agency had no one to blame but itself for what happened next. So at this point, of course, it's going to be open season for a while because this is leading into.

59:09 The whole Nixon era leading up to the mid-1970s when all hell breaks loose. But this is the first shoe to drop. And we will continue this tomorrow from where we're at now. But this whole thing is along those lines of the Rampart Magazine and the New York Times expose.

59:40 Started the ball rolling during the LBJ administration with Richard Helms as the CIHE. And over the course of the next five years or so, all hell breaks loose. Because now for the media, the little strap hangers around, not necessarily the main players, it's going to be everybody running to find.

1:00:08 all of the little pieces while the CIA is using their propaganda experts in the media to, number one, mitigate the information coming out and craft it so that it's more acceptable. But there's quite a bit that's going to come out. Okay. Anyone? SR? Bridget?

1:00:47 Thank you, Colonel. Thank you, everyone, for being here on Rumble and on Spaces today. There's still something mulling through my mind. I'll hold off on fire with Richard Helms because there's going to be a lot more about him, I'm sure. Yes. But what's going on here, and you mentioned one senator pops up and says, yeah, I approve the expenditure. And I'm sitting here wondering, how in the hell does one senator

1:01:19 get to approve expenditure from U.S. coffers. That doesn't make sense. There's more going on here than meets the eye. Thank you, Colonel. Sure. Well, so you guys know that it obviously wasn't one senator. It was everyone that's on the Armed Forces Committee.

1:01:41 They had a sub-panel. This is before the actual stand-up of the Intelligence Committee. So the intelligence budgets were classified under the Armed Forces budget during budgetary negotiations. And so by him standing up and saying that he knew about it and approved it,

1:02:06 He's basically speaking for the entire committee because to your point, SR, at no time in any of the budget process does only one senator get briefed. Now, could there have been a limited number? Yes, but everybody on the subcommittee for intelligence had been cleared and was part of the budget process. So Richard Russell is speaking on behalf of his entire panel for the budget committee.

1:02:36 he somehow drew the short straw to be the one that did it. But let me just tell you, Richard Russell is an icon in the military for his support of the military. And if they were, he was, he had impeccable standing.

1:03:01 If you understand the dynamics of how that works, he was like Strom Thurmond, like the current day, the older version of Mitch McConnell. When he spoke, everybody else just shut up because he spoke on behalf of everybody. And that's the stature that Richard Russell had in that community.

1:03:28 That's why he was selected to be the one to say that because no one was going to question him. Thank you, Colonel. Appreciate that. Sure. Let me, I'm going to look something up real quick here. Yeah. So just so that you guys know, Richard Russell is from Georgia. That's the home of Lockheed.

1:04:05 You know, Lockheed Martin, Marietta, those guys, the C-130. And so I first came across Richard Russell when I got to Warner Robins on my last assignment. And I'm not kidding. From I-75 to the base, at the time I got there, there was one road.

1:04:36 that went from I-75 to the base. It's called Russell Parkway for a reason. The museum is named after him. He is the icon of military. He was the Southern Democrat. He had literally people eating out of his hands. I cannot overstate how popular he was.

1:05:06 He was so popular that he was also a member of the Warren Commission. Okay. So he's in there big, big time. So all he had to do is stand up and say that and everybody else sat down and shut up. Okay. The other thing I found interesting here is they're showing their hand and they're actually blatant about it. We have a...

1:05:49 media that's willing to report on it and doing what's possible and yet we get no results out of all of this it goes on with operation chaos and everything else happening operation phoenix the whole nine yards and it's like yeah we broke the law so what yep and they broke the law

1:06:19 And the senators responsible for writing the laws give them the out. That's the part you have to make sure you understand. None of this shit went on without Congress and the president's knowledge and actually being a part of it. So, Bridget, I'm going to take you down and see if you can come back up. Her mic's not working.

1:06:51 Let me bring her back up as a co-host. So let me look over here. There you go. So you're saying that the Russia, Russia, Russia was not the first time? I'm saying that the Russia, Russia, Russia wasn't the first time. As we've seen with so many other repeated playbooks. Yeah. And Jamie Raskin is creepy as heck. If you go through.

1:07:31 His history. He is. There's just something, not just politically, but evil. And, you know, there's very few people, but that's one that is not generally on everybody's radar. That man has got some really evil, satanic kind of crap going on. Well, he was brought up in the system. So it's very hard.

1:08:03 to not turn out that way when you're brought up in the system. True, true. There's a few rare exceptions, but... And to your point that you were talking about with one person essentially moving the needle congressionally or in the Senate, either one, that when they talk, everybody else sits down and shuts up. Doesn't that kind of more or less negate the...

1:08:37 Our vote by putting people in? Well, it certainly does with the way we do the Senate now, right? Right. Yeah. It's something that people need to really realize. It's like by one person, it's like all these different committees writing the bill. Not all these people, you know, and what came up last year about how these guys have no time to read the bill. It's because a handful of people, right?

1:09:06 The bill. You're just supposed to go along. But the handful of people that write the bill aren't even in the Senate. It's not even the staffers. They hire, they actually pay lobbyists. And lobbyists are the ones that write these bills. And I know that personally from sitting through this whole process in the 1990s, while we were still actually doing budgets.

1:09:35 The last budget I think that was passed was when I left the Pentagon. But I was part of that budget process. And the laws and the changes to the military didn't come from the military. They weren't drafted by the military. They were drafted by lobbyists. And the lobbyists then would propose them in the budget and they would come to the services for comments.

1:10:04 as well as the executive branch, through the executive branch down to the Department of Defense at the time. And you would be able to comment on them and they did whatever the hell they wanted to. If you wanted something done in the military, the only way that you could get it done was hobnobbing with the lobbyists that were the ones that were going to be.

1:10:30 writing these. And they have, that's the reason why you have like MOA, the Military Officers Association of America, and the BFW, both of which I'm a lifetime member, but they're the ones, those lobbyist groups are the ones that, you know, made the changes to the GI Bill. They don't come up through Congress. And if you represent a large enough constituent,

1:11:01 population, then you get more traction because they're the ones that are going to go back to the home states and organizations like MOA and the VFW and have their chapters sell that to the American people. And that's the way that sausage is made. I don't know the last time that Congress actually wrote their own bill, but it's not been in the last 50 to 70 years.

1:11:32 Agreed, and that's why I have to go back to it has been decades since our vote actually counted because of it. Because, again, like you were just saying, they're not writing the bills. Nope. So if they're not writing the bills, the person that you're voting to put in there has no say, essentially. I mean, they do, but they don't. Well, they're bought off. Right.

1:12:03 compromised, whatever. So that would be the question that everybody needs to ask Salazar and every one of those Republicans that endorsed the amnesty bill who wrote it. Where did the bill come from? They didn't write it. There was a lobbyist group, multiple ones, that drafted that legislation. It was not drafted in the Capitol. It was not drafted by staffers. It was not drafted by

1:12:32 the House or the Senate, there was a lobbyist group that drafted that bill and these people put their names on it. And they generally put their names on it after they've been flown to some exotic place and given all of these perks or their kids been given a job in the lobbying firm or something like that. So. Good point. Yeah. And well illustrated, I think.

1:13:05 Yeah, well, and I mean, they approach the Congress people that have some skin in the game. So you would go to, like in Salazar's case, you go to, you know, her ex-husband, well, both of her ex-husbands were big time and she owns part of their business. She got them in divorce settlements. The one owns the largest sod farm in...

1:13:35 the Southeast. It goes all the way to Texas. And that's very labor intensive with migrant workers. Both of them are, the most recent one has a private equity, which is basically money laundering, and has lots of real estate and construction interest, which again is

1:13:58 a lot of migrant, primarily illegals, working in those industries. And so she's the prime target to get, not that she doesn't agree with it anyway, because she's not really a Republican, but that's how they do it. They do basically buy a graph. They're just like the CIA. They do surveys. This particular...

1:14:20 senator has financial interest in this, this or this, or their family does or whatever. Like if you're going to do something in the transportation area, you would target Mitch McConnell because of his wife's family's investment in shipping. And so that's how they do that. And then they figure out some package that is attractive to the politician in order to get them to sponsor whatever the lobbyist bill is.

1:14:50 That's what ought to be taught in school as to how the congressional part of the trifecta government that we have is how do you get ends? And the same thing on the regulatory side for the executive branch. They hire lobbyists and they get the lobbyists.

1:15:10 put into government positions at very high, you know, that's what the pharmaceutical does. They get their reps in the FDA. They put their reps in the CDC and they get past whatever they want and they regulate everybody else out. You can't come up as a small business and be competitive. Or, you know, like if you...

1:15:34 are the guy that's making all the ivermectin leading into COVID, you and your wife are found dead in your mansion as the sole source of ivermectin at the time in the United States. So it's a very evil system that has been set up. SR? Thank you, Colonel. I'm sitting here thinking about all the amendments that come to these bills as well. That means somebody had to read it.

1:16:04 Somebody had to do something with it for somebody to come up with an amendment to a bill. And typically it's to wet their own beak, I would imagine. So what we've got here is a refined Tammany Hall in my opinion. Yes, that's exactly a great analogy. It is Tammany Hall on steroids. That's exactly right. So, all right, if we're done.

1:16:33 for the evening. I'm going to go ahead and sign off here. And I probably will start my other premium content in a little bit tonight. So just kind of keep a lookout for that. And we will be back tomorrow and continue on. Just want to give you guys a flavor of

1:17:03 where we're at in this book. We're coming, obviously we're closer to the end. We still have, we're on chapter 16 and there are, well, there's really 24 and then a summary chapter 25. So that's where we're at.

1:17:33 It's fascinating, totally fascinating. Okay, you guys take care, have a nice evening and I'll see you back here tomorrow.

Entities here

Richard Helms25 CIA25 South Vietnam23 Ramparts18 National Student Association17 Washington, D.C.15 Phoenix Program14 John Hart12 William Colby12 Lyndon B. Johnson11 Richard Russell9 Ted Shackley7 Langley6 Allen Dulles6 FNLA5 Douglas Caddy5 The New York Times5 United States Navy5 Operation Gladio5 Frank Wisner4 John McCone4 Civil Operations and Rural Development Support4 Edmund Applewhite3 Las Vegas3 W. Eugene Groves3 Bay of Pigs3 House Armed Services Committee3 Cord Meyer3 Italy3 Fall of Saigon3 Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation3 William Casey3 Vietnam3 West Germany3 Tom Polger3 Nicholas Katzenbach3 Car bomb attack on U.S. Embassy in Saigon3 United Press3 Edward Lansdale2 USAID2

Claims made here

Car bomb attack on U.S. Embassy in Saigon assassinated Pierre de Silva documented ▶ 4:16

“quote-unquote, building a political base for the Saigon government on pacification, unconventional warfare programs. The guerrillas made the war real at the end of March of 1965 when they detonated a …”

Car bomb attack on U.S. Embassy in Saigon carried_out_attack South Vietnam documented ▶ 4:16

Car bomb attack on U.S. Embassy in Saigon assassinated Barbara Robbins documented ▶ 4:43

“Agency Secretary Barbara Robbins died while several more persons from the typing pool and at least two case officers like Da Silva were wounded. Eliezer Williams stepped into the breach to act as the …”

John Hart member_of Congo Task Force documented ▶ 6:11

“dictum was the first team should go to Vietnam. And given the dominance of Cuban operations in the early 1960s, CIA's next station chief was John Hart from the Cuba Task Force. Now, again, remember th…”

John Hart involved_in Tibetan operation documented ▶ 7:10

“Hart came to Saigon in early 1966. He was 45 at the time. He had a hand in Wisner's Wurlitzer operations, and he was involved in Italy, setting up the stay-behind units. He was also very involved in t…”

John Hart headed South Vietnam documented ▶ 7:10

John Hart involved_in Wurlitzer operations documented ▶ 7:10

John Hart involved_in Operation Gladio documented ▶ 7:10

John Hart headed Thailand documented ▶ 7:42

“He was actually the guy in charge of the task force that moved the Dalai Lama into India. Hart had headed CIA stations in Thailand in the early 50s, which means he was setting up the drug operation, a…”

John Hart headed Morocco documented ▶ 7:42

John Hart carried_out_attack Dalai Lama documented ▶ 7:42

John Hart founded Vũng Tàu documented ▶ 8:45

“had little stomach for paramilitary operations, but that's bullshit because he had participated in multiple countries in multiple stay-behind operations. He opened a training center at Vontau and recr…”

John Hart funded South Vietnamese labor unions documented ▶ 9:13

“By the spring of 1966, there were more than 3,000 armed men in his program. Hart also emphasized political action, providing funds and specialists to South Vietnamese labor unions. He also had experti…”

Edward Lansdale member_of South Vietnam documented ▶ 9:47

“was backing the entire time. The elections had nothing to do with democracy. It had everything to do with consolidating the Western power in South Vietnam. For much of this period, Ed Lansdale resided…”

William Colby headed Civil Operations and Rural Development Support documented ▶ 14:56

“Fresh organization called CORDS, Civil Operations and Rural Development Support. Rural development. They were not developing the rural area. They were creating a tracking system to control it. That wa…”

William Colby headed Phoenix Program documented ▶ 15:30

“Colby succeeded to the top job when his boss, Robert Comer, became the U.S. ambassador to Turkey. Turkey, the one with the largest stay-behind unit. As a result, it would be Colby who presided over co…”

Ted Shackley headed South Vietnam documented ▶ 18:44

“40,000 had been killed. But when questions arose over the legality of the program, even under Vietnamese law, authorities rapidly retreated to an admission that 87% of the supposed cadre had been kill…”

Robert Renault ordered_assassination_of South Vietnam documented ▶ 20:09

“Killed after a long, inconclusive interrogation on grounds that he might be a spy for Hanoi. The case came to the attention of the U.S. Commander General Creighton Abrams, who ordered a full investiga…”

Ted Shackley ordered_assassination_of South Vietnam host_asserted ▶ 20:40

“He, plus a number of Green Berets, were remanded for court-martial. Their defense was the CIA. Shackley and the agency's regional officer, Dean Almey, had demanded the man be killed. Lawyers threatene…”

Operation Ivory Coast carried_out_attack Son Tay documented ▶ 22:08

“To both Colby's and Shackley's credit, their differences remained minor. Another intelligence mission principally involving special forces at the MAC SOG was a prisoner rescue under the code name Brig…”

Tom Polger headed South Vietnam documented ▶ 23:42

“were not about to determine the outcome of the war. That would be done on the ground in the South. And the prospects dimmed every day. Tom Polger followed Shackley as the Saigon station chief in Janua…”

Vietnam overthrew South Vietnam documented ▶ 24:15

“but the war was too far gone. Hanoi staged a huge offensive that year, finally driving the U.S. out of the conflict, at least in terms of military involvement. The Paris ceasefire agreement sealed the…”

Richard Helms member_of Strategic Services Unit documented ▶ 33:33

“Ralph Kingsley, and Robert Joyce, all of them intelligence officers and diplomats that would play a big role in the future CIA covert operations. Like many of them, Richard Helms stayed on when the OS…”

Richard Helms headed West Germany documented ▶ 34:00

“Already in a senior position, Richard Helms rose to become the CIA staff chief, then a division chief for Germany, responsible for the major theater of the Secret War, and that would be Operation Glad…”

Richard Helms involved_in Operation Gladio documented ▶ 34:00

Allen Dulles appointed Frank Wisner documented ▶ 34:00

Allen Dulles appointed Richard M. Bissell Jr. documented ▶ 34:32

“He told a group of officers, quote, my job is to hold an umbrella over you fellows and catch the crap when you get on with your operating, unquote. When it became impossible for Wisner to continue in …”

Allen Dulles appointed Richard Helms host_asserted ▶ 35:01

“Near the end of his life, Dulles told Helms that not making him the DDO was his worst mistake. Dulles' choice reflected Eisenhower's preference for covert action. But after the Bay of Pigs, the man wh…”

Richard Helms succeeded John McCone documented ▶ 35:01

Richard Helms member_of CIA documented ▶ 35:32

“Laos, South Vietnam, and South America. Helms showed that he could play the covert operations game as good as anyone. And he became John McComb's deputy along the way. The CIA director sometimes took …”

Lyndon B. Johnson removed_from_power John McCone documented ▶ 36:34

“increasingly cut out FaceTime in the Oval Office for him. This annoyed McCone. By early 65, John McCone was at loggerheads with LBJ over Vietnam access, and he'd had enough, so he quit. A few days lat…”

Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Sam Rayburn documented ▶ 37:06

“The startled spook that John McComb had resigned. LBJ appointed Vice Admiral Rayburn as the successor. But Rayburn, a Navy rocket specialist, knew nothing about the intelligence agency. Johnson wanted…”

Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Richard Helms documented ▶ 37:06

Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Richard Helms documented ▶ 38:03

“The CIA director was not helped by a low-level campaign of gutter sniping from the agency people who didn't want him there. Then LBJ gives Richard Helms another admiral as a deputy, Rufus Taylor. John…”

United States Navy appointed Richard Helms documented ▶ 38:03

CIA funded National Student Association documented ▶ 40:27

“The agency's international organization division had been seen as a counterweight to the Soviet-sponsored youth groups of the 50s. Though the sensibilities had changed with the growing opposition to t…”

CIA recruited National Student Association documented ▶ 40:56

“NSA, National Student Association's International Activities. It had arranged for its officers to occupy an office. They paid for it. They contributed to the upkeep of the senior officials in this org…”

CIA spied_on National Student Association documented ▶ 41:56

“After 1962, when the CIA's International Organizations Division merged with a covert action staff, they were still running the student program. It was literally part of the covert operations. Later in…”

Phil Sherborn exposed CIA documented ▶ 42:57

“soured everything. Shortly before the time series on the CIA, the NSA president, Phil Sherborn, told his director of development, Michael Wood, of the CIA's role. Not everyone in the organization were…”

Michael Wolff exposed CIA documented ▶ 43:56

“others at NSA of the CIA connection and began talking to the San Francisco-based magazine called Ramparts. That magazine had already raised eyebrows at Langley because of an expose reporting that the …”

USAID financed_via Michigan State University host_asserted ▶ 44:20

“We later found out Indiana University was part of this entire operation as well, which is where Dan Mederone went for training when he was the Richmond police chief. So Michigan State was exposed. Bas…”

Ramparts exposed CIA documented ▶ 44:49

“that trained operatives at Michigan State and deployed them forward as part of the Phoenix program in the Vietnam. Rampart saw the opportunity to make a powerful statement against covert operations by…”

Richard Helms ordered_assassination_of Ramparts host_asserted ▶ 45:22

“By May of 66, within a month of the Times revelation, Director Helms sent the White House information about Ramparts to its editor, Robert Scheer. The White House wanted more, and Helms initiated an i…”

Edmund Applewhite carried_out_attack Ramparts book_quoted ▶ 46:52

“A 17-year agency veteran of literary bent who had once worked at Buckminster Fuller coordinated all of these schemes for the covert action. Applewhite had later said in an interview, quote, I had all …”

James Jesus Angleton covered_up CIA host_asserted ▶ 48:41

“The NSA was a conference affiliate. This permitted Langley counter-spy James Angleton to assert that the entire matter was a Soviet disinformation plot. Had the CIA followed Angleton's advice, it woul…”

Cord Meyer ordered_assassination_of National Student Association host_asserted ▶ 49:12

“If you are working to uncover, you're a communist. Instead, Corden Meyer instructed James Kiley, his case officer for the National Student Association, to turn off the money. At least the agency would…”

Richard Helms member_of 1967 policy review documented ▶ 55:12

“who had actually coordinated the public response, and John Gardner, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. They met in Krachenbach's office. Helms and Gardner sat on a sofa, the acting secre…”

John Gardner member_of 1967 policy review documented ▶ 55:12

Nicholas Katzenbach member_of 1967 policy review documented ▶ 55:12

1967 policy review ordered_assassination_of National Student Association documented ▶ 55:12

CIA front_for United States Information Agency host_asserted ▶ 56:41

“talked about that Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and all of those things, the U.S. Information Agency, were all CIA fronts. So there's no useful purpose for the American people to know that they're…”

CIA front_for Radio Free Europe host_asserted ▶ 56:41

Richard Russell pardoned CIA documented ▶ 57:10

“but he understood the rationale and believed that they had headed off a full-scale congressional investigation by taking these steps. He would nonetheless be called to testify. Georgia Senator Richard…”