Trying to Expose the CIA

The controversy is not a cause celebre of the proportions of the Pentagon papers, but for two years the Central Intelligence Agency has employed its wits, wiles and considerable manpower in an effort to stop publication of large chunks of a book called The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. The agency has fought so hard because the book's principal author, Victor Marchetti, 44, was a CIA officer with access to much secret material and a zeal to reveal it. Although its reliability will be questioned, the book is the most detailed expose of CIA tactics to date and is bound to pose embarrassing questions about the aims and activities of American espionage.

The book is still involved in a legal tangle. The CIA is contending that, as the result of a contract that every CIA employee signs, Marchetti has no right to publish any material that the agency deems classified. Nonetheless the book will be published this June--in a most unusual form. Blank spaces will appear where 168 passages have been deleted at CIA insistence, and the courts have not yet finally resolved whether or not the missing material deserves national-security classification. A larger number of portions initially deleted by the agency and then reluctantly restored by it will be included; they will be printed in boldface type so that a reader can readily identify those tales, statistics and names that the CIA would just as soon not have had made public.

Some of the boldface incidents have appeared in print before or were generally known: the agency's loan of B-26 bombers and CIA pilots for the uprising against Indonesian President Sukarno in the late 1950s, the drifting of balloons laden with propaganda over mainland China during the Cultural Revolution, the training of the Dalai Lama's mountaineer troops when they were driven out of Tibet in 1959 by the Chinese Communists. But often the book adds fresh detail. For example, in one of their periodic raids on their homeland, the hardy Tibetans helped resolve a debate that had been going on in CIA headquarters in Washington: they captured documents showing that Mao Tse-tung's Great Leap Forward had been a flop.

Other episodes in the book are set down for the first time, and some of them will provide fuel for critics of the agency and perhaps trigger unpleasant cables to Henry Kissinger from foreign capitals. A likely instance is the book's recounting of how in the mid-1960s the CIA helped Peru to quash an indigenous guerrilla movement. At the request of the government, headed by Fernando Belaunde Terry, the agency erected a miniature Fort Bragg in the heart of the Peruvian jungle and recruited a crack counterinsurgency team, which made short work of the guerrillas. Another passage reports that in 1969 the agency learned of a scheme by radicals to hijack a Brazilian airliner. The CIA kept the news to itself for fear that it would expose the agency's penetration of Brazilian Guerrilla Leader Carlos Marighella's band and thus jeopardize a plan to capture him. The plane was hijacked on schedule--and Marighella was trapped on schedule.

Secret War. The book reports that contrary to the general impression, the CIA devotes about two-thirds of its annual budget of some $750 million to covert operations and only 10% to intelligence gathering. The $750 million, moreover, is merely part of the money spent on the CIA. The Pentagon contributes hundreds of millions of dollars for technical projects that do not show up in the CIA budget. The Air Force, for example, funds the overhead-reconnaissance program --mostly spy satellites--for the entire U.S. intelligence community. Though the CIA conducted a secret war in Laos for more than a decade, the bulk of the $500 million spent each year was supplied by the Defense Department. Another hidden source of funds is the CIA'S proprietary airlines--Air America, Air Asia and others--which generate tens of millions of dollars every year by providing charter service for Government agencies.

For anyone not privy to the CIA'S files, it is difficult to judge just how accurate the book is. The original manuscript was censored under the guidance of four CIA deputy directors. The CIA refuses to attest to or deny any portion of the book, and the court record is mixed on the point.

During the long court battle, one of the deputy directors, William E. Nelson, deposed that he had not deleted any material on grounds of inaccuracy because "untrue [material] per se isn't classified."

Yet another deputy director argued the opposite, claiming that false material could be classified and that there were errors in some portions that he censored. Says a high-ranking agency official: "Some of the book is true, some of it is slightly wrong, and a lot of it is totally wrong. Marchetti has strung a few facts together and done a lot of hypothesizing."

The authors, to put it mildly, are not sympathetic to the CIA. Marchetti, who is responsible for most of the book, and Co-Author John Marks, 31, a former Foreign Service officer, believe that the agency should not intervene in other nations' affairs in any circumstances. Pointing out the inefficiency of many CIA missions, the authors would restrict the agency to intelligence gathering and strip it of all its covert operations. That argument is sure to be aired fully once the book is published; for now, the CIA is arguing that the book is dangerous on narrower if no less vital grounds. It fears that the book will expose secret operations and covers, jeopardize if not eliminate relations with foreign secret services, and encourage other disgruntled employees to spill what they know or claim to know about the agency. The conflict is yet another example of the public's "right to know" v. the national interest; there is no easy answer.

For most of his 14 years with the CIA, Marchetti was a bright young agent on the way up. After serving with U.S. Army intelligence in West Germany during the early '50s, he returned to Perm State to major in Soviet studies. Because of his background, he was recruited for the CIA. He spent a year in training in covert operations, then became an intelligence analyst, concentrating largely on Soviet military matters. In

1968, he was named executive assistant to the agency's deputy director, Admiral Rufus Taylor. If he seemed to be something of a Boy Scout to his colleagues, it was appropriate that Scouts first caused him to have misgivings about his employment.

Sour Belly. While he was working with community organizations, he recalls, "Eagle Scouts came around with their long hair telling me they were not going to Viet Nam. I had a hard time arguing with them. It seemed to me that the world was changing quite a bit, and neither the CIA nor the Government was changing along with it."

Disillusioned, he quit the CIA in

1969, but stayed quiet. "I didn't feel free to speak at the time," he says. "I was too well trained." Instead, he wrote a veiled expose, a novel called The Rope-- Dancer, in which the head of an American intelligence agency turns out to be working for the Russians. The book was not widely noticed, but the agency communicated its displeasure to the author. Undeterred, Marchetti decided in the spring of 1972 to tell all--or almost all. An enterprising literary agent, David Obst, who is also the agent for Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (see THE PRESS) and Daniel Ellsberg, held an auction for the rights to Marchetti's book. Alfred A. Knopf

Inc. was the winner. One of the losers leaked the outline to the CIA, which considered Marchetti to be a turncoat who had developed a "sour belly" over U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia.

A month later, two federal agents, whom Marchetti dubbed Marshal Dillon and Chester, appeared at his door with a temporary restraining order forbidding him to show the manuscript to the publisher until the CIA had examined it. The agency based its position on the contract restricting present or past employees from revealing anything about agency operations without first getting its consent. Marchetti phoned the American Civil Liberties Union, which went to trial on his behalf. It argued that the CIA was exercising prior restraint--preventing publication--and thereby violating the First Amendment. But the U.S. District Court Judge Albert V. Bryan Jr. ruled that the First Amendment did not apply in the case of contractual obligations. Marchetti lost on appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Almost ready to abandon his project, Marchetti met John Marks, who was working as an aide to Senator Clifford Case. Together, Marchetti and Marks revised the manuscript, with Marks contributing a section on relations between the press and the CIA. They submitted the manuscript to the agency in August 1973. It was returned with 339 deletions indicated. Some of the excisions were baffling or perhaps simply inexpertly done. Chapter 2, for example, begins with a deleted remark by Henry Kissinger. Yet another passage makes clear that he was discussing a CIA project to prevent the 1970 election of Chilean President Salvador Allende Gossens.

Last October the authors and Knopf joined as co-plaintiffs in a suit against the CIA. They charged that most of the deleted material in the manuscript had never been formally classified and was actually in the public domain. By the time the trial began in February, CIA officials had reinstated the numerous segments that will appear in boldface. But the CIA continued to argue that whatever it said was classified had to be considered classified. Judge Bryan objected; he ruled in favor of restoring most of the remaining cuts of material that had not been properly classified. The CIA is appealing his decision, and so are the authors and Knopf, which anticipates that its legal fees will be between $50,000 and $100,000. In the meantime, the book will be published with 168 deletions, which present something of a structural problem for Knopf Editor Charles Elliott. He is puzzling over how to make a page break where there is a blank space. At one point, a footnote refers to a deleted passage. "We don't know where to put the asterisk," he says.

Quiet Offices. To the degree the book is accurate, it illuminates more than any previous expose the fundamental dilemma of using covert activity as a tool in foreign policy, of a secret agency operating in an open society. How are the two to be reconciled? If the CIA is to be held accountable, are the present watchdog functions of congressional committees adequate? In a world of ever-shifting political currents that still present threats to American interests, can the nation conduct its foreign policy in a perfectly open manner without resorting to covert operations? Particularly in a dangerous world where other powers employ covert means to achieve their global aims? The book will sharpen that debate. And it is sure to be must reading in some quiet offices all around the world.

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