In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

The Economy-Size War
Among other messages, the officer was to instruct the chief of
station, Kinshasa, to ask Larry Devlin to intercede with Mobutu to
release the CIA agents (Zairian citizens) Mobutu had arrested, convicted
of espionage and treason, and sentenced to death in June 1975.
It was embarrassing to the CIA to have these men sitting on death
row in Kinshasa while we were hustling Mobutu's Angola war.
In late September Larry Devlin returned to Washington to testify
to the Church Committee about the CIA's Congo program of
the 1960s and role in the plot to assassinate Lumumba. Of course,
he visited CIA headquarters to confer with Potts and with the
Congo task force, which was responding to the Senate investigation.
It hadn't taken me long to realize that Potts didn't want a verbatim
transcript of any of the working group meetings. He was staying late
after each session to write a summary of what had happened. This
didn't seem appropriate, considering his grade and workload. I offered
to write up my own notes. When that didn't seem to satisfy
him, I suggested we get a professional stenographer who could take
shorthand. He agreed, then changed his mind. I dropped it when I
finally realized that he wanted to control the exact wording of the
record of those meetings. He continued to write the reports and he
did them in the form of "blind" memoranda, without headings or
addressees, and kept them out of CIA official files. Thus the innermost
records of the war would forever be immune to any Freedom
of Information Act disc1osures, or congressional investigation. Technically
they did not exist: legally they could be destroyed at any time.
The meetings were also supplemented by a steady flow of
working group papers-162 altogether-most of which Potts himself
wrote, to brief the members on developments in the field or
to document some plan of action. These were either presented to
the working group during the meetings, or were delivered to
them by courier. They too were kept in "soft files" in Potts's
desk where they were safe from disclosure or investigation.
In the working group meetings Potts wanted to speak exclusively
for the CIA and I generally obliged by remaining silent. However,
one occasion when I felt compelled to speak out was in early October,
(Seymour Hersh of the New York Times exposed the CIA's operation against
American blacks on March 17, 1978.)