In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

The Economy-Size War (173]
so their act1v1t1es could be filmed secretly for later viewing by
pseudoscientists of the CIA's Office of Technical Services.
We inside the agency reacted to these disclosures differently. The
hard core was untroubled by their substance: "Are you kidding?"
they would say. "Maybe we could straighten things out if the director
had the balls to let us do more of that . . . After all, the other
side ... "Others felt betrayed, by the.CIA directors who had led the
CIA into such activities, and by the changing rules which in one
decade had us as superpatriots and in another suggested we were
enemies of the people. But, as the CIA's public image slipped, even
the hardest cases felt insecure. If we were still the good guys, the elite
of the American foreign service, we ourselves seemed to be the only
ones who appreciated the fact. We drew closer into our little world,
working with agency people, playing tennis with agency people,
socializing with agency people. It was not a happy time to conduct
a clandestine war.
Director Colby, always the good soldier, nevertheless continued to
hammer away at the Senate and Congress with a barrage of secret
briefings about the Angola program. Our function was to keep him
supplied with charts, maps, and briefing boards, which were updated
almost to the hour with figures reflecting the latest adjustment of the
IAFEATURE budget and revised listings of all the arms which had
been sent to Kinshasa. We were never told exactly how he used the
material and it still hadn't entered my mind that Colby might be
deceiving the senators in any significant way, while they were distracted
by his dramatic disclosures of other historic agency malversations.
It probably didn't occur to the senators either.
Potts rarely gossiped, although he would occasionally give us little
insights of how the briefings went, if he thought they were important
for us to know. One day Kissinger smiled at Colby, Colby returned
to tell Potts about it, and Potts repeated it to us in his staff meeting,
then instructed me to tell the task force. He also told his secretary
to spread it around. It was, Potts felt sure, a favorable judgment of
our early efforts that Kissinger had smiled at Colby during a National
Security Council meeting. Everyone agreed.
The incident led me to reflect at length, on Kissinger and Colby,
who had to be, if anyone was, the master chess players in the game
of American intelligence. I often told myself there must be some
master plan behind our intelligence policies, someone who saw the