In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

CIA People Policies
tongue tip the store of detailed knowledge I really needed for the job.
That was okay with Potts. He didn't want competition in making
decisions and I had what he lacked-the physical mobility to range
across the building, if necessary across the world, to get things done.
He was the three-star general, I the colonel. He made decisions and
gave orders, and I, like the chief of staff of an army division, supervised
their execution.
Potts's primary vehicle for communicating decisions was the 9:00
A.M. staff meeting, where he methodically interrogated every unit
head and gave them marching orders for the day. To play the game
you read every cable that had come in from your area during the
night, and were ready to answer any question Potts might think to
ask: "How much is IAMOGOL/1 's salary?,, "How many intelligence
reports did he provide last month?" "Okay, draft a cable approving
the onetime payment of seven hundred and fifty dollars.,, A normal
branch might have ten cables each morning, three requiring careful
study, most marked ROUTINE. (My task force received fifty or more
IMMEDIATE cables daily.) Routine business consumed fifteen minutes.
Potts then spent an hour on the Angola program while the rest
of his staff listened, and I concentrated, taking notes.
After staff meeting Potts communicated through notes scrawled
on little yellow buckslips. Known as "Pottsgrams," they often carried
important decisions as well as reminders and reprimands; things
like "Let's get an airplane out with some additional 4.2 mortar
ammunition," or "Please find out how much the air force wants for
those ten C-47's in Thailand." Potts, who had an aversion to bureaucratic
structure, fired these notes at random throughout the division.
The Lusaka section chief might be ordered to get out a planeload of
ammunition, the Hom and Central deputy asked to draft a memorandum
for Henry Kissinger, and a reports officer charged with
researching the Israeli price for 120 mm. mortar ammunition.
Quickly, I learned to make the rounds of all offices, collecting Pottsgrams
and centralizing them at the task force.
I didn't know Potts well. He had come into Africa Division in
1972, shortly before I went to Vietnam, as deputy division chief under
Larry Devlin.* In 1974 he became the division chief. His prior experi-
*Devlin was famous for running the Congo operation in early 1960 and for the Laos
operation in the late sixties.