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November 8,
2001
Homeland
Insecurity by Douglas Valentine
Part Three
Chaos And Political Terrorism
In America
The similarities between the Phoenix Program and
the OHS are obvious, and with its computerized database of terrorist
suspects, Phoenix is certainly the organizational model for an
OHS-style counter-terror program based on "intelligence
coordination and exploitation." 3
But as everyone is aware, the threat
of radical Islamic terrorism is not comparable to the insurgency
in Vietnam. In that case America rushed to defend a hapless ally,
thousands of miles away, much as we did in Kuwait. In the present
situation, the OHS has been created to defend us from terrorists
on our own turf. Its counter-terror function is equivalent to
that of providing internal security, in so far as the Bush Administration
defines "internal security" in political terms.
Historically, and ironically, the U.S.
Government considered Native Americans as our homeland's first
domestic terrorists, and various methods were devised to deal
with the threat, such as the distribution of blankets infected
with smallpox.
Abolitionists, whether peaceful or violent
like John Brown, also were regarded as terrorists, and for decades
the reactionary right wing of American civilization, and its
unreconstructed representatives in the government (many of whom
still hold office), regarded the Ku Klux Klan as a legitimate
means of countering the terror of Emancipation. Indeed, until
today, the reactionary right wing still considers a "genuine"
American to be an active proponent of this ideology, with its
repulsive mix of racial purity, patriotism, and Christian fundamentalism,
with its divine savior nailed to the cross, a symbol of the spiritual
terror that enabled our Founding Fathers to rationalize slavery
in the land of free and the home of brave.
Segregation persisted as unstated policy,
and by the late 19th Century, organized labor had emerged as
our homeland's new breed of domestic political terrorists; and
after private police forces proved ineffective in eliminating
the unions, the U.S. Government created the FBI to nullify the
threat labor posed to its Robber Baron patrons. The FBI quickly
established that foreigners (mostly Jews, Bolsheviks and immigrants
with no rightful claim to America as their "homeland")
were controlling the labor movement. Over the years Communists
replaced Bolshevists, and eventually Civil Rights and Anti-War
activists were added to the hit list of domestic terrorists--all
of which brings us the FBI's notorious Counter Intelligence Program.
Created in the late 1950s, COINTELPRO
was designed to neutralize "radical" political movements
inside the U.S. In its attempt to provide decent Americans with
"internal security," the FBI employed agent provocateurs,
conducted burglaries, engaged in black propaganda (disinformation),
fraud, and perhaps in the case of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and several other black leaders, outright assassination. 4
But COINTELPRO failed to neutralize America's
Anti-War and Civil Rights insurgency, and by 1967, President
Johnson and the FBI were sensing the presence of foreign intelligence
agencies. And the mere fear that the KGB was directing the Anti-War
and Civil Rights movements provided the FBI with the pretext
to enlist the CIA in domestic intelligence operations. The precipitating
event was a February 1967 expose in Ramparts magazine,
which revealed that the CIA had suborned the leadership of the
National Student Association. The exposure of this illegal CIA
domestic activity prompted even moderate students to join and
support radical, alternative organizations like the Students
for a Democratic Society. The Anti-War movement blossomed like
never before.
The Ramparts revelation, and the
resulting surge in anti-establishment activities, was deemed
to be a Soviet provocation, and confirmed the FBI's suspicions
that foreign agitators were fueling the Anti-War and Civil Rights
movements, so Johnson ordered the CIA to investigate Robert Scheer,
the author of the Ramparts article. Director of Central
Intelligence Richard Helms gave the job to veteran CIA officer
Richard Ober, a Harvard graduate (1943), World War II veteran,
and member of the CIA's counter-intelligence staff. And thus
came Operation Chaos--which, with its counterpart organizations
in the Justice Department and White House, enabled the CIA and
political ideologues to get involved in "internal security"
operations such as will be conducted by the OHS. 5
Ober's Counter-Intelligence, Special
Operations Group (CI/SOG), codenamed MHCHAOS, was created in
August 1967, concurrent with the Phoenix Program (and for a similar
purpose), and existed until March 1974. Its initial mission,
ostensibly on behalf of the FBI, was to collect intelligence
information on radical domestic political groups, to discover
if they were being manipulated by foreign intelligence agencies.
To coordinate Chaos and COINTELPRO operations,
Johnson's attorney general, Ramsay Clark, created the Interdepartmental
Intelligence Unit (IDIU) within the Justice Department's Internal
Security Division. Ober became the CIA's representative on the
IDIU, which (like the OHS) was managed by senior members from
the White House staff. In other words, from its inception, CIA
intelligence information on dissidents was reported to people
whose primary interest was in politics, not internal security.
Upon assuming office in January 1969,
President Nixon immediately grasped the partisan political potential
of the IDIU, which he moved under the Civil Rights Division.
In June 1969, through his advisor on Domestic Affairs, John Dean--and
Dean's youthful assistant, Tom Huston--Nixon directed Ober to
engage Chaos in covert actions against dissidents. Ober was assigned
a deputy and a case officer whose names remain secret until today.
The deputy and the case officer moved into Ober's suite of offices
in a vault in the basement at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Among the rooms was a library where files were kept and where
slides of suspects and potential recruits were viewed. Several
female CIA officers managed the precious, super secret Chaos
files.
Central to Chaos was its super-secrecy.
Assignment to CI/SOG was considered a "command performance,"
and security was commensurate with the responsibility. Ober,
at the direction of his immediate supervisor, Counter-Intelligence
Chief James Angleton, devised a communications system exclusively
for Chaos cables and couriers to overseas stations. These "back-channels"
by-passed the geographical division chiefs and reached right
into the stations, to trusted counter-intelligence officers.
In some cases Chaos by-passed the station chiefs, and corresponded
directly with its unilateral assets and representatives in a
country. Chaos "traffic" carried the highest security
classification, was restricted only to those involved in the
operation (as were Chaos files), and was inaccessible even to
the CIA's top administrators, often for their own protection.
Based on names provided by the FBI (and
the CIA's Offices of Security, Domestic Contacts, Foreign Resources,
and Domestic Operations 6
) the Chaos case officer in October 1969 began recruiting double
agents from within the Black Power and Anti-War movements. The
case officer approached only those people with "radical"
credentials. Only those who proved trustworthy (some were polygraphed,
others given psychological assessments) were recruited. Recruits
were given a training course in the clandestine arts, supplied
with the proper technical equipment and sufficient funds, sheep-dipped
(meaning their records were falsified), and then sent overseas.
The case officer referred to his 40-50 double agents as "dangles,"
because their job was to operate as a dissident normally would,
and hope that a foreign intelligence agent would make an approach.
With the approval of Nixon's National
Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, the Pentagon joined in the
counter-terror effort through a secret committee formed under
the aforementioned Tom Huston, and began leveling requirements
on the Chaos unit. The Pentagon was intent on tracking deserters,
and gathering information on foreign nationals who were attempting
to persuade American soldiers to desert from military bases in
Germany. Chaos dangles were sent to North Vietnam, North Africa
and Cuba, and one Chaos agent, possibly Timothy Leary, was launched
against Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria.
Here it is important to remember that
Bush has granted the CIA unprecedented freedom to coordinate
with law enforcement and military officials, through the OHS.
Previous restrictions on CIA domestic operations have been waived.
As Bob Woodward reported in the 21 October Washington Post,
CIA covert action is now a key element in defending America from
terrorist attacks. Every day the CIA provides the Bush Administration's
top national security and intelligence officials--including OHS
Director Tom Ridge--with current intelligence on possible bombings,
hijackings or poisonings within the U.S. But other than the anthrax
outbreak, which appears to be the work of the radical right,
none of the threats has materialized, and there is no way of
knowing if, as the CIA is wont to do, the anthrax outbreak has
been manufactured for purely political and psychological warfare
reasons.
It also is likely that the CIA, on behalf
of the OHS, will start sprinkling Chaos-type dangles overseas,
and within the United States, to tempt terrorists into exposing
themselves. It is a chilling prospect, but these dangles may
exist only on paper, with the sole purpose of contriving reasons
to launch counter-terror operations against opponents of Bush
Administration policy. Hundreds of businesses and institutions
across the country have already been placed on the CIA's watch
list. According to Woodward, one Bush official said that merely
being on the list "could destroy the livelihood of all those
organizations without a bomb being thrown or a spore of anthrax
being released."
Loss of livelihood is perhaps the heaviest
psychological hammer a security agency can hold over a middle
class American's head. But that's what it's come down to.
You Don't Need
A Weatherman
Incidental to their role as dangles designed
to entrap foreign agents, Chaos agents reported on U.S. citizens.
A folder, or hard file, was created for each suspected dissident
the CIA targeted. The folder contained the dissident's 201 "personality"
file, as well as Situation Reports about his or her radical activities.
The 201 file included every scrap of biographical information
about the person, from arrest records to report cards to surreptitious
photos taken of the person with other suspects. Some 7-10,000
hard files were eventually assembled.
In May 1970, Chaos chief Richard Ober
starting entering the information from his index cards and hard
files onto IBM cards, and compiling them in a data base codenamed
HYDRA, which ultimately contained the names of some 300,000 people.
HYDRA was developed at the same time as the Phoenix computer
system in Vietnam. A mail intercept program codenamed HTLINGUAL
also was part of the Chaos operation.
Thirty years later, far more sophisticated
databases exist in the United States, and so much information
is already available on every American citizen, that a computerized,
national ID card system isn't required to keep track of everyone.
But the on-going anthrax scare, which may be a CIA provocation,
could serve as the pretext to institute, under the OHS, a mail
intercept program similar to HTLINGUAL. And OHS Director Tom
Ridge already has a deputy, "cyber security expert"
Richard Clarke, to monitor and ultimately censor all politically
incorrect Internet information.
As is well known, the paranoid Nixon
Administration--whose ideology is compatible with Bush's--was
ruthless in the application of its executive authority to attack
its domestic political "enemies" under the aegis of
national security. To this end, the Nixon Administration formed
the IDIU's secret Intelligence Evaluation Committee in December
1970 under Robert Mardian, the assistant attorney general in
charge of Internal Security. Mardian reported directly to Nixon's
attorney general, John Mitchell. A major player in Nixon's illegal
political and fundraising schemes, Mitchell was sentenced for
his Watergate crimes in February 1975.
Bush's right wing attorney general, John
Ashcroft, will be a major player at OHS, and can be expected
to play the same partisan political role for Bush as Mitchell
played for Nixon. Indeed, it is evident from the records of the
1975 Report by the President's Commission on CIA Activities Within
the United States that Chaos agents, at the behest of White House
officials, operated domestically, illegally, and that Chaos operations
were directed against non-violent dissidents, including Daniel
Ellsberg, the Berrigan Brothers, Tom Hayden, and others. Many
of these activists had important political connections, and by
association, Left politicians came under Chaos scrutiny. The
coverage was vast, and in order to advance policies he wished
to keep secret from the secretaries of State and Defense, Kissinger
kept close track of the most critical Chaos operations, especially
agent operations that might impact his secret peace negotiations
with the North Vietnamese.
One of Chaos' most important agents played
a critical though undisclosed role at the May 1971 anti-war demonstrations
in Washington. DC. And at least one Chaos agent may have been
involved in the Watergate scandal that brought down Nixon.
Yes, by 1971 Ober and the Chaos unit
were working for Nixon's secret team of political dirty tricksters,
the infamous Plumbers. Master Plumber G. Gordon Liddy, a deranged
former FBI agent with a penchant for eating live rats, actually
leveled requirements on Ober at the Intelligence Evaluation Committee.
Before Liddy and his partner in crime, CIA officer E. Howard
Hunt, were imprisoned for burglarizing the office of Ellsberg's
psychiatrist, they directed Ober to spy on members of other government
agencies, as well as on Nixon's political and bureaucratic "enemies".
Ober, who died earlier this year, is
thought to have reacted negatively to this ultimate violation
of the Constitution, and at least one researcher has suggested
that he may have been Woodward's Deep Throat. But there's never
any guarantee that any CIA officer will ever break ranks, and
the threat of Nixon-style abuses loom large under the OHS and
the illegitimate Bush Administration, with its fascist ideology
and unprecedented, dictatorial emergency powers.
The Shell Game
Incredible power was concentrated in
the Chaos office. Ober was the CIA's liaison to the National
Commission on Civil Disorders and to the Ginsburg Commission
on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. He was the CIA's liaison
to the protean Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and
to the Special Services units (Red Squads) of America's major
metropolitan police departments. He reported directly to DCI
Richard Helms (later convicted of lying to Congress about the
CIA's major role in the violent coup that toppled the elected
government of Chile, and resulted in the torture and murder of
thousands of Leftists), and he sat on the Huston Committee, which
was chaired by FBI Counter Intelligence chief William C. Sullivan
(assassinated in 1977). 7
However, by mid-1972, CIA Executive Director
William E. Colby was concerned that revelations of illegal CIA
domestic political activities, on behalf of the Nixon Administration,
might destroy the Agency. The big problem was Ober's association
with rat-eater Liddy and his partner in crime, CIA officer Howard
Hunt, and it is probably not a coincidence that the Chaos "case
officer" was reassigned concurrently with the 17 June 1972
arrest of the five Watergate buggers. The IDIU was dissolved
six months later.
By September 1973, Colby was the new
Director of Central Intelligence, and had prepared a list of
the CIA's "family jewels," an array of illegal domestic
activities--now legal under the Bush Administration--which Colby
felt should be revealed. The abuses included spying on politicians
and government agencies, helping other agencies conduct domestic
surveillance, and following U.S. citizens abroad. Colby blamed
counter-intelligence chief James Angleton for the public relations
disaster, and forced his retirement, amid much bitterness and
rancor.
But Colby's "limited hangout"
and scapegoating of Angleton were part of a clever shell game,
and the Chaos staff continued to conduct name traces, and follow
dissidents abroad, and respond to FBI and military requirements.
Everything was exactly the same as before, including the ultra-secure
communications system and restricted filing system, except now
it was acceptable because it was done under the aegis of counter-terrorism.
Colby started the ball rolling in July
1972, when he assigned Ober a second job as Chief of the CIA's
newly created International Terrorism Group (ITG). Ober told
the Rockefeller Commission that his new responsibility was "setting
up and running a central program" within the CIA of information
on international terrorism and hijackings, and very possibly
the penetration of terrorist training camps in Algeria, Cuba
and other enemy states. The ITG also kept track of homeland-based
black militants and white racists with international terror connections.
ITG reports were, like Chaos reports, were sent to Kissinger
at the National Security Council.
Ober's appointment as chief of ITG coincided
with the establishment of Nixon's Cabinet Committee to Combat
Terrorism, the first U.S. Government entity of its kind. But
even after the official termination of Chaos in March 1974, the
ITG continued to exist in the same suite of offices in the same
vault in the CIA's basement.
In March 1974 Ober was assigned other
duties and a new ITG chief (not named in the Rockefeller Commission
Report) was assigned. The second ITG chief (perhaps Lawrence
K. White), had no deputy or case officer, and was assisted by
approximately ten female file clerks in what is described as
basically an "analytical" capacity. But ITG operations
still relied on the Chaos folders and computer tapes, which were
maintained and updated. As of 1975, despite the recommendations
of several Congressional Committees, no Chaos files had been
destroyed, because the CIA could not adequately define a "dissident."
Senior CIA officer John Ryan became the
third ITG chief in April 1975 and served until 1977, when he
was replaced by veteran CIA officer Howard Bane.
While Chaos was evolving into the CIA's
International Terrorism Group, the Phoenix Program--which did
not expire with South Vietnam in April 1975--was being employed
as the model for a worldwide anti-terrorism unit in the CIA's
paramilitary Special Operations Division (SOD). Its main proponents,
all veterans of the Phoenix Program, had climbed the corporate
ladder and were in positions to turn their monster loose on all
mankind.
Colby, the "father" of Phoenix
and its staunchest defender before Congressional Hearings in
1970 and 1971, appointed his close friend, Evan Parker (the first
Phoenix Director) as chief of the SOD in 1973. Parker awarded
CIA officer Robert Wall (self-described as the "grandfather"
of Phoenix, for his pioneering work on a pilot program in 1966)
the first "terrorism account," and then began reorganizing
the SOD to fight Communist insurgencies, using the Phoenix anti-terrorism
model.8
The CIA's resident counter-terrorists
found willing allies, invariably fascist military dictators,
around the world, and gladly taught them how to terrorize entire
nations into submission, through the arcane art of political
and psychological warfare. Perhaps the CIA's greatest success,
in this regard, was achieved in the midst of the Watergate scandal,
under the supervision of Kissinger, Colby, and the CIA's Western
Hemisphere Division chief, Theodore Shackley.
Donald Freed in Death In Washington (p
83-84) describes the CIA's covert action that resulted in the
bloody right-wing military coup in Chile September 1973. Devised
by the CIA's resident "black propaganda" expert, David
Atlee Phillips, the plan used "classic depth psychology
and behavior modification techniques to program individual Chileans
toward a destiny of victims or executioners. The CIA aim was
to "serialize" and atomize the Chilean people by using
psychological terror to fractionate what had been growing popular
unity behind (Allende's) government." Freed explains that,
"Under the CIA program the middle classes had to be organized
to "save freedom," the military to impose temporary
controls, the workers to give up their drive for power."
The centerpiece of the CIA's Track II
plan to overthrow the elected government of Chile, by terrorizing
the middle class through incredible acts of violence, was the
widespread publication of pictures of a man who was allegedly
"quartered" by radical leftists--but who in fact was
mutilated by the CIA's proxies in the Chilean secret service,
DINA.
This ability to commit the most horrific
acts of terror, and successfully blame them on its enemies through
black propaganda, is what makes the CIA's inclusion in the OHS
so dangerous. This one-two punch, in conjunction with the CIA's
expertise at "provoked responses" and "false flag
recruitments," also makes the CIA itself a prime suspect
in the terror attacks of 11 September, and the current propaganda
campaign being waged in America now, as a pretext to threaten
terror against the Bush Administration's domestic political opponents,
as well as to win support from the terrified middle class for
the illegitimate Bush regime.
Homeland Insecurity Continued in Part Four:
The Terrorism Account Goes Underground
Douglas Valentine writes frequently for CounterPunch. He is the
author of The Phoenix
Program, the only comprehensive account of the CIA's torture
and assassination operation in Vietnam, as well as TDY
a chilling novel about the CIA and the drug trade.
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