Title: NEWSPAPER ARTICLE-WHY ROCKEFELLER TRIED TO COVER UP THE CIA PROBE Author: n/a Pages: 4 Agency: CIA RIF#:

104-10418-10242 Subjects: ROCKEFELLER Source: AARC

Date Page ASSASSINATION SYSTEM IDENTIFICATION FORM ----------------------------------------------------------------------------AGENCY INFORMATION AGENCY NUMBER SERIES NUMBER CIA 104-10418-10242 JFK RUSS HOLMES WORK FILE DOCUMENT INFORMATION ORIGINATOR FROM TO TITLE DATE PAGES SUBJECTS DOCUMENT TYPE CLASSIFICATION RESTRICTIONS CURRENT STATUS DATE OF LAST REVIEW OPENING CRITERIA COMMENTS OPEN JFK

01/06/99 1

RECORD RECORD AGENCY FILE

NEWSPAPER ARTICLE-WHY CIA PROBE 09/00/77 3 ROCKEFELLER TEXTUAL PAPER UNCLASSIFIED OPEN IN FULL OPEN 11/29/98 JFK-RH09:F163-II

ROCKEFELLER

TRIED

TO COVER UP THE

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1998.11.29.10:53:45:140107

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Ali-i K3-c ^ yi p C The u -my rf--jD31 Ro Watergate Letter/Tad 27

NEW YORK September Szulc 1977

Capitol

On January 21 1975 then Vice President Nelson Rockefeller chairman of the blue-ribbon investigating com mission that was to get to the bottom of illegal CIA activities quietly called CIA chief William Colby into his of fice and urged him not to tell all It was the most blatant cover-up attempt since Watergate The vice-president's argument was that for national-security reasons it was not necessary for his commission to be told "everything. Rockefeller therefore urged Colby not to volunteer any information and to confine himself to bare-bone answers to questions that the commissioners might ask him But Rockefeller also had personal reasons for his request He had participated twenty years earlier in decisions in volving the illegal CIA behavior that now was being investigated It is unclear whether Rockefeller acted on his own or with the knowl edge and approval of President Ford who on January 4 1975 had named the Commission on CIA Activities 'Within the United States to look into published allegations that the agency had engaged in illegal operations against American citizens on U.S soil It does appear however that the vice-president failed to inform the rest of the commission of his request to Colby,"and the commissioners may still be unaware that their own chairman tried to sabotage their work Colby who was fired by Ford in No vember 1975--apparently because he had been too cooperative with the com mission as well as with a subsequent Senate investigation.refused to com ment on reports concerning Rockefel ler's cover-ups saying he would neither deny nor confirm them Likewise Colby kefused to say wheth er the book he is currently writing on his CIA career to be published next year includes an account of the Rocke feller pressures Rockefeller himself could not be reached for comment Accounts provided by highly authori tative-informants said that Rockefeller's appreach to Colby was made on Janu ary .421 1975 immediately following the second meeting of the commission in a conference room in the Executive Office Building (EOB) across the West 1 Executive Alley from the White House

As the story is reconstructed from these accounts Colby had been quite forthcoming during this session The first session on January 14 was taken up by Colby's general review of the CIA's past activities But on January 21 he had volunteered to the commis sion that during the 1950s and the 1960s the agency had engaged in secret experiments with LSD which had re sulted in at least two deaths Colby's revelation seems to have up set Rockefeller considerably Knowl edgeable informants believe that the possibly Ford vice-president.and were worried that Colby might follow it up with such other damaging dis closures as the CIA program for assas sinating foreign leaders Consequently Rockefeller invited Colby for a private conversation in the vice-presidential of fice at the EOB undertaking to con vince him that national security would be endangered if the commission were to learn too many CIA secrets.* There is no precise version of Colby's reply to Rockefeller It is known how ever that Colby took the view that not only the commission but the Congress as well should be fully informed of all facts pertaining to the CIA's activi ties in the domestic field (The com mission's mandate under Ford's execu tive order limited the inquiry to CIA operations at home which were in violation of the agency's charter.) According to Colby's CIA friends the director thought it was an error on Ford's part to establish the blue-ribbon *Rockefeller's request for discretion of course constituted an insult to the integ rity of the commission whose members had been chosen by Ford Rockefeller and their senior advisers The commission's members were John T Connor former secretary of commerce in the Johnson administration and chair man of the board of the Allied Chemical Corporation C Douglas Dillon former secretary of the Treasury undersecretary of state ambassador to France and at the time managing director of Dillon Read & Company the New York investment bank ing firm Erwin N Griswold former so licitor general and former dean of the Harvard Law School Lane Kirkland sec retary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO General Lyman L Lemnitzer former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Ronald Reagan former governor of California and Edgar F Shannon Jr. former president of the University of Virginia

commisson He is said to have con cluded t;sat if any investigation of the CIA's wrongdoing were to he launched it should have been done by congress sional committees In the post-Water gate period it appeared essential that Congress be brought into the picture if only 14 help restore trust between the executive and legislative branches of government The White House on the other hand decided on naming the Rockefeller Commission (the vice-president actu ally volunteered to serve as chairman after ancther name had been discarded) precisely to preempt congressional in vestigations.an attempt that failed as it turned out This preemption stemmed from the fear of ghat is known in CIA parlance as the family jewels. These are the j agency's'most jealously guarded secrets concerning its past operations The "jewels"r had been buried for years in the agemy's secret archives at its Lang ley Virtinia headquarters although a great ma iy records had been destroyed (particularly those relating to the 25 year mind-control program in which LSD and other dangerous drugs were used) and some of the secrets survive only in 1:'IA officials memories It was James R Schlesinger who first began digging into the family jewels when he became CIA director in Feb ruary 1973 replacing Richard Helms What Schlesinger found led him to issue ! orders to end a long series of illegal programs ranging from the agency's spying on American radicals and politi cal dissenters to illegal.opening of in ternational mail the LSD testing and the planning of foreign leaders assassi nations The search for the jewels was continued by Colby when he took over from Schlesinger in August 1973 '(after Schlesinger had been appointed defense secretary by Richard Nixon) Neither Schlesinger nor Colby how ever considered it necessary to inform Nixon oi anybody else outside the CIA of their discoveries The past was the after all they had taken all past and the necessary measures to halt question able agency operations ,>/t 'When Ford became president in Aug and his deputy for ust 1974 Colby clandestine operations William Nelson briefed yvm on ongoing major intelli gence operations but again they did not find it desirable to place all the family

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jewels before the new occupant of the Oval Office Ford was thus in blissful ignorance of all these events when on December 22 1974 the New York Times published Seymour Hersh's sen sational story about the CIA's illegal domestic manipulations The new president was in Vail Col orado on Christmas vacation when Hersh's bombshell hit Washington Al though Colby had informed Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft the deputy national-security adviser three days earlier that the Times was preparing an article on this subject (Hersh had given Colby advance notice) this word apparently never reached Ford After reading the Times story Ford instructed Henry Kissinger who still held the twin posts of secretary of state and national-security adviser to obtain a report from Colby on the situation So without going into classified de tail Colby prepared a report.it became known as the "Vail Report"--confirm ing that the CIA had indeed spied on Americans under "Operation Chaos, but he emphasized that this activity had The report was been discontinued taken to Vail by Kissinger Subsequent ly it was made public On his return to Washington Ford called a meeting in the Oval Office on Janste-ry 3 and received a full briefing 1 on what the CIA had been doing all those years Kissinger was in attendance (it is not clear whether Rockefeller was present) and now Colby displayed all the family jewels for him What alarmed Ford and Kissinger most was that the

plans for the assassinations of foreign the Congo's Patrice Lu leaders.from mumba to China's Chou En-lai and Cuba's Fidel Castro.were sure to come out in the investigation they knew was an inevitable consequence of the Hersch article Ford and Kissinger hadn't known about these clandestine CIA activities until Colby had given them what CIA officials call a "no s- t briefing alid their nervousness about assassinations was by all accounts the principal reason that Ford advised by Kissinger decided to form the blue-ribbon com mission to be headed by Rockefeller It would be the White House people thought a "safe way of handling the investigation But the investigation.created by ex ecutive order on January 4.was not as safe as Ford had hoped First Colby emerged as too enthusiastic a witness informing the commission for example of the LSD program This Ied to the Rockefeller cover-up pitch to Colby The CIA director did apparently cease to volunteer information against hisbef= ter judgment but as a commission staffer put it he was "boxed in be cause he had to answer yes or no to questions developed by the staff Slowly and painstakingly then the commission began acquiring more and more material despite Rockefeller's partial success in restraining Colby (The minutes of the weekly commission meetings remain highly classified which makes it hard to assess exactly how Colby handled his testimony after the

Rockefeller intervention.) Rockefeller hadn't counted on in discretion from another highly placed source however It was Ford himself who gave iaway the assassination story in a careless remark during a lunch given for him by the.editors of the Times In short order the story was leaked to Daniel Schorr of CBS News and the White House saw its worst fears materializing Now it was clear that the Congress would take a much harder look at the family jewels than had the Rockefeller Commission which pleading lack of time had decided not to investigate the assassination attempts With the formation of the Senate Se lect Committee on Intelligence Activi ties on January 27 the Rockefeller cover-up efforts were no longer effec tive What were Rockefeller's motivations in attempting to block his own com mission's investigations While not necessarily agreeing with Rockefeller a number of intelligence officers familiar with this matter.and a certain this includes Colby.see validity in the national-security argu ment No intelligence service likes to have its innermost secrets publicized and men such as Kissinger and Rocke feller long familiar with intelligence work clearly appreciated this reality Kissinger as usual was fearful that headline-making disclosures about the CIA would complicate his conduct. of foreign policy But it also appears that Rockefeller may have had deep personal reasons

When Rockefeller carne aboard at 1 for not wanting the whole truth to come out This had to do with the very the White House at the end of 1954 special services he had rendered to the Eisenhower appointed him his repre Eisenhower administration There are sentative on the OCR It wasl a power ful body accountable to virtually no -4 strong reasons to believe that Rockfel lee was not only extremely well ac one because of what was considered quainted with many if not all of the at the time the need to protect the CIA's family jewels but also had president from official knowledge of had a hand in designing some of them secret intelligence operations The OCB In the first place there was Rocke thus served as a "circuit breaker, feller's tenure as undersecretary of and the White House could invoke the Health Education and Welfare in 1953 doctrine of "plausible denial% to cover and 1954 This was the time when the when disclosures embarrassing to the the U-2 incident CIA set in motion its complex secret president.like occurred programs seeking to establish hallucino William R Corson a leading Wash genic-drug control of the human mind through experiments on thousands of ington specialist on intelligence mat unwitting Americans These programs ters has written in his forthcoming and book The Army of Ignorance that "it's were code-named :'Artichoke "MK-Ultra, and they involved secretly quite clear that the OCB maintained a funded LSD research in scores of Amer very flexible set"of criteria in deciding ican hospitals universities and special whether a specific covert-action project was consistent with a presidentially ap foundations A certain amount of this funding was proved (NSC) policy directive. Corson and other intelligence experts channeled through HEW most partic ularly in the case of the Addiction Re believe that as a member of the OCR search Center of the National Institute between December 1954 and Decem of Mental Health in Lexington Ken ber 1955 Rockefeller was able to learn tucky The Lexington facility comes un practically everything about ongoing der HEW which covertly handled the clandestine intelligence operations at home and abroad This included the annual contracts for LSD experimenta tion being done there on addicts and LSD testing as well as the growing federal narcotics prisoners In fact CIA program of intercepting and read some of the most significant LSD re ing the foreign mail of American citi search was conducted in Lexington zens at post offices around the country Authoritative informants believe that The final report of the Senate Select as HEW undersecretary Rockefeller Committee on Intelligence related that was one of the few top officials in the in March,1955 CIA Director Allen W department who knew that CIA funds Dulles briefed the OCB "on all CIA co were being surreptitiously moved for vert operations_previously approved un this research Even Oveta Culp Hobby der NSC-4-A,-10/2 1015 and 5412. the HEW secretary apparently knew These designations correspond to Na tional Security Council directives going nothing about this In December 1954 Eisenhower back to 1948 Other intelligence sources named Rockefeller special assistant say that Dulles laid out all the CIA to the president for "cold-war plan family jewels before the OCR Rocke ning. although this description of his feller was present at this briefing As an OCB member.and duties was not publicly known In Eisen his new capacity Rockefeller became hower's personal delegate.Rockefeller Eisenhower's direct link to covert in thus participated in the approval of all covert projects that were submitted tclti once operations The mechanism through which the to the group during the year he spent president supposedly controlled clan at the White House one of the most destine intelligence was the Operations crucial cold-war years Two decades later President Ford Coordinating Board (OCB) function ing as part of the National Security established the blue-ribbon commis Council structure The OCB,'-created sion to study the CIA and Rockefeller by executive order in September 1953 therefore found himself in the ex was the forerunner of subsequent White traordinary position of having to pm Ilouse covert-intelligence control groups side over an investigation of acts which in several cases he had personally ap .such as Nixon's "Forty Committee, which Kissinger chaired The OCB's proved twenty years earlier In other chairman was the undersecretary of words Rockefeller had been called state and its members were the deputy upon to investigate himself Aside from then secretary of defense the director of national-security considerations the Foreign Operations Administration small wonder that on January 21 1975 (foreign aid) the director of Central the vice-president of the United States Intelligence and a representative of invited the director of the CIA to be the president designated by him ras his cover-up partner