LETTER TO GENERAL WALTERS FROM SMITH HEMPSTONE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80R01731R001900050008-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 8, 2006
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: January 2, 1976
• Content Type: LETTER

IV.-VIr ri);
1~Release 2006/08/08: CIA-RDP80RO1731 R001900050008-3 G t ti
SMITH HEMPST?NE
January 2, 1976
Dear General Walters:
Since my column no longer
ap ears in Washington, I thought the attached
(ay might escape your all-seeing eye and (b) be
of some interest to you.
Best wishes for the New
MORI/CDF
Approved For Release 2006/08/08: CIA-RDP80R01731 R001900050008-3
 Approved For Release 2006/08/08: CIA-RDP80R01731 R001900050008-3
I FOR RELEASE ON RECEIPT
AIRMAILED FROM WASHINGTON
SMITH HERWIPSYOPIE
10411V 14*1 Res //
column of commentary
In From the Cold
By SMITH HEMPSTONE
FOR RELEASE ON OR AFTER
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 7, 1976
ARLINGTON, VA. -- On the orders of the President, they
buried him among heroes. And it was meet and right so to do.
For although Richard Skeffington Welch never wore a
uniform, the CIA's station chief in Athens -- gunned down Dec. 23
outside his home by three unidentified assassins and buried yesterday
(Tues., Jan. 6) in Arlington National Cemetery -- was killed in action
after nearly a quarter of a century in the service of his country.
Who killed 46-year-old Dick Welch? Take your pick:
The KGB, which in 1968 published his name in the
East German book entitled Who's Who in CIA.
a The editors of the Washington quarterly, Counter-
which last year published the names of 150 CIA station chiefs,
including Welch.
? Norman Mailer and his radical chic friends, who
provided the initial funding for Counter-Spy.
? Author Philip Agee, a former CIA agent (and member
of Counter-Spy's advisory board), who has published the names of
scores of his former colleagues and called for their "neutralization."
9 The editors of the Athens News, an English language
paper which in November published Welch's name and address and
those of other CIA agents in Athens -- but declined to publish the
names of 10 Russian KGB agents serving in Greece.
a The members of the congressional committees that
for nearly a year have been holding the CIA up to ridicule and
verbal abuse.
All of these, it could be said, had an indirect hand
in Welch's murder, and it seems to me the time has come to put a
stop to this sort of thing. Sure, the CIA has been guilty of
errors of judgment, and at times has seriously violated its mandate.
But these failings have been admitted and corrected. What the
Agees and their ilk have to ask themselves is this:
Which side am I on? To which country do I owe
allegiance? Do I want to be an accessory to the murder of one of
my countrymen?
The identity of the masked men who pulled the trigger
does not much matter. In all probability, Welch's murder was not
a KGB assassination. There is an unwritten understanding between
the two intelligence organizations that they do not target each
other's senior officers (Welch is the first CIA station chief
(MORE)
Approved For Release 2006/08/08: CIA-RDP80R01731 8001900050008-3
 Approved For Release 2006/08/08: CIA-RDP80RO1731 R0019QO050008-3
'KITH HEMPSTONE +?up AMOT
murdered since the agency was formed in 1947).
The CIA's operation in Greece is a large one. The
country has land frontiers with three Communist nations -- Albania,
Yugoslavia and Bulgaria -- and its islands stud the Soviet Union's
sea lanes into the Mediterranean.
The fledgling agency's first group of officers, many
of them graduates of the wartime OSS, played a key role in defeat-
ing the Communists in the Greek civil war of 1944-49. The Greek
intelligence agency, the KYP, was set up with CIA help.
Because several members of the military junta that
ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974 were KYP graduates, the CIA has been
accused of masterminding the coup that brought the colonels to
power. The CIA has also been accused, again without proof, of
having engineered the temporary disposition of the Cypriot president,
Archbishop Fakarios, in 1974.
Welch served in Cyprus in the early 1960s, and it is
possible that he was killed to settle an old score. But it is a
better guess that he was murdered by members of some far-left
Greek group not subject to Communist discipline.
As station chief, he was the biggest fish in the Athens
pool. And that made him a natural target.
But Welch was more than a "fish" or a "target." He
was a husband and the father of three children. He was a man who
enjoyed music, a classics scholar, a chess buff and, despite
being blind in one eye (a childhood accident that kept him out of
the military after his graduation from Harvard in 1951), an
ardent tennis player.
And remembering all this, it might have been nice if
Sen. Frank Church and Rep. Otis Pike had managed to be on hand
when Welch's 23-year-old son, a Marine lieutenant, brought his
father's flag-draped coffin home to Washington's Andrews Air Force
Base last week. But then their committees are charged with
investigating the CIA, not honoring its dead.
So now a 32nd star will go up on the marbled wall of
the entrance hall of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Those
stars represent the intelligence officers who have lost their
lives in 30 years of not-so-cold war.
And a few weeks from now, Counter-Spy will be coming
out with an edition giving the names of CIA agents serving in
Angola, Paria and Stockholm. It makes you sick.
It it it #It it
Approved For Release 2006/08/08: CIA-RDP80R01731R001900050008-3