SOME IRANIAN HISTORY FROM RICHARD HELMS

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CIA-RDP91-00901R000500150045-1
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RIPPUB
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K
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6
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December 19, 2016
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December 20, 2005
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45
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Publication Date: 
February 28, 1981
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NSPR
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STAT Approved For Release 2006/01/12 : CIA-RDP91-00901R00050 a0_1 AFM" WASHINGTON STAR 28 FEBRUARY 1981 e: m taes e If on r r 4 I back up through the: corridors . of House")., Guerrilla groupsremained in the American compound to. "guard" the place for seven months until bitter complaints finally dis- Iodged.them from what should have been inviolate U.S.territor)S. s journey k th H l e rnnfncp'i .ifS nower..rlookin2 for In;-the'searclrfor-a n6r,policy to combat` terrorism, this. government would' do~well to listen;,toLa bit of. history-froi> an`-old hand who help- ed make some of it,-Richard Helms; fbrmer;master spy 'former director- of the Central'Intellige,nce.Agency, formers ambassador. to-4 Iran, was down=in,thesalubrious' environs of Florida'a?few-days,''ago ruminating to a. select: audience about'. the sei- zure of?the' hostages in Tehran and America's. failure !;too- -perceive the event before it.happened and to un- derstandzit.'after;it occurred, .." .. Helms is:tone'of-::those-men who was born-with wide-angle vision and then- trained to. be. wary of~ instant gratification in politics and diploma- cy.- Educated in part in Europe, he Went, back,after. Williams College to report.for'United Press on the, rise of Hitler..whom .he interviewed-in 1936. During World War II he served in the' Office of Strategic Services which-then became the CIA. Always worked`~with'? the globe;-.pulling' a string here then watching to see its effec.there ..Ex ercising admirable krestraint he-.remained quiet.through,.the?hos- tage'trauma.: But he-has-watched and. studied': the flow of events with his same. -practiced eacompassing-eye... Whet Iran-Took Hostages 'Thereasoritbehostages were tat enwas*notbecausethe shah was admitted ;tor the, United, States-' tfor inedicaLtreatmentr Helms told,'his. listeners lahs;the?#.?Islamic Republic hard-, liners,;.Wanted to:;bring' down the; government.; of Prime . Minister.: Bazargan.and put`a stop'to.its- quiet. efforts to, resume at. least informal: relations with the United States. Put, another way, the excuse that the ad- ventof?tlieshah.in the United States. had:-caused `:`the embassy. takeover: was nothing but a cover to hide what : ,was a major domestic political coup inside^.Irani.e.,the fail,-.of-.the Bar zagaw,'goYernment rk and, effect has been suggested : 'But. because`Helms comes to that conclu- sioni-inakes it considerably more in-- teresting as we sort throupgh the Iran- debris for. some clue. on how to act in'the future:. It:'is Helms' contention that the critical date is not any of those that commemorate the. storming of the U.S. Embassy or. when the shah was laid out-.on the operating table in' New-York, but rather Nov, 1, 1979, when Carter's voluble-national secu- rity aide Zbigniew Brzezinski; then in _Algie_rs? 'for the, independence') celebration, set up a meeting with Bazargan and Foreign Minister Yas- di. Helms-believes that, the session set off alarms all through. the ranks I of the Islamic hard-liners and three days later they triggered the stor;! ming of the U.S. embassy. The Ayatollah Khomini- had be- come convinced that the Bazargan government. wanted to sustain and perhaps enlarge a relationship. with the U.S. Tharwas intolerable to Khoo- meini, who had fired his movement with the doctrine that AmericaLhas 'corrupted Iran. Khomeini-was the power, a fact not fully understood by our government. Contacts With, Bazagan4r~ C'i One suspects at this distance that, the filesof the State Department wilt? some day reveal-many more contacts- with the Bazargangovernment than we know about as the Carter admin- istration'sought frantically to-climb back.. into bed with`iran. There-is simply no other explanation . for the indignities that were tolerated from the first. embassy takeover Feb.. 14 guidance ;one: comes: out:inevitably in the Oval Office. There:must first be a firm idea-of what. kind of role the nation intends to- play} in the! world. Then there-,must, beta set of priorities, an:-appreciation:of the critical pressure points- Information theri:.becomes crucial-,',hot. just the repo. is on events but the long view of. why trouble arises and from! whence it comes. All-through the; American system there. is. a desper- ate need for more meaningful inter- pretation of. the vast amount of fact 'that flows into Washington...; Summed up,-the Helms theory sug-- gests that had we had. people of breadth and sensitivity at the top when trouble in Iranarose, we could have-, grasped its -importance, fo- cused`our concern, foreseen under- lying ',hostility and prepared for trouble.` Instead, the government stumbled in a kind of. wishful stupor', from event to event never quite un- derstanding the sequence nor out- running it. All that drama around Approved For Release 2006/01/12 : CIA-RDP91-00901 R000500150045-1 .~ ),(called whimsically by..,those?-pres- ent,, "The St. Valentine's Day Open Approved For Release 2006/01/12 : Cl JF P91-009 POST MAGAZI priTl(;:1= 22EWASHINGTON February 19B1 a:s FAG5-_. ~Z...._ - QITESTIpld Which pictures don't fit in this group? ~tc.mzzv_ Tl.. +..;.:.vhsi uran't broke. Agee attacked memoirs written by the two men who ola An i l IA' . g n e s ro All are former CIA employeswho wrote- the C books drawing on. their year of.service. the, agency's secret operations and aren't telling reporters they're in finan-i with the Agency. Marchetti. (along-with named undercover agents. And Snepp cial distress, ex-directors Colby and'; coauthor John Marks1- criticized the criticized America's hasty and ill-con- Helms, were bland, flattering portray agency's- methods-Y-Stockwell blasted ceived withdrawal from Vietnam The als of the CIA. wave the fillers of Sam Giancana and Johnny Roseili_' two-of the mobsters involved with the CIA plot in the '68s:to4ssassinate Fidel Castro-ever beenfound?. Gianna was hot dead by gunmen in is Chicago home in 1975; Roselli was found dead in an oil drum floating in a Miami waterway -a *year later. No suspects in either death have been apprehended Approved For Release 2006/01/12 : CIA-RDP91-00901 R000500150045-1 Victor Plarchettz .. '. Richard Helms John Stockwell William Colby Philip Agee STAT ~ttxl~ p d F r Release 200676f/1M-S(5R93170a1 f5@q' 0 ov, ~19 February 1981 Mae i:' .. --- ?._?.~:7J.i~-`M`t'-~se3 xi-,:.:aa-.c-~t~::i~-..ter? By, D*vid Shribman'; WashitigtonStar Staff Writer- - It seems all so fortuitious; An aim t` bassador sets'6ff on. the luxurious`. Red Arrow night train from Mosco u?:I to Leningrad, and'. finds a- tempting, young blonde' inYhis compartment:: A'young mantn tiie military attar che,a office finds .he=has been as-: signed a sexy-Russian. cleaning lady` A diplomat,,..gets dt whispery tele1; phone call. and the offer,of com- r~?: panionshipA , ,,while=s traveling to far-flung Uzbek oriKirghtz 'And-yet itisn.~ as'fnnocent as it seems. Behind closed doors, where.; Soviet agents;are-mosf?artfiiI,.:even:: intimacy is`=full` of'.intrigue: The-'4 walls often have eyes and flash bulbs nr In- hotels? country hideaways and even back alleys, the KGB operates a,-high-stakes: pornography trade be--, fitting the shadowy-worlds of Gra=. harm Greene;and John-Ire Carte.: Its; currency is ;blackmail; not rubles; 'and- the snare' nare is sexual entrapment. ` `.. .Reports indicating an Army major' assigned to the U.S.:embassy in Moe- - .cow may. have. .bpen caught up _-in- :'such a-trap are only the latest twists' Am a.Sovietespionage:tradition that is as old, as the'Russian Revolution. "ThisY'sorx : b . th ag:, has"always been- an- essential" element . of espi= onage," said onetsou?ce. prominent ins intelligence.:circles.:"But the`So- viets have. made;it.- an-Aft. -Their tar- get-,Js, completely:;.-inundated ;by surveillance, -telephone taps, every thing. They:kiiow his- habits , better: ;than he;:knows htmse]f " l `m r?,tid,- h 'Mata Han IivesVSometimes-awl; wardly, somett eswith;astonfshin :ease? the Soviets have-used the: tech-- nique of-sexu alentrapment through out..- the postwar - period; :.luring Western diplbmats,:embassyguards businessmen and. journalists with' women known. within, the;KGB as "sparrows How :often-tlie sparrows get their. worm - can ,never, be, known.'..Anct :though diplomatic and military min- istries throughout 1 he-- world warn Russia-bound personnel of the dan.' gers-that lurk in the unmade-mbeds of Soviet relations, the West has of- ten been embarrassed.by activities. Approved in.the sparrows' nests throughout ' the- Soviet bloc. It happens time and again. In the late--1950s six American diplomats and 10' Marine guards were compro- mised in Poland, a particularly fer- tile area forsuch amorous intrigues. The agents, described in the argot of -the time- as "pretty Polish girls," infiltrated -the Marines'., sleeping quarters while the diplomats en- joyed?'4their- trysts : in - hideaways around,,-;Warsaw. And -at, the, same time,:a. Soviet intelligence agent se- duced_the wife of an American for- officer,'-following and courting the woman for days. ?'?"They're throwing-girls at-us by the :.scores. everywhere.-behind the Iron:Curtain," an American official said?-and: they've also begun to work on our wives." The-Americans yielded little more than,their : bodies. in this series of incidents;-no classified information. Apparently. was passed on.-But two years later, in the celebrated liaison between Irwin C. Scarbeckand Ur- szula Discner, a number of classified American. documents were passed to the. Communist side.---------- Scarbeck 'was the second officer, of the American embassy in Warsaw and Discner was the saucy 22-year-- old blonde he fell for. She was a Polish agent, however,, and she set him up for a raid. that led to black-' mail and, finally, to the transfer of classified information. Scarbeck, _ whose very- name still causes an- guish: in the State Department, was convicted and sentenced to prison. Such incidents are sprinkled through the tortuous history of East- West, relations. A,-ery prominent:Western Euro pean journalist travelling ,through. the Soviet. Union , was, drugged in Soviet Georgia, where a high propor- tion-,of these cases also seem :to oc- cur, .and. then was ; photographed with a woman. Once back in Moscow,- colleagues advised him to inform his embassy, his editor and his wife of .the incident. . _ In.1965, Cmdr. Anthony Courtney, .one of the British Parliament's bar -.- sliest -critics of the. Soviet Union,) 'charged the Soviets with.' abusing i their diplomatic privileges. -Less than a month later snapshots show- ing . him,, In bed with an Intourist guide he met four years earlier were circulating through the:'House -of Commons; . x,~ i 7? " There are many more. Gerda Mun-' singer - prostitute, petty thief and Soviet 'agent, according to a police report - had liaisons with at least two high Canadian. officials. And a Norwegian foreign ministry official' took a Russian as her lover, Soviet)' agents discovered the connection,) taunted her and:demanded security, ? ;-... ;.? . -.-'--T71en there was the American-en- gineer who vacationed in the Soviet Union. In a restaurant-in the city) .of Kharkov _he -was ushered,: in nocently enough, to a table with anI attractive woman. They passed .. a pleasant evening and agreed to meet again. The next. night she led him to an outdoor bench. One thing ledi to another and they:began to em-1 brace. ..A.moment later she began yellin g in Russian. The American was arl~j rested for attempted rape and wasj offered a choice: a long prison sen- tence or cooperation with Soviet agents: dw: f .A similar choice was offered a'i, French embassy subordinate who l was lured into a tryst with- a KGB agent in 1961. He would neither en- dure the humiliation of the photo-'~ graphs . nor:. cooperate with the Soviets. He killed himself. But perhaps the most startling in- cident involved Maurice Dejean, for- mer French ambassador to Moscow., The Soviets- followed him . through posts in New York; London and To-~ kyo and knew he had an eye for a well-turned leg..-Once in Moscow;' KGB agents set him up with an ac--' tress, accused. him of adultery and. had him beaten "Our operation with the. French ambassador was one of the greatest in the history of the KGB's inside operations," a :former KGB agent., told a Senate committee nearly:a dozen-years ago.---,,-- " There =There was, however, no evidencef Dejean : parted :with. any. classified: information and French President COT For Release 2006/01/12 : CIA-RDP91-00901 R000500150045-1 - A "r Release 2006/01/12 GTI~F~pP 1-p~~9F0~NR~O1Q 0,0150 A TICGL THE N A l iyr~ ON r' k,c: ' _..2----- 10 February 1981 ? Stiff Upper Yellow Ribbon 1 Richard Helms, for- mer ambassador to Iran, former CIA chief and holder of other res on-; p sible - posts, says he doesn't "mean to sound nasty," but the United States should have left the hostages "to their own fate." Helms told People magazine this week that the hostages ld h d " ave returne HELMS wou earlier if (former Presi- dent Jimmy) Carter had not put a value on them with all this hoopla. The hostages were prisoners of war, and we should have declared war," Helms said. "That doesn't necessarily involve shoot- ing." Helms, 67,_ was appointed ambassador to Iran in 1973 by then-President Richard M. Nixon. He left Iran in 1977 to return to Washington and open a consulting firm. When he was ambassa- dor, he said, the State Department warned him that if kidnapped, he would not be ransomed. "It's a privilege to serve one's country," he said. "If you get knocked about, that's what life is." Approved For Release 2006/01/12 : CIA-RDP91-00901 R000500150045-1 Approved For Release 2006/01/12 : CIA-RDP91-0090 NEV YORK TIMES 9 FEBRUARY 1981 New PE, V' Backs Ex-- nvoy on BySEYMOURM.HERSH ? 1 For six years- -Edward M.. Korry, United States Ambassador to Chile from i 1967 to 1971, has insisted that he was not involved in and indeed tried to stop White House efforts to induce a military coup in Chile in 1970-to prevent Dr. Salvador Al- lende Gossens, a Marxist, from assuming the presidency: Evidence has come to light suggesting that Mr. Korry, despite his strong opposi- tion to the Allende candidacy, was frozen out'of the..planning fbr a proposed mili-. Lary. coup and warned the White House that it would be risking another "Bay of Pigs" if It got involved in military, plots to stop Dr. Allende's election. Mr. Korry has not workri. in his pro ies- sions, journalism or public affairs, since 1974, two years after the columnist Jack Anderson published International Tele nhone and Telegraph. Cornoration docu ments that seemingly linked Mr. Korryto, joint I.T.T: Central' Intelligence Agency operations to block Dr.. Allende's elec1. 'tion. Mr. Korry expressed particular bitter nest toward The,New York Times for 'what he said was unfair reporting about, his role in articles in 1974 that revealed the C.I.A.'s activities in Chile and ..in. -refusing in later years, despite hls.en-'t treaties, to investigate ins actions accu- rately. ,Mr. Korry, who lives with his wife in Stonington, Conn., insists that his sullied reputation and his early inability to get appropriate work stern from publication of the I.T.T. documents and from two subsequent widely publicized investiga- tions by Senate committees. He is now a .visiting professor of international rela- tions at Connecticut College in New Lon- don. Much of. the new evidence, including highly classified internal C.I.A. docu- ments, was provided by a former intelli- gence official who had direct knowledge of the agency's activities against Dr. Al_ ' lende,who died in the course of a military upritin.g against him in 1973. Corroborat- ing information was obtained in inter- views with other C.I.A and White House officials. Internal documents provided by the C.I.A. to the Senate Select Committee ,,on Intelligence - and not published by the committee in its reports in 1975 on Chile-have also been obtained. Finally, Mr. Korry made available some of his private communications with Washing ton during the 1970 election period. These materials raise new questions about the extent of C.I.A. operations -in Chile in 1970 and the efficacy of the Sen- ate committee's investigation. For exam- ple, an "eyes only" internal C.I.A r5- -port, filed in early 1971 and not provided to the Intelligence Committee, shows that senior agency officials were aware that an operative had entered Chile under a false passport and posed as a member of the Mafia in making contact with anti-Al- lende :orces. . ? In another internal 1971 report, William .V. Brae, then chief of the agency's clan- destine service in Latin America, was formally advised that an operative had, posed.as - a representative of the Ford; Foundation and the Rockefeller Founda- tion while on special assignment to Chile, In October 1970 -a tactic in violation of a' -Presidential prohibition against the use of American educational and ptdlan-' thropic foundations as covers. The opera- tive , in later meetings with Chilean buss neesmen, made it clear, according to the! C.I.A. documents, that "as a representa tive of American business interests," he', was eager "to activate a military take-i over of the Chilean Government." None of this, it is now evident, was' Imown to Ambassador Korry. Not Considered Trustworthy In interviews, a number of C.I.A. offl-l vials directly involved in the anti-Allende operations emphasized that Mr. Korryi was not% considered trustworthy by the, White House or by C.I.A. headquarters.I "Korry never did know anything," said an intelligence operative who worked in the embassy under Mr. Korry in 1970. While he was in Chile, Mr. Korry was )mown in the Nixon Administration for his outspoken hostility to Dr. Allende and ills harsh anti-Communist stance. Mr. Korry, who acknowledges the severity of his views on Dr. Allende, was active in lobbying for a ?. 100,000 C.I.A. propaganda effort against him and his Marxist views that was authorized by the Nixon Admin- istration in the spring and summer of 1970. Nonetheless, Mr. Korry insists that he repeatedly advised Washing on not to take any steps toward a military solution of the Allende problem. On Oct. 9, 1970, for example, he told the White House in a direct message made available to The New York Times that he was appalled to learn that unauthorized contact had been made by the C.I.A. station in Santiago with Patria y Libertad, a right-wing ex- tremist group advocating the violent overthrow of the Government. "I think any attempt on our part actively to en- courage a coup could lead us to a Bay of Pigs failure," he added in the "eyes only" cablegram. In the interviews Mr. Korry constantly focused on his inability to get newspapers to publish his view of events after he left Chile. But he says that he perhaps waited too long, until 1978, to begin to tell all he Approved For Re' ti b9e cpi'fs precbxt;,W tionalsecurity interests.-- ? Mr. Korry, who is 59 years old, was a foreign correspondent for. United Press and went on to Look magazine, where- he served as European editor. In 1962 he was' designated Ambassador to Ethiopia by President John F. Kennedy, serving there with distinction, by all accounts, until his assignment to Chile. His moment in the greatest glare of publicity came in September 1974, soon after The New York times disclosed that the C.I.A. had spent at least S~8 million in Chile in an effort to prevent Dr. Allende's election and; failing in that, sought to make it irnoossible for him to govern.Mr. Korry, with Richard M. Helms, then Di- rector of Central Intelligence, and two senior State Department officials. was accused by members of the Senate staff of having provided. misleading testimony to the Sensate multinational subcommit- tee of the Foreign Relations Committee, headed by Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, which held hearings in March and April 1973 into I.T.T.'s involvement with the Chilean election. During the hearings Mr. Korry testi- fied that the United States maintained a "total hands off" policy toward the mili- tary during the campaign for the elec- tion, which Dr. Allende won in a three- way race by only 30,000 votes of three mil- lion cast. Mr. Korry denied knowledge of the I.T.T. cablegram that became a focal point-of much of the hearings - a report from two I.T.T. officials in Santiago that the Ambassador had finally received "the green light to move in the name of Richard Nixon" against the new Presi- dent. Repeatedly refusing to answer many queries in full from the senators and the subcommittee staff diredtor, Jerome I. Levinson, Mr. Korry insisted that to de- scribe confidential communications and official orders would be "contrary to the Approved For Release 2006/01/12: CIA-RDP91-00901R POLICY REVLEW PITBLISHED by THE I RITAGE FOUNDA7 WINE. 1981 Can CounterinteB ige ce Con In From the Cold? ARNOLD BEICHMAN "The best hope that the free world will an efficient, constitutional, freedom-los i quately secret - CIA and FBI." - M.R.D. Foot, Professor of IV' University of Manchester, in ~ IVl What a cushy job it must be today to run the USSR secret.police and espionage agency. 7 and job security, not as in the old Stalin days years as head of the secret police, you were tal Better yet, Yuri Andropov, who runs the Politburo secure in the knowledge that his adversaries, the CIA and the FBI, have for thi been so weakened that they are no longer serf Even now, when there is some possibility th allow the CIA and FBI to function once me years before these agencies will be sufficient KGB penetration and disinformation. Penetration of the CIA by the KGB is now an eseaousnea racy. On October 29, David H. Barnett, a former CIA agent, confessed that he had been selling important secrets to the Soviet agency for some years - including a top-priority clandestine CIA operation in Indonesia in the 1960s. Mr. Barnett also confessed that he had revealed to the KGB the identities of thirty covert CIA employees. The organizational deficiencies have multiplied since 1975 because of Congressional investigations, Executive orders and, above all, because of the serious decline of U.S. counterintel- ligence capacity in the CIA and the FBI. This was the conclusion of many. specialists who attended the third meeting of the Con- sortium for the Study of Intelligence (CSI). It is now possible, for example, to assign Soviet agents to the U.S., literally by the shipload. In 1978, there were 1,300 Soviet and 700 Soviet-bloc officials. permanently assigned to the U.S. as diplomats, media and trade representatives, and staff to international organizations. The number of Soviet-bloc graduate students has increased from the usual 35-40 to 200. During 1977, there were almost 60,000 Soviet-bloc visitors to the U.S. Of these visitors, 14,000 were commercial, scientific, and cultural delegates, while the remain- ing 40,000 were crewmen who enjoyed complete liberty while Soviet ships were docked in 40 U.S. deepwater ports. Now I have it on good authority that before Congress put the FBI on its "most wanted" list, the FBI routinely covered KGB suspect agents on a one-to-one basis, that is, one FBI surveillance expert to one KGB suspect. Today, as Mr. Andropov, knows well, the ratio has dropped to 1-to-4. There are just too many KGB targets floating about the U.S. today, while some 300 FBI staffers are busy checking applications from all kinds of dubious Approve?PR dl@48e "YOg442rP(414IR iui%OgOdOS0Orl5QO45e1 former Assistant Attorney General Antonin Scalia, now a pro- fessor at the University of Chicago Law School: