WHO WILL CONTROL THE CIA-OUTSIDERS OR THE OLD BOYS?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00498R000200020063-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 23, 2007
• Sequence Number: 63
• Publication Date: August 2, 1981
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2007/03/23: CIA-RDP99-00498R0002000299G; 2
ART TCLE APPEARED
ON ?Act
David Wise
ho
:.=s
THE WASHINGTON POST
2 August 1981
0 11
H_, Controll the CIA,
ens o~ ~ e'01d Doyse
William J. Casey has survived as CIA director, at
least for the moment, but, the wrong conclusions will
probably be drawn from the Senate investigation of
his activities and the pratfall from power of.his spy-.
master, Max Hugel.
The moral of the story, some will assume, is that the
CIA should be left' to the professionals. That, of-
course, is precisely what the?powerful'network of Old
i oys, both inside and outside the CIA, would like the
public to think. The intelligence professionals, the ca-
spies, prefer to regard "the agency" as their pri-
reer
vate preserve. Outsiders are poachers. ? -
While the controversy may have appeared on the
surface to be a struggle between the Senate intelli-
gence committee and Casey, the real struggle was
over who will control the CIA. Arrayed on one side
were Casey and the president, who gingerly sup-
ported his CIA director. On the other side were the
Old Boys, the present and former CIA professionals,
and their allies on Capitol Hill. . .
It was an old battle played out again with a new
cast of characters. Back in 1965, President Lyndon
Johnson appointed Adm. William F. Raborn Jr., the
man responsible for the development of the Polaris
missile, as CIA chief.. The Old Boys were annoyed.
Within weeks, stories found their way into print re-
porting that at CIA meetings Raborn was a muddle of
confusion, "so unlettered, in international politics," as :
Newsweek put it, "that he could- not pronounce 'or
even remember the names of some foreign capitals
and chiefs of state." Six months later,.Raborn was out
? as CIA director. With the admiral piped ashore, John-
son named a professional, Richard Helms, to the post.
Besides Raborn and Casey, at least two other out-
siders who served as CIA directors. were targeted by
the professionals. President Nixon named James A.
Schlesinger to the job in 1973. Schlesinger fired a'
number of Old Boys, 'arousing much ire within-the
agency. Under Jimmy Carter; Adm. Stanfield Turner
managed to survive as CIA chief, but many old agency
hands refer to him mockingly as "the Admiral."
The current flap had its unobtrusive beginnings late
in March when Casey quietly moved John McMahon
out as deputy director for operations (the CIA's covert
side) to head intelligence and analysis. Then, on'May
11, Casey tapped Hugel, who had worked with him in
the Reagan campaign, to be the DDO.
Only four days later, on May 15, Cord Meyer, the
covert-operator-turned-columnist, surfaced Hugel's
name, revealing the appointment of "a rank-ama-
teur" to head the agency's cloak-and-dagger direc-
torate-The drama had begun...
Two brothers, forrimer business. assoeiates. of- the
Brooklyn-born Hugel, went to The Washington Post.
On July 14, within hours of the newspaper's publica-
tion of charges of improper or illegal business activities
by Hugel, he 'had resigned... There were- those who
]argued, albeit not seriously, that the disclosures only
pioved Hugel's superior qualifications for the job. Ac-
cording to the Hugel tapes and other revelations in
The Post, the spymaster had threatened to kill a law-.
yer who got in his way, warned his business associate +
that he would hang him by the testicles and admitted
(in-his unpublished autobiography) that he was a liar,
informer and a bunko artist. To top it all, he beat the
CIA lie detector. What finer background could any-
one have to head the CIA's dirty tricks division?
But Hugel went quickly down the tube. Perhaps;
one anonymous White House official 'speculated,
with some help from 'former intelligence officials."
Whether anyone, inside or outside the CIA greased
the ways for Hugel's fall, remains, like so much
i
about the agency, clouded in mists. But it is very
clear that Casey's appointment of Hugel, a one-time
sewing machine manufacturer, rankled the CIA pro-.
fessionals like nothing in recent memory.
From the tree-shaded lanes of Langley to the Fed-
eral-style homes of Georgetown, the sputtering could
be heard wherever old spooks gathered. It was as
though a busboy had suddenly been made a Mem-
ber of the Club. Unheard of?
On the very day that Hugel-resigned, stories mys-
teriously surfaced noting that a federal judge-two
months earlier on May 19---had ruled that Casey.'
and-others had "omitted and misrepresented facts';
to investors in Multiponics, Inc., a company that-
owned farm acreage in the South. In succeeding
days, Casey's image came to resemble nothing so
much as a series of ducks in a carnival shooting gal-,
lery. One duck carried a sign reading "Multiponics.'."
Others read "Vesco," "ITT," or had similar labels of;{{
cases in which the.CIA director's name had figured i
in the past. No sooner would one d uck be shot down
than another would pop up.
? .
Casey had concealed a $10,000 gift, said Vone
story. Casey had links to a New Jersey garbage
man who might have links to the Mafia, said an-
other. Soon Barry Goldwater and other influential .
Republicans were calling for Casey's resignation.
In the midst of it all, Samuel and Thomas McNeil,
Hugel's accusers, vanished.